This paper studies the relationship between labelled and nested calculi for propositional intuitionistic logic, first-order intuitionistic logic with non-constant domains and first-order intuitionistic logic with constant domains. It is shown that Fitting’s nested calculi naturally arise from their corresponding labelled calculi—for each of the aforementioned logics—via the elimination of structural rules in labelled derivations. The translational correspondence between the two types of systems is leveraged to show that the nested calculi inherit proof-theoretic properties from their associated labelled calculi, such as (...) completeness, invertibility of rules and cut admissibility. Since labelled calculi are easily obtained via a logic’s semantics, the method presented in this paper can be seen as one whereby refined versions of labelled calculi (containing nested calculi as fragments) with favourable properties are derived directly from a logic’s semantics. (shrink)

Medicine involves specific practical expertise as well as more general context-independent medical knowledge. This raises the question, what is the nature of the expertise involved? Is there a model of clinical judgement or understanding that can accommodate both elements? This paper begins with a summary of a published account of the kinds of situation-specific skill found in anaesthesia. It authors claim that such skills are often neglected because of a prejudice in favour of the ‘technical rationality’ exemplified in evidence-based medicine (...) but they do not themselves offer a general account of the relation of practical expertise and general medical knowledge. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus provides one model of the relation of general knowledge to situation-specific skilled coping. He claims that the former logically depends on the latter and provides two arguments, which I articulate in the second section, for this. But he mars those arguments by building in the further assumption that such situation-specific responses must be understood as concept-free and thus mindless. That assumption is held in place by three arguments all of which I criticize in the next section to give a unified account of clinical judgement as both practical and conceptually structured and thus justified in the face of a prejudice in favour of ‘technical rationality’. (shrink)

Recent models of cognition in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder predict that trauma-related, but not neutral, processing should be differentially affected in these patients, compared to trauma-exposed controls. This study compared a group of 50 patients with PTSD related to the war in Bosnia and a group of 50 controls without PTSD but exposed to trauma from the war, using the DRM method to induce false memories for war-related and neutral critical lures. While the groups were equally susceptible to neutral critical lures, (...) the PTSD group mistakenly recalled more war-related lures. Both false and correct recall were related more to depression than to self-rated trauma. Implications for accounts of false memories in terms of source-monitoring are discussed. (shrink)

There has been considerable recent philo- sophical work on the nature of mental illness. Two..

In this paper I examine Peter Goldie's theory of emotional thoughts and feelings, offered in his recent book The Emotions and subsequent articles. Goldie argues that emotional thoughts cannot be assimilated to belief or judgment, together with some added-on phenomenological component, and on this point I agree with him. However, he also argues that emotionally-laden thoughts, thoughts had, as he puts it, ‘with feeling,' in part differ from unemotional thoughts in their content. The thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous' when thought (...) with an emotional feeling of fear differs in its content from the thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous' when thought without actually feeling fear. I argue that Goldie offers no good reason to think that the difference between emotional and unemotional thoughts is found in their contents. In fact, the analogies Goldie presents to help make his case actually suggest that the contribution feelings make to the distinctive role played by emotional thoughts consists solely in their influencing the way we think emotional thoughts. However, this position is consistent with Goldie's broader point: that theories which treat emotional feelings as phenomenological afterthoughts should be rejected. (shrink)

Der Philosoph Ernst Cassirer liest Goethe als einen Autor von philosophischer Dignität. Er bringt Goethes Texte auf eine individuelle Weise erneut zum Sprechen, indem er sie im Licht seiner eigenen Theorie liest und an ihnen exemplarisch werden läßt, wie eine symboltheoretisch begründete Kulturphilosophie im umfassenden Sinne zu verstehen sei. Die Aufsätze des Bandes betreten wissenschaftliches Neuland in zwei Richtungen: Indem sie nach der philosophischen Rezeption eines Dichters im Werk des Theoretikers fragen, dem wir die elaborierteste Kulturphilosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts verdanken, (...) präsentieren sie zugleich eine Facette des Wirkens Goethescher Dichtung und Theoriebildung in der zeitgenössischen Philosophie, die bisher in der Forschung wenig Beachtung gefunden hat. Hier wird ein Themenbereich angesprochen, der durch die universale Gelehrsamkeit Goethes wie Cassirers aus sich selbst heraus und par excellence die Notwendigkeit des interdisziplinären Zusammenspiels der Fächer erkennen läßt. (shrink)

