In response to points raised by our critics in this book symposium, we offer some clarifications about how to understand the role of science in assessing the multiple realization thesis. We also consider the connection between functionalism and multiple realization in the contexts of both psychological and biological sciences.

Since Hilary Putnam offered multiple realization as an empirical hypothesis in the 1960s, philosophical consensus has turned against the idea that mental processes are identifiable with brain processes, and multiple realization has become the keystone of the 'antireductive consensus' across philosophy of science. Thomas W. Polger and Lawrence A. Shapiro offer the first book-length investigation of multiple realization, which serves as a starting point to a series of philosophically sophisticated and empirically informed arguments that cast doubt on the (...) generality of multiple realization in the cognitive sciences. They argue that mind-brain identities have played an important role in the growth and achievements of the cognitive sciences, and suggest that there is little prospect for multiple realization in an empirically-based theory of mind. This leads Polger and Shapiro to offer an alternative framework for understanding explanations in the cognitive sciences, as well as in chemistry, biology, and other non-basic sciences. (shrink)

Mental and physical causes do not competedthe presence of one does not exclude the efficacy of the other. This point is obvious from the perspective of an interventionist theory of causation, but only when this theory gets its proper due. Doubts about the interventionist justification for concluding that there is both physical and mental causation, we have argued, rest on misunderstandings of interventionism. When looking to interventions to reveal causal structures, care must be taken to consider the right variable sets. (...) Jaegwon Kim’s diagram is the wrong starting point for interventionist causal reasoning because it includes variables that are related by non-causal relations in addition to causal relations. When it comes to understanding exclusion, less is more. (shrink)

Issues of identity and reduction have monopolized much of the philosopher of mind’s time over the past several decades. Interestingly, while investigations of these topics have proceeded at a steady rate, the motivations for doing so have shifted. When the early identity theorists, e.g. U. T. Place ( 1956 ), Herbert Feigl ( 1958 ), and J. J. C. Smart ( 1959 , 1961 ), fi rst gave voice to the idea that mental events might be identical to brain processes, (...) they had as their intended foil the view that minds are immaterial substances. But very few philosophers of mind today take this proposal seriously. Why, then, the continued interest in identity and reduction? Th e concern, as philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor have expressed it, is that a victory for identity or reduction is a defeat for psychology. For if minds are physical, or if mental events are physical events, then psychologists might as well disassemble their laboratories, making room for the neuroscientists and molecular biologists who are in a better position to explain those phenomena once misdescribed as “psychological.” Th e worry nowadays is not that locating thought in immaterial souls will make psychology intractable, but that locating thoughts in material brains will make it otiose. (shrink)

According to the multiple realization argument, mental states or processes can be realized in diverse and heterogeneous physical systems; and that fact implies that mental state or process kinds cannot be identified with particular kinds of physical states or processes. More specifically, mental processes cannot be identified with brain processes. Moreover, the argument provides a general model for the autonomy of the special sciences. The multiple realization argument is widely influential, but over the last thirty years it has also faced (...) serious objections. Despite those objections, most philosophers regard the fact of multiple realization and the cogency of the multiple realization argument as plainly correct. Why is that? What is it about the multiple realization argument that makes it so resilient? One reason is that the multiple realization argument is deeply intertwined with a view that minds are, in some sense, computational. But we argue that the sense in which minds are computational does not support the conclusion that they are ipso facto multiply realized. We argue that the sense in which brains compute does not imply that brains implement multiply realizable computational processes, and it does not provide a general model for the autonomy of the special sciences. (shrink)

A central figure in Western history and American political thought, Thomas Paine continues to provoke debate among politicians, activists, and scholars. People of all ideological stripes are inspired by his trenchant defense of the rights and good sense of ordinary individuals, and his penetrating critiques of arbitrary power. This volume contains Paine’s explosive _Common Sense_ in its entirety, including the oft-ignored Appendix, as well as selections from his other major writings: _The American Crisis_, _Rights of Man,_ and _The Age (...) of Reason. _It also contains several of Paine’s shorter essays. All the documents have been transcribed directly from the originals, making this edition the most reliable one available. Essays by Ian Shapiro, Jonathan Clark, Jane Calvert, and Eileen Hunt Botting bring Paine into sharp focus, illuminating his place in the tumultuous decades surrounding the American and French Revolutions and his larger historical legacy. (shrink)

