This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the celebrated problem (...) of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

Chalmers (2018) considers a wide range of possible responses to the meta-problem of consciousness. Among them is the ignorance hypothesis -- the view that there only appears to be a hard problem because of our inadequate conception of the physical. Although Chalmers quickly dismisses this view, I argue that it has much greater promise than he recognizes. The plausibility of the ignorance hypothesis depends on how exactly one frames the 'problem intuitions' that a solution to the meta-problem must explain. I (...) argue that problem intuitions are hybrid intuitions that encompass one's intuitive take on the phenomenal and one's intuitive take on the physical. The ignorance hypothesis undermines the second half of these hybrid intuitions. I show how the ignorance hypothesis is preferable to the alternatives and attempt to explain why there is such widespread resistance to this promising position. (shrink)

. Ill BERGSONS THEORY OF ART . . .141 THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTENSIVE MANIFOLDS I I CINDERS ..... 215 APPENDICES A. REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE . . 249 B. PLAN FOR A ...

Although the word “indoctrination” in the English language originally had a neutral meaning almost equivalent to educative teaching, it gradually assumed the connotations of coercive teaching and became disassociated from the emerging concepts of democratic education. During this century it finally acquired a derogatory connotation similar to propaganda and brainwashing and came to be regarded as the antithesis of education for life in a democracy. McClellan regards indoctrination as a counterfeit of teaching in two crucial senses: While the counterfeit and (...) the genuine forms of teaching share the same properties, they differ in one property that crucially qualifies all the others. Counterfeiting subverts the institution that gives point to the counterfeiting itself. Indoctrination subverts educational institutions in their activity of teaching-andlearning. (shrink)

The author has combined his knowledge of original Sanskrit materials with his study of western philosophy to produce a new interpretation of the Brahmas tras. He has put forward and amply substantiated a very challenging thesis: the original Brahmas tras and the Upanisads can be interpreted in the light of the theological ideas of the Bh gavata and the teachings of Sri Caitanya. It is an illuminating study of modern Hinduism which exposes the scriptural bases of modern ideas.

This article reviews contributions to The Volitional Brain, some of which defend a libertarian, contra-causal account of free will, while others take a so-called compatibilist view, in which adequate conceptions of human liberty and moral responsibility are claimed to be compatible with naturalistic causality. Siding with compatibilism, this review finds that defenders of libertarian free will place undue weight on the first person feeling of freedom, while discounting scientific evidence that human choices are fully a function of antecedent causes at (...) various levels of description. It is argued that morality, justice, and personal responsibility and efficacy do not require the assumption that persons are first causes, so that we need not fear mechanism when applied to human agency. (shrink)

This draft now appears (in revised form) as Chapter 7 of _Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_. See http://philpapers.org/rec/PARSFT-3.

The Ethics of Public Health Paternalism is about policies that try to stop people damaging their own health. From the point of view of public health advocates, if people did not smoke, or drank less alcohol, or kept off junk food and sugary liquids, they would tend to be healthier. Hence such tactics as taxing tobacco, restricting the sale of alcohol, and limiting the density of fast-food outlets. These tactics are often pejoratively described as the actions of a 'nanny state' (...) that overvalues health and wrongly infringes on the autonomy of adults. But many of us want to be healthy rather than ill, and alive rather than dead. Does a state really nanny us when it uses its power to make us healthier? If it does, should it stop? (shrink)