KEYWORDS: Validity, reliability, values, taxonomy, clas- sification, McDowell.

This chapter sets out an account of tacit knowledge as conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge. It sets this out against two claims from Michael Polanyi which conjoin the idea that we know more than we can tell with the suggestion that knowledge is practical. Any account of tacit knowledge which attempts to respond to Polanyi’s first claim faces a twofold test of adequacy. It must be tacit and it must be knowledge. To count as knowledge some content must be (...) known but that puts pressure on its tacit status. What stops such a content being put into words? I reject Polanyi’s attempt to answer this based on a distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. And I reject Harry Collins’ process-based approach that looks more to ontology than epistemology or reference more than sense. By equating tacit knowledge with conceptually structured, situation specific practical knowledge or know-how, I show the respect in which it remains tacit. Although it can be expressed in demonstrations, and is related to concepts, it cannot be expressed in words alone. (shrink)

The paper begins by asking, in the context of McDowell's Mind and World, what guides empirical judgement. It then critically examines David Bell's account of the role of aesthetic judgement, or experience, in Kant and Wittgenstein, in shedding light on empirical judgement. Bell's suggestion that a Wittgensteinian account of aesthetic experience can guide the application of empirical concepts is criticised: neither the discussion of aesthetic judgement nor aesthetic experience helps underpin empirical judgement. But attention to the parallel between Wittgenstein's discussion (...) of understanding rules and the question of how empirical concepts can be applied to particulars suggests how to dissolve the felt need for an answer. This in turn helps shed light on McDowell's conceptualist account of experience. (shrink)

It seems obvious that one of the harms that dementia does is to undermine the person’s identity. One reason for thinking this is that personal identity has long been associated with continuity of a subjective perspective on the world held together by memory that that memory is severely curtailed in dementia. Hence dementia seems to threaten an individual’s identity as a particular person, gradually undermining it. But the necessity of the connection has been criticised by a number of philosophers and (...) healthcare professionals who subscribe to a narrative account of personal identity. If personal identity is constituted through a personal narrative rather than, for example, a memory connection, then while the capacity to author a self-narrative also seems to be threatened by dementia, that need not undermine personal identity providing that the narrative that constitutes identity can be co-constructed. In this paper I set out the danger of any such view, explore its motivations and provide a minimal account of the role of narrative in dementia making use of the Wittgensteinian notion of secondary sense. (shrink)

Person Centred Medicine is a substantial and contentious view of healthcare that carries both ontological and epistemological presuppositions. This chapter examines two key aspects: that the person is a central, basic irreducible element in ontology and that person-level knowledge is both important and possible. Some reasons for holding both of these are sketched.

This paper sets to answering the question of how Lacan’s 1959-60 Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis[1], with its recurring critique of the Platonic idea of a moral Sovereign Good, might contribute to and improve our understanding of the Nietzschean project to diagnose the moral metaphysics instigated by Plato in philosophy, and by Christianity in religion, as a history of untruth and nihilism––opposed to life––in preparation for its overcoming. I explore the possibility that Lacan’s Ethics might make such a contribution (...) by i) its tripartite ontology of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary serving as an additional frame of reference for examining the nature of the Good and our configurations of desire beneath it; and ii) by its more detailed elaboration of the archaic, polymorphous perversity at the instinctual base of the drives, what Lacan in his Ethics will call das Ding, the somewhat diabolical Freudian Thing. I also attempt to indicate how Nietzsche’s own ethics might make a contribution to those of the Lacanian, for the purposes of further combating what I will take to be the contemporary neurosis and nihilism of a ‘life’ against life––as indicated today for instance by such phenomena as the physical destruction of the environment, along with us as amongst its earthly inhabitants. (shrink)

_Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics._.