Deforming American Political Thoughtoffers an alternative to the dominant American historical imagination, treating issues that range from the nature of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an egalitarian nation to the persistence of racial inequality. Presenting multifaceted arguments that transcend the myopic scope of traditional political discourses, Michael J. Shapiro summons disparate disciplines and genres - architecture, crime stories, novels, films, and jazz/blues music to provide approaches to the comprehension of diverse facets of American political thought from the founding to (...) the present. The book's various investigations disclose that there have always been dissenting voices, articulated in diverse genres of expression that cast doubt on the moral purpose and exceptionalism of the American mind. This highly anticipated updated second edition features a preface focusing on aesthetic theory and the contributions of artistic genres for political analysis, and a completely new chapter on critical thinking about the US western and urban encounters afforded by the two HBO series, Deadwood and The Wire respectively. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

A central figure in Western history and American political thought, Thomas Paine continues to provoke debate among politicians, activists, and scholars. People of all ideological stripes are inspired by his trenchant defense of the rights and good sense of ordinary individuals, and his penetrating critiques of arbitrary power. This volume contains Paine’s explosive Common Sense in its entirety, including the oft-ignored Appendix, as well as selections from his other major writings: The American Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age (...) of Reason. It also contains several of Paine’s shorter essays. All the documents have been transcribed directly from the originals, making this edition the most reliable one available. Essays by Ian Shapiro, Jonathan Clark, Jane Calvert, and Eileen Hunt Botting bring Paine into sharp focus, illuminating his place in the tumultuous decades surrounding the American and French Revolutions and his larger historical legacy. (shrink)

Written by Thomas Hobbes and first published in 1651, _Leviathan_ is widely considered the greatest work of political philosophy ever composed in the English language. Hobbes's central argument—that human beings are first and foremost concerned with their own fears and desires, and that they must relinquish basic freedoms in order to maintain a peaceful society—has found new adherents and critics in every generation. This new edition, which uses modern text and relies on large-sheet copies from the 1651 Head version, (...) includes interpretive essays by four leading Hobbes scholars: John Dunn, David Dyzenhaus, Elisabeth Ellis, and Bryan Garsten. Taken together with Ian Shapiro’s wide-ranging introduction, they provide fresh and varied interpretations of _Leviathan_ for our time. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline and critically evaluate Thomas Hofweber’s solution to a semantic puzzle he calls Frege’s Other Puzzle. After sketching the Puzzle and two traditional responses to it—the Substantival Strategy and the Adjectival Strategy—we outline Hofweber’s proposed version of Adjectivalism. We argue that two key components—the syntactic and semantic components—of Hofweber’s analysis both suffer from serious empirical difficulties. Ultimately, this suggests that an altogether different solution to Frege’s Other Puzzle is required.

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue (...) that number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting. (shrink)

In their recent article ‘Resolving Frege’s other Puzzle’ Eric Snyder, Richard Samuels, and Stewart Shapiro defend a semantic type-shifting solution to Frege’s other Puzzle and criticize my own cognitive type-shifting solution. In this article I respond to their criticism and in turn point to several problems with their preferred solution. In particular, I argue that they conflate semantic function and semantic value, and that their proposal is neither based on general semantic type-shifting principles nor adequate to the data.

To what degree must the brains and bodies of creatures with minds have to be similar to the brains and bodies of human beings? Since the late 1960’s, most philosophers and cognitive scientists have supposed that there a relatively few constraints on what sorts of brains and bodies can realize minds. It is widely believed that minds are multiply realizable. Of course there were always dissenters, and in recent years their grumbling has grown harder to dismiss. In The Mind Incarnate (...) , Lawrence Shapiro provides the first book-length study of the multiple realizability thesis. Such an examination is long overdue, and Shapiro’s treatment is sure to set the standard for the budding debate. (shrink)

Forthcoming in Philosophy of Science. Despite some recent advances, multiple realization remains a largely misunderstood thesis. Consider the dispute between Lawrence Shapiro and Carl Gillett over the application of Shapiro’s recipe for deciding when we have genuine cases of multiple realization. I argue that Gillett follows many philosophers in mistakenly supposing that multiple realization is absolute and transitive. Both of these are problematic. They are tempting only when we extract the question of multiple realization from the explanatory context (...) in which it is invoked. Anchoring multiple realizability in its theoretical context provides grounds for arbitrating disagreements. Doing so, I argue, favors the view advanced by Shapiro. (shrink)

