Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease can lead to the development of neuropsychiatric symptoms. These can include harmful changes in mood and behaviour that alienate family members and raise ethical questions about personal responsibility for actions committed under stimulation-dependent mental states. Qualitative interviews were conducted with twenty participants following subthalamic DBS at a movement disorders centre, in order to explore the meaning and significance of stimulation-related neuropsychiatric symptoms amongst a purposive sample of persons (...) with PD and their spousal caregivers. Interview transcripts underwent inductive thematic analysis. Clinical and experiential aspects of post-DBS neuropsychiatric symptoms were identified. Caregivers were highly burdened by these symptoms and both patients and caregivers felt unprepared for their consequences, despite having received information prior to DBS, desiring greater family and peer engagement prior to neurosurgery. Participants held conflicting opinions as to whether emergent symptoms were attributable to neurostimulation. Many felt that they reflected aspects of the person’s “real” or “younger” personality. Those participants who perceived a close relationship between stimulation changes and changes in mental state were more likely to view these symptoms as inauthentic and uncontrollable. Unexpected and troublesome neuropsychiatric symptoms occurred despite a pre-operative education programme that was delivered to all participants. This suggests that such symptoms are difficult to predict and manage even if best practice guidelines are followed by experienced centres. Further research aimed at predicting these complications may improve the capacity of clinicians to tailor the consent process. (shrink)

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence (...) Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. (shrink)

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno's theory (...) of “non‐identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought. (shrink)

In his 1958 seminal paper “Saints and Heroes”, J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tripartite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional in the sense of being morally indifferent, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are “beyond the call of duty” (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. But it is a (...) controversial category. Some have argued that the concept of supererogation is paradoxical because on one hand, supererogatory actions are (by definition) supposed to be morally good, indeed morally best, actions. But then if they are morally best, why aren't they morally required, contrary to the assumption that they are morally optional? In short: how can an action that is morally best to perform fail to be what one is morally required to do? The source of this alleged paradox has been dubbed the ‘good-ought tie-up’. In our article, we address this alleged paradox by first making a phenomenological case for the reality of instances of genuine supererogatory actions, and then, by reflecting on the relevant phenomenology, explaining why there is no genuine paradox. Our explanation appeals to the idea that moral reasons can play what we call amerit conferring role. The basic idea is that moral reasons that favor supererogatory actions function to confer merit on the actions they favor—they play a merit conferring role—and can do without also requiring the actions in question. Hence, supererogatory actions can be both good and morally meritorious to perform yet still be morally optional. Recognition of a merit conferring role unties the good-ought tie up, and (as we further argue) there are good reasons, independent of helping to resolve the alleged paradox, for recognizing this sort of role that moral reasons may play. (shrink)

divisibility in Physics VI. I had been assuming at that time that Aristotle's elimination of reference to the infinitely large in his account of the potential inf inite--like the elimination of the infinitely small from nineteenth century accounts of limits and continuity--gave us everything that was important in a theory of the infinite. Hilbert's paper showed me that this was not obviously so. Suddenly other certainties about Aristotle's (apparently) judicious toning down of (supposed) Platonic extremisms began to crumble. The upshot (...) of work I had been doing earlier on Plato's 'Third Man Argument' began to look different from the way it had before. I was confronted with a possibility I had not till then so much as entertained. What if the more extreme posi tions of Plato on these issues were the more likely to be correct? The present work is the first instalment of the result ing reassessment of Plato's metaphysics, and especially of his theory of Forms. It has occupied much of my teaching and scholarly time over the past fifteen years and more. The central question wi th which I concern myself is, "How does Plato argue for the existence of his Forms (if he does )7" The idea of making this the central question is that if we know how he argues for the existence of Forms, we may get a better sense of what they are. (shrink)

In "Milk, Honey, and the Good Life on Moral Twin Earth", David Copp explores some ways in which a defender of synthetic moral naturalism might attempt to get around our Moral Twin Earth argument. Copp nicely brings out the force of our argument, not only through his exposition of it, but through his attempt to defeat it, since his efforts, we think, only help to make manifest the deep difficulties the Moral Twin Earth argument poses for the synthetic moral naturalist.

