This article is an introduction to a philosophical approach termed “panspiritism.” The fundamental principles of this approach are summarized, with discussion of how it links to earlier (mainly Eastern) philosophical perspectives, how it differs from panpsychism and its relationship to idealism and theism. Issues such as the relationship between mind and matter, the relationship between the mind and the brain, and the emergence of mind are discussed from a “panspiritist” perspective. There is a discussion of how panspiritism relates to mystical (...) experiences. The article concludes by suggesting that this approach can help to elucidate a wide range of phenomena that appear anomalous or problematic from a materialist point of view. (shrink)

This paper is the second in a two-part series in which we discuss several notions of completeness for systems of mathematical axioms, with special focus on their interrelations and historical origins in the development of the axiomatic method. We argue that, both from historical and logical points of view, higher-order logic is an appropriate framework for considering such notions, and we consider some open questions in higher-order axiomatics. In addition, we indicate how one can fruitfully extend the usual set-theoretic semantics (...) so as to shed new light on the relevant strengths and limits of higher-order logic. (shrink)

The present paper shows that the clearest formulation of J. M. E. McTaggart's antipassage argument, that of D. H. Mellor in _Real Time II, is unsound when its premises are interpreted so that it is valid. This argument need mislead us no longer. The crucial item in the interpretation of the premises is the copula 'is', as in 'E is past'. The copula may be either tensed or tenseless. While this ambiguity of the copula has been noted before, its implications (...) for McTaggart's argument had not been adequately exploited. This paper does that job. (shrink)

We develop a vision of consumer responsibility in purchasing decisions in light of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ boycotts. These boycotts succeeded in convincing large fast food companies and national supermarket chains to pay tomato growers a penny more per pound, to improve working conditions and wages for pickers. The C.I.W. efforts to generate consumer support eschewed claims associated with rule-based obligations in favor of appeals more typically associated with virtue and caring ethics. The strategies encouraged consumers to understand the (...) plight of tomato pickers and to extend concern in an effort to improve the world. These strategies are associated more with encouragement to contribute to the social good rather than claims that in refusing to help, consumers would fail to fulfill an obligation. Insights from virtue ethics and caring ethics are offered as a model for a broader account of consumer social responsibility. (shrink)

Notices Amer. Math. Sac. 51, 2004). Logically, such a "Grothendieck topos" is something like a universe of continuously variable sets. Before long, however, F.W. Lawvere and M. Tierney provided an elementary axiomatization..

Although the system T of ticket entailment is obviously related to its cousins E and R , it is motivated along quite distinctive lines in Anderson and Belnap [1975]. It would seem, accordingly, that T is more nearly akin to the system P W studied in Martin [1978] than to E and R. The result presented here, however, at least suggests the contrary.

This paper argues for a ‘perennial phenomenology’ (or ‘soft’ perennialism) varying from the traditionalist notion of a ‘perennial philosophy.’ Perennial phenomenology offers a more nuanced form of perennialism that focuses on spiritual/mystical experiences rather than the teachings and beliefs of different religions. While teachings and beliefs vary greatly, the mystical experiences associated with different mystical traditions have striking commonalities. I suggest four experiential aspects that support a perennial phenomenology. These aspects also necessitate a reconsideration of the debate between perennialism and (...) constructivism. Significantly, these experiential elements are present when mystical experiences occur outside the context of spiritual traditions, to people who know little or nothing about spirituality and consider themselves non-religious. Treating mystical experiences exclusively in the context or religion and spiritual traditions has been a major failing in debates between constructivists (or contextualists) and perennialists. There is a common landscape of mystical experience that precedes interpretation and conceptualization by spiritual traditions. This paper contributes to a reopening of discussion about perennialism that has been underway in recent years. (shrink)

This reply to Finn Collin’s critically sympathetic review of my Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt, addresses some of the tensions involved in realizing “Humboldt 2.0” in today’s higher education environment. Its focus is largely on the academic’s sense of researcher as being one of learner. In other words, the Humboldtian sees research as the necessary complement to teaching, not something radically distinct from it.

There is one grand question that lies beneath most of what follows. That question is: what is morality I mean morality as it is contrasted with the non-moral, not as it is opposed to the immoral. The question does not ask, say, whether lying to a friend in a certain situation is moral or immoral, but asks what makes something, for instance lying to a friend, a moral problem. Parts of the same question ask what counts as a moral consideration, (...) as opposed to, say, one of efficiency or aesthetics, or ask what makes a motivation moral as opposed to prudential. The question asks for the boundaries of the domain of morality. (shrink)

After a brief review of the literature on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET), I employ a Foucauldian analysis to argue that student evaluations are forms of power that involve aspects of both discipline and governmentality. After examining how SETs are used to improve teaching, I identify some techniques that instructors use to respond to SET that undermine the legitimate interests of students or the educational institution. I endorse a hybrid model where a single global teaching question is used for summative (...) purposes and fifteen or twenty additional questions are used for formative purposes. Finally, I argue that to resist the normalizing pressure of SET, instructors might, as Foucault suggested, return to the Hellenistic concept of the care of self. Through techniques of the care of self, it is my hope that instructors could cultivate a more robust subjectivity, a subjectivity less vulnerable to the normative power of student evaluations. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two concepts. The first is a coinage of the author, 'Protscience', a contracted form of 'Protestant science', made in reference to the 16th—17th century Protestant Reformation, when the members of Western Christendom took their religion into their hands, specifically by reading the Bible for themselves and interpreting its relevance fortheir lives.Today we witness a similar tendency with regard to the dominant epistemic authority, science, whose 'reformation' often portrayed as 'democratisation'. However, a more exact understanding draws (...) on the article's second key concept, the distinction drawn in marketing between 'customer' and 'consumer'. The former purchases to sell (i.e. a retailer), whereas the latter purchases to use. Many of the so-called 'anti-science' movements of recent times can be explained as a rise in 'science customisation', whereby people who have acquainted themselves with the latest science adopt a discretionary attitude towards what they will and will not believe of what they have learned. Keywords: anticipatory governance, democracy, New Age, placebo effect, Protestant Reformation, Protscience, science customisation. (shrink)