Consider what the brain-state theorist has to do to make good his claims. He has to specify a physical–chemical state such that any organism (not just a mammal) is in pain if and only if (a) it possesses a brain of suitable physical–chemical structure; and (b) its brain is in that physical–chemical state. This means that the physical–chemical state in question must be a possible state of a mammalian brain, a reptilian brain, a mollusc’s brain (octopuses are mollusca, and certainly (...) feel pain), etc. At the same time, it must not be a possible (physically possible) state of the brain of any physically possible creature that cannot feel pain. Even if such a state can be found, it must be nomologically certain that it will also be a state of the brain of any extraterrestrial life that may be found that will be capable of feeling pain before we can even entertain the supposition that it may be pain. It is not altogether impossible that such a state will be found... . But this is certainly an ambitious hypothesis. (Putnam 1967/1975, p. 436) The belief that mental states are multiply realized is now nearly universal among philosophers, as is the belief that this fact decisively refutes the identity theory. I argue that the empirical support for multiple realization does not justify the confidence that has been placed in it. In order for multiple realization of mental states to be an objection to the identity theory, the neurological differences among pains, for example, must be such as to guarantee that they are of distinct neurological kinds. But the phenomena traditionally cited do not provide evidence of that sort of variation. In particular, examples of neural plasticity do not provide such evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 249 larger sections of the work will be translated-preferably not from the Latin, but from the Arabic original. JOSEPHL. B~u Columbia University Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. By St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. by John P. Rowan. (Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1961. Pp. xxiii + 955.2 vols., boxed, $25.00.) Generally speaking, the two Summae of St. Thomas, long available in English translation, contain all (...) that is most personal and most profound in his philosophical thought. Nonetheless, it is quite impossible to get a fully adequate conception of St. Thomas' place in the history of western thought from a consideration of his theological writings alone. Hence, by translating St. Thomas' Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle into English, Professor J. P. Rowan has provided the non-Latin reading student of the history of philosophy an invaluable service. For it is in his r61e as Aristotelian commentator that we see St. Thomas creating for the Schoolmen a version of Aristotle which served to render the Stagirite's thought into terms which became fundamental to the philosophical defense of Christianity. Further, by keeping in mind the fully-developed notions of St. Thomas on the existence of God and the nature of being as these are given us to understand in the Summae, the reader becomes better enabled, by a critical reading of Thomas' Commentary, to grasp the sense in which the Saint's theological writings are said by his enthusiasts to represent a "completing" and "perfecting" of Aristotle's thought. Professor Rowan's translation is based upon the Turin, 1950, edition of R. M. Spiazzi. This edition is itself fundamentally the older edition of M. R. Cathala, containing but few emendations. Although the translator was obliged to check Spiazzi occasionally against the Parma and Viv6s editions of Thomas' Opera Omnia, the usefulness of such consultation was, as Professor Rowan himself states, "limited inasmuch as both the editions of Viv~s and that of Cathala use Parma as their basic text" (p. vii). Further, since the edition from which he worked was not critical, Professor Rowan found it necessary in some instances to himself emend the reading of the Spiazzi text. However, where such alterations were made, and where indeed they were not obviously required, Professor Rowan indicated his iustification for the change in a footnote. It is unfortunate that no critical edition of Thomas' work was available to his translator; still, although a final evaluation of his emendations must, of course, attend the future appearance of a critical edition of Thomas' work, so far as we were able to judge, Professor Rowan's 250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY changes were in all instances quite reasonable and well ]ustified. Professor Rowan has wisely included a translation of that version of the Aristotelian text upon which St. Thomas (in all probability) based his commentary. As this Latin version frequently departs from such currently available English translations as those of W. D. Ross, H. Tredennik, and others which are based upon Greek sources, a good deal of confusion as to Thomas' actual point of departure would have been introduced had this inclusion not been made. The general value and utility of Professor Rowan's work is further increased by his footnoted indications of the more important variations obtaining between the Greek text (as given in Bekker), and the Latin version employed by St. Thomas. For the reader who wishes to compare the Latin version, the Greek text, and the English translations, Professor Rowan has provided the standard Bekker reference numbers at the beginning of each of Thomas' Lectiones. To further simplify the whole matter of reference and cross-reference, Professor Rowan has used the letter C, followed by a numeral, to designate sections of Thomas' Commentary. These sections are the same as those established originally by Cathala. Numbers not preceded by C designate the appropriate sections of the Latin version of Aristotle's text, and correspond with those given by Spiazzi in his revision of the Cathala edition. Thus, as example, in such a reference as (241:C345), the first number designates the section of the version of Aristotle employed by St. Thomas, and the second, the section of St. Thomas... (shrink)