Moral phenomenology is concerned with the elements of one's moral experiences that are generally available to introspection. Some philosophers argue that one's moral experiences, such as experiencing oneself as being morally obligated to perform some action on some occasion, contain elements that (1) are available to introspection and (2) carry ontological objectivist purportargument from phenomenological introspection.neutrality thesisthe phenomenological data regarding one's moral experiences that is available to introspection is neutral with respect to the issue of whether such experiences carry ontological (...) objectivist purport. (shrink)

This review of peter hodgson's new english translation of hegel's "lectures on the philosophy of religion", Part iii, And of two other books on hegel, Includes a report on plans for retranslating the entire "lectures". A new edition is made feasible by the hegel archiv's ability to construct a superior critical text of each of the four lecture series (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) from lasson plus additional recently-Discovered auditors' transcripts. Stephen dunning's book on hegel and hamann, And james yerkes' on (...) hegel's christology, Disagree emphatically on the suitability of hegel's conceptual framework for doing justice to the nature of christianity. (shrink)

By now “continental” philosophy has long since ceased to be a geographical term; there are “continental” philosophers in the Midwestern United States. Likewise, “analytical” philosophy is now widely practiced in most areas where academic philosophy is practiced. Moreover, many of the old jabs at each side have lost much of their force. The idea of a pox on both their houses—that analytical philosophers are a bunch of small-minded logic choppers, and continental philosophers are a bunch of wooly minded gasbags—has long (...) since failed to carry the punch it once did. What I want to suggest here is that they are both the same type of philosophy in one crucial, determining aspect: That one of the key experiences of modern philosophy, maybe even the great motivating experience of modern philosophy, is that of a certain type of skepticism, the idea that “we” both collectively and individually are prone to fool ourselves, be misled by conclusions that are attractive but unsupportable, or be misled even by our own experience and ways of thought to come to conclusions that turn out later to be insupportable. Certainly something like this underwrites the motivational power in those parts of contemporary philosophy that can be called “analytic” or are at least inspired by the analytical philosophers of the first two thirds of the twentieth century. Why else the careful attention to argument, the constant recasting of theses so that their implications can be better viewed, the deep ethos of attacking papers given by colleagues with a barrage of counter-examples, and of subjecting our colleagues to ruthless, sometimes unforgiving examination? What often seems perhaps petty to those more irritated than enlightened by analytic philosophy—that it is only tedious logic-chopping or “academic in the worst sense” niggling—is inspired by a brooding sense of skepticism, a sense that without such very intensely rigorous policing of our arguments and our explications, we are simply too prone to slide off into assertions that feel good, that may even seem to some of us like really very deep matters, but which, alas, may on closer inspection or in the light of later hindsight just turn out to be dreadfully false. Better to jump on the arguments now than to be embarrassed by them later. (shrink)

In Kant's "fact of reason," there is an apparent paradox of our being subject to laws of which we must regard ourselves as the author, while at the same time being normatively bound by the same laws that we cannot see ourselves as authoring. Working out the implications of this apparent paradox generated much of the response to Kant in post-Kantian idealism. Wilfrid Sellars notes the same paradox when he speaks of the "paradox of man's encounter with himself" in "Philosophy (...) and the Scientific Image of Man." Like some of the idealists, Sellars thus opted for "two track" system of philosophy that combines the two tracks in a metaphor of "stereoscopic vision." This paper argues that understanding Sellars 's own thought in terms of the issues that formed the dynamic of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany puts us in a better position to understand why Sellars 's own conception of experience and of the unreality of the manifest image is not completely consistent with the argumentative direction of his thought. Understanding Sellars in this way helps us understand the limits of post-Kantian idealism just as understanding the dynamic of post-Kantian idealism gives us a more nuanced version of Sellars 's conception of experience. (shrink)

Is conceptual relativity a genuine phenomenon? If so, how is it properly understood? And if it does occur, does it undermine metaphysical realism? These are the questions we propose to address. We will argue that conceptual relativity is indeed a genuine phenomenon, albeit an extremely puzzling one. We will offer an account of it. And we will argue that it is entirely compatible with metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the view that there is a world of objects and properties that (...) is independent of our thought and discourse (including our schemes of concepts) about such a world. Hilary Putnam, a former proponent of metaphysical realism, later gave it up largely because of the alleged phenomenon that he himself has given the label ‘conceptual relativity’. One of the key ideas of conceptual relativity is that certain concepts—including such fundamental concepts as object, entity, and existence—have a multiplicity of different and incompatible uses (Putnam 1987, p. 19; 1988, pp. 110 14). According to Putnam, once we recognize the phenomenon of conceptual relativity we must reject metaphysical realism: The suggestion . . . is that what is (by commonsense standards) the same situation can be described in many different ways, depending on how we use the words. The situation does not itself legislate how words like “object,” “entity,” and “exist” must be used. What is wrong with the notion of objects existing “independently” of conceptual schemes is that there are no standards for the use of even the logical notions apart from conceptual choices.” (Putnam 1988, p. 114) Putnam’s intriguing reasoning in this passage is difficult to evaluate directly, because conceptual [1] relativity is philosophically perplexing and in general is not well understood. In this paper we propose a construal of conceptual relativity that clarifies it considerably and explains how it is possible despite its initial air of paradox. We then draw upon this construal to explain why, contrary to Putnam and others, conceptual relativity does not conflict with metaphysical realism, but in fact comports well with it.. (shrink)