The “adaptive toolbox” model of the mind is much too uncritical, even as a model of bounded rationality. There is no place for a “meta-rationality” that questions the shape of the decision-making environments themselves. Thus, using the ABC Group's “fast and frugal heuristics,” one could justify all sorts of conformist behavior as rational. Telling in this regard is their appeal to the philosophical distinction between coherence and correspondence theories of truth.

Bryan Van Norden’s _Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto_ draws on his expertise in Chinese philosophy to launch a comprehensive and often scathing critique of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I focus on the sense in which “China” figures as a “non-Western culture” in Van Norden’s argument. Here I identify an equivocation between what I call a “functional” and a “substantive” account of culture. I argue that Van Norden, like perhaps most others who have discussed Chinese philosophy, presupposes a “functional” conception, whereby (...) the relevant sense in which “China” matters is exactly as “non-Western,” which ends up incorporating some exogenous influences such as Indian Buddhism but not any of the Western philosophies that made major inroads in the twentieth century. I explore the implications of the functional/substantive distinction for the understanding of cross-cultural philosophy generally. (shrink)

Finn Collin has been the honest broker of social epistemology. In this article, I attempt to come clean on the nature and sources of what I have always regarded as the ‘normative’ horizon of the field. It basically turns on a social constructivist reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, the dialogue from which modern analytic epistemology also takes its inspiration. I pursue the implications of this approach in various normative fields of philosophy.

The question in the title is addressed in three parts. First, I associate the democratisation of science with the rise of ‘Protscience’ (i.e. ‘Protestant Science’), which pertains to the long-term tendency of universities to place the means of knowledge production in everyone’s hands, thereby producing universal knowledge that is also universally spread. Second, I discuss how the current neo-liberal political economy of knowledge production is warping the ways that universities deal with this long-term tendency. These include: the segmentation of research (...) and teaching; the alienation of the student constituency; the lack of incentive to defend the university. I then discuss strategies for addressing the resulting deformities and re-building solidarity within the knowledge producing community. These include the establishment of a student-based co-curriculum and the introduction of employee ownership policies to the university as whole. Third, I reprise the entire argument by focusing on the economic challenges facing the integrity of the university and knowledge as a public good. Some of these arise from Protscience itself and others from the neo-liberal environment that it inhabits. But in any case, it is important that the democratisation of science is not reduced to its marketisation. (shrink)

As a bioethical and social issue, euthanasia has become in the 1990s what abor- tion was in the 1960s. Around the world, a de facto taboo on open discussion of the practice is seemingly falling by the wayside, as recognition increases that “active” euthanasia is taking place in spite of social and legal prohibitions. Euthanasia, or more specifically physician-assisted suicide, has become the most visible bioethical issue of the present era; and in the United States the debate has taken on (...) a prominence and urgency unprecedented in our nation's history. (shrink)

Ordinary cognition is subject to the influence of a variety of systematic distortions or biases. This chapter looks at the use of some collective cognition techniques to correct for individual cognitive bias. It introduces the possibility of group‐level corrections to cognitive bias and raises the problem of biases that emerge at the group level. The chapter discusses how to ameliorate some of the cognitive biases that affect individuals by utilizing group processes and choice architecture. Some examples of the use of (...) the internet to create corrections to cognitive biases are also discussed. Then the possibility of institutions engineering solutions to individual cognitive biases is considered. (shrink)

I work at a large urban medical center. Our hospital has over 1,200 beds and was built in 1805 to take care of the poor. Our patients are still poor, but now so are the hospital and the doctors. Russian doctors are paid about one-third of what truck drivers are paid. The government historically allocates no more than 3% of the budget to medicine because this is not a means of production, like manufacturing.

Sam Buss produced the first polynomial size Frege proof of thepigeonhole principle. We introduce a variation of that problem and producea simpler proof based on parity. The proof appearing here has an upperbound that is quadratic in the size of the input formula.

is a new campaign devoted to reducing the environmental harmsgenerated by the healthcare industry. One of the leading local proponents of this effort is Michael Lerner, founder of Commonweal, a Bolinas, Californiagenius grant”).

Although housed in an anonymous Victorian house in San Francisco, California, the Zen Hospice Project is world renowned for its pioneering model of training hospice volunteers, providing direct services to patients, and offering educational programs to the broader public.

The field of environmental economics, while offering powerful tools for the diagnosis of environmental problems and the design of policy solutions to them, is unable to effectively incorporate normative concepts like justice or rights into its method of analysis, and so needs to be supplemented by a consideration of such concepts. I examine the two main schools of thought in environmental economics ? the New Resource Economics and Free Market Environmentalism ? in order to illustrate the shortcomings of their methods (...) of analysis, taken on their own, and to demonstrate how a consideration of concepts like rights or justice might usefully supplement them. (shrink)