Ian Shapiro’s The Moral Foundations of Democracy explores the moral foundations of political legitimacy in utilitarianism, Marxism, and social contract theory. Each of these traditions, he contends, has made decisive contributions to the advancement of democracy precisely because it has been shaped by the moral and political advancements introduced by the Enlightenment. The latter, Shapiro argues, made the decisive moves forward by demanding that the social order be based on scientific reasoning and that human freedom be respected, issuing (...) in a legal doctrine of individual rights. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] fish propel their bodies under water in order to travel from one place to another, are they doing the same kind of thing that we do when we swim? If swimming is to be identified with exactly the kind of thing that we do when we swim, we should seriously consider the following question: Do fish swim? Believe (...) it or not, how you think about these questions is relevant to what you will make of this book’s central arguments against the multiple realization thesis in philosophy of mind. As Polger and Shapiro report, the conventional wisdom in philosophy of mind is that psychological kinds are multiply realized by different physical kinds; therefore, we shouldn’t expect to... (shrink)

This is a largely expository review of Thomas Polger’s and Laurence Shapiro’s The Multiple Realization Book (Oxford Press 2016).

_The Multiple Realization Book_By PolgerThomas W. and ShapiroLawrence A.Oxford University Press, 2016. xiv + 258 pp. £71.14 cloth, £18.99 paper.

Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro claim that unlike human-made artifacts cases of multiple realization in naturally occurring systems are uncommon. Drawing on cases from systems biology, I argue t...

Thomas Polger and Laurence Shapiro argue that Carl Gillett's much publicized dimensioned theory of realization is incoherent, being subject to a reductio. Their argument turns on the fact that Gillett's definition of realization makes property instances the exclusive relata of the realization relation, while his belief in multiple realization implies its denial, namely, that properties are the relata of the realization relation on occasions of multiple realization. Others like Sydney Shoemaker have also expressed their view of realization in (...) terms of property instances, yet they too have accepted the multiple realizability of properties. Thus I am interested in the more general issue raised by Polger and Shapiro's argument. Specifically, I show how to supplement a theory of realization with a category-inclusive auxiliary assumption, which avoids the stated reductio. I then offer a few reasons to justify the proposed category-inclusive view of realization, making some comparisons to supervenience and causation along the way. (shrink)

Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro (or P&S) have recently (2008) criticized ?causal-mechanist? views of realization that dominate research in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics of science. P&S offer the internal criticism that any account of realization focusing upon property instances, as views of causal-mechanist realization routinely do, must lead to incoherence about multiple realization. P&S's argument highlights important issues about property instances that have recently been neglected, as well as raising a challenge to the standard approach to (...) understanding the non-causal relations between properties and their instances in the sciences. In response, I clarify some important background issues about property instances and their relations to properties which show why P&S's main argument fails. In addition, I provide a second reason to doubt their argument by highlighting reasons to think that instances, as well as properties, are plausibly sometimes multiply realized in the sciences. (shrink)

Thomas Reid , the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of (...) ideas propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

This article is an extended critical study of Kit Fine’s The limits of abstraction, which is a sustained attempt to take the measure of the neo-logicist program in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics, founded on abstraction principles like Hume’s principle. The present article covers the philosophical and technical aspects of Fine’s deep and penetrating study.

One might have thought that if something has two or more distinct realizations, then that thing is multiply realized. Nevertheless, some philosophers have claimed that two or more distinct realizations do not amount to multiple realization, unless those distinct realizations amount to multiple “ways” of realizing the thing. Corey Maley, Gualtiero Piccinini, Thomas Polger, and Lawrence Shapiro are among these philosophers. Unfortunately, they do not explain why multiple realization requires multiple “ways” of realizing. More significantly, their efforts to (...) articulate multiple “ways” of realizing turn out to be problematic. (shrink)