Causal compatibilism claims that even though physics is causally closed, and even though mental properties are multiply realizable and are not identical to physical causal properties, mental properties are causal properties nonetheless. This position asserts that there is genuine causation at multiple descriptive/ontological levels; physics-level causal claims are not really incompatible with mentalistic causal claims. I articulate and defend a version of causal compatibilism that incorporates three key contentions. First, causation crucially involves robust patterns of counterfactual dependence among properties.Second, often (...) several distinct such patterns, all subsuming a single phenomenon, exist at different descriptive/ontological levels (e.g., microphysical, neurobiological, macrobiological, and psychological). Third, the concept of causation is governed by an implicit contextual parameter that normally determines a specific descriptive/ontological level as the contextually relevant level, for the context-sensitive semantic evaluation of causal statements. (shrink)

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, by BrandomRobert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. pp. xiv + 836.

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals (...) have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The “What is X?” Question, the Sciences, Virtue, and the Forms Plato's “Argument from the Sciences” for the Existence of Forms, as Apparently Represented by Aristotle, and Aristotle's Criticism of that Argument Plato the Parmenidean Sciences and Pseudo‐Sciences The Good and the Sciences A Proposal: The Forms are Attributes; and There are No Attributes that are not Forms What about Plato's Other Reasons for Believing in Forms (Logical, or Mystical‐Metaphysical‐Theological)? And Won't These Reasons Make of (...) Forms Something Rather More than Simply Attributes? Objections to the Theory of Forms The Theory of Forms in Later Dialogues Note. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

The philosophy of engineering is, in the first instance, concerned to make sense of what we do and how we do it as agents in the world. It is also concerned with understanding the nature of inquiry and exploration in the engineering enterprise. In these latter concerns, the philosophy of engineering constitutes the more general framework for understanding the nature of reality and the role of engineering in it. The philosophy of engineering and the engineering worldview supersede and subsume the (...) philosophy of science and the scientific worldview. (shrink)

Inspired and informed by the work of Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel in their 'Describing Inner Experience', we do two things in this commentary. First, we discuss the degree of reliability that introspective methods might be expected to deliver across a range of types of experience. Second, we explore the phenomenology of agency as it bears on the topic of free will. We pose a number of poten-tial problems for attempts to use introspective methods to answer var-ious questions about the (...) phenomenology of free-will experience -- questions such as this: does such experience have metaphysical-liber-tarian satisfaction conditions? We then discuss the prospects for over-coming some of these problems via approaches such as Hurlburt's DES methodology, the so-called 'talk aloud' protocol, and forms of abduction that combine introspection with non-introspection-based forms of evidence. (shrink)

Kant’s conception of nature’s having a “purposiveness without a purpose” was quickly picked by the Romantics and made into a theory of art as revealing the otherwise hidden unity of nature and freedom. Other responses (such as Hegel’s) turned instead to Kant’s concept of judgment and used this to develop a theory that, instead of the Romantics’ conception of the non-discursive manifestation of the absolute, argued for the discursively articulable realization of conceptual truths. Although Hegel did not argue for the (...) “end of art” (although it is widely held that he did just that), he did, curiously enough, claim that it is art and not philosophy which tells us about the “life” of agents. To see how he reconciles that claim with his otherwise entirely discursively oriented philosophy, it is necessary to look at his thesis of the end of art’s “absolute” importance. Hegel’s worries have to do with the impossibility of fully exhibiting the “inner” in the “outer” in modern art and with the newly emerging problem of “fraudulence” in the poet’s voice. This is illustrated by examples drawn from the history of music and the problems besetting the lyric poet in modern life. Because of these problems, we are, Hegel says, now “amphibious animals” having to live in different and seemingly incompatible worlds. Hegel’s student, Heinrich Heine, found that the only satisfactory way of responding to this was for the modern artist to adopt a distinctive type of irony in response to the Hegel’s worries about modern art. This form of irony, it is argued, is itself Hegelian in spirit. (shrink)

Neuhouser’s book is one of the most important contributions to the revival of Hegelian philosophy that has been taking place in Anglo-American philosophy over the last few years. Much of the debate in moral and political philosophy of the last few years has been set in terms of “the right” versus “the good,” and it is tempting to want to put Hegel in one of those categories and thereby also to classify him as either a “liberal,” a “communitarian,” or perhaps (...) a “romantic.” Neuhouser develops a powerful case for understanding him as none of these things. Instead he wants to understand Hegel as developing a social and political philosophy around the central conception of “self-determi- nation.” At first blush, that makes Hegel sound very much like the post-Kantian many now take him to be, but Neuhouser argues that, however true that might be, Hegel is best understood as continuing and developing certain key Rousseauian insights. In Neuhouser’s treatment, both Hegel and Kant are “post- Rousseauians,” and his understanding of what this means throws new and great light on understanding why Hegel’s social philosophy may still be of importance to us. (shrink)