Recent research, especially with functional brain imaging, demonstrated cases where the administration of a placebo produces objective effects in tissues that are indistinguishable from those of the real therapeutic agents. This phenomenon has been shown in treatments of pain, depression, Parkinsonism, and more. The main ethical complaint against placebo treatment is that it is a kind of deception, where supposedly we substitute what works just psychologically for a real drug that actually works on the tissue level. We claim that the (...) scientific findings bring to a new level the seeming deconstruction of the distinction between “placebo” and “real” drugs, and that instances of placebo treatment which fulfill this criterion should be recognized as a unique category—we call it “comparable placebo treatment” (CPT). The paper uses an analysis of the notion of deception to argue that CPT does not amount to deception; that it can preserve patient autonomy; and that it is therefore morally legitimate. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. In addition, it presents the fundamentals of his beliefs about language, epistemology, and an extensive treatment of revealed religion and its relation to politics. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent's desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute (...) control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes's contemporaries recognized the power of the arguments in Leviathan and many of them wrote responses to it. Selections from books by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. Leviathan is divided into four parts: In the first part, Of Man, Hobbes presents a view of human beings and of the natural world in general that is materialistic and mechanistic. In the second part, Of Commonwealth, he defends the theory of absolute sovereignty, the view that the government has all the political power and has the right to control any aspect of life. In the third part, Of a Christian Commonwealth, he critiques concepts like revelation, prophets, and miracles in such a way that it becomes doubtful whether they can be rationally justified. In the fourth part, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, he explains various ways in which priestly religion has corrupted religion and transgressed the rights of the sovereign. In this revised edition of Hobbes's classic work, A.P. Martinich improves Hobbes's punctuation for the sake of clarity. He has also added new notes for readers, extensive cross references, and substantial part of Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan. (shrink)

In this article I take on the “Transcendentalist Challenge” to naturalized phenomenology, highlighting how the ontological and methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy point in the direction of an integration of the transcendental and the scientific, thus making room for a productive exchange between philosophy and psychological science when it comes to understanding consciousness and its place in nature. Discussing various conceptions of naturalized phenomenology, I argue that what I call an “Integrationist View” is required if we are to make sense (...) of the possibility of productive exchange between phenomenology and the sciences. My main argument is that if we conceive of consciousness as a structure of behavior ontologically prior to the distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity and third- and first-person perspectives, we arrive at a view of the transcendental as not essentially separate from the domain of science, but rather as contingent organizational norms of empirical nature that are best illuminated through a dialectical exchange between phenomenological and scientific approaches. I end by showing how Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the “Schneider case” in an example of such an integration. (shrink)

Introduction to the 2009 Synthese Special Issue on Philosophy and Neuroscience. The papers are: -/- The multiplicity of experimental protocols: a challenge to reductionist and non-reductionist models of the unity of neuroscience Jacqueline A. Sullivan -/- Making sense of mirror neurons Lawrence Shapiro -/- Evaluating the evidence for multiple realization Thomas W. Polger -/- Multiple realization and methodological pluralism Robert C. Richardson -/- Neuroscience and multiple realization: a reply to Bechtel and Mundale Ken Aizawa .

The proliferation of new accounts of infused and acquired virtue in Thomas has brought much welcome attention to his understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. But the very originality of these interpretations has raised a multitude of unanswered questions and difficulties. For any of these accounts to be plausible, they must be accompanied by an account of the way in which Thomas thinks that the specifically one virtue of prudence considers the matter of all virtues, and (...) his statement that such prudence depends on a correct order to the ultimate end. The current disagreement over acquired moral virtue cannot be resolved until these related disagreements are adequately addressed. (shrink)

Dans la vie d'un lecteur, certains auteurs occupent une place à part : lectures inaugurales, compagnons de tous les jours, sources auxquelles on revient. La collection "Les auteurs de ma vie" invite de grands écrivains contemporains à partager leur admiration pour un classique, dont la lecture a particulièrement compté pour eux. Dans sa jeunesse, Thomas Mann a lu et médité Schopenhauer, philosophe de la volonté et du pessimisme, qui a largement influencé l'oeuvre de celui qui deviendra l'un des plus (...) grands écrivains modernes de la décadence. Cet hommage à son maître nous offre une clé précieuse de son parcours intellectuel. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper proposes a reading of Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of predestination as fundamentally oriented towards and realized in friendship with God. On this reading, the seemingly disparate questions, “What does it mean to be predestined?” and “What does it mean to grow in friendship with God?” are not only mutually illuminating but ultimately coterminous. In the first part of the paper, I contextualize this theological rapprochement by foregrounding Aquinas’ treatment in the Summa Theologiae of predestination as a Christocentric, communal (...) reality, and by considering friendship with God as the end of Aquinas’ doctrine of grace. In the second part, I attend to Aquinas’ scriptural commentaries on Romans and the Gospel of John, in order to conduct a reading of predestination in/as friendship with God. Ultimately, as invited in friendship and adopted in grace into the life of Christ, God’s ordering of the rational creature to eternal life is nothing other than God’s ordering of humanity as viator to friendship with Himself in the inner life of Trinitarian love itself. (shrink)