In “semantic vagueness in Psychiatric Nosology,” Nicholas Tilmes offers a conditional claim for further consideration. The conditional is that “if psychiatric vagueness exists, there is reason to think that some cases of it are at least partially semantic.” From this, some conclusions worth investigating follow. In this brief commentary I will set out a question Tilmes introduces by, like him, drawing on a paper by Miriam Schoenfield, which also examines vagueness as semantic, epistemic or ontic though she draws a contrasting (...) conclusion for her subject matter: moral judgment. Highlighting a supposed contrast between semantic and ontic vagueness will also highlight an issue for... (shrink)

I believe that Wright’s constructivist account of intention is funda- mentally flawed [Wright 1984, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1992]. To understand why it fails it is necessary first to locate the account in its broader strategic context. That context is Wright’s response to Wittgenstein’s account of rule following. When so located the diagnosis of the account’s failure is clear. Wright’s account of intention is a species of the interpretative approach to mental content which is explicitly rejected by (...) Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The harmful dysfunction account of disorder separates an explicitly normative or evaluative notion of harm from the idea of dysfunction which is subject to a reductionist naturalistic account. Dysfunction is analysed as a failure of function which is itself reduced via evolutionary biology. In this paper, I question this latter aspect of the account. Light can be shed on the prospect of reducing the apparently normative notion of dysfunction by comparing it with two distinct reductionist projects in the philosophy of (...) content which stand to each other as do the contrasting options in the euthyphro dilemma. A more modest project takes for granted the structure of normative relations between concepts and attempts to solve an engineering problem of how human thought can fit that structure. A more ambitious project aims to explain that structure itself in naturalistic terms. The ambitious project, however, is undermined by an argument from Wittgenstein. I argue that the harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder has to be interpreted as isomorphous with the latter project and is thus subject to the same objection. (shrink)

The two main psychiatric taxonomies set out codifications of psychiatric diagnoses via lists of symptoms with the aim of maximizing the reliability of diagnostic judgements. This approach has been criticized, however, for failing to capture the precise connection between diagnostic judgements and symptoms as detected by skilled clinicians. Assuming that this criticism is correct, this chapter offers two related accounts of why this might be so. First, skilled diagnostic judgement may be an exercise of tacit knowledge: a practical skill the (...) exercise of which requires the presence of the patient. Second, the conception of criteria implicit in the DSM and ICD is based on a mistaken view of how what people say and do connects to their mental states. On an alternative account, in an overall gestalt diagnostic judgement the various criteria are abstractions from a whole that directly expresses the underlying psychopathological state of patients or clients. (shrink)

Psychiatry’s inchoate wish for a paradigm shift and the biopsychosocial model of mental illness’ critically examines the much discussed goal of a paradigm shift in psychiatric taxonomy. The chapter first highlights some illustrative calls for such a change and then sets these against the Kuhnian account of science from which the idea is taken, highlighting the connection to incommensurability. Relative to a distinction drawn from Winch, between putative sciences where the self-understanding of subjects plays no role and those where it (...) is fundamental, psychiatry falls into the latter kind. This suggests that the wish for a paradigm shift in psychiatry is either incoherent or a wish for a radical but unpredictable overhaul of a significant aspect of our self-understanding as subjects and agents. The biopsychosocial model of mental illness is thus a helpful reminder of the cost of a paradigm shift in psychiatry. (shrink)

In response to concerns about the subsuming of individuals under essential general psychiatric diagnostic categories, there have been calls for an idiographic component in person specific diagnostic formulations. The distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic was introduced by Windelband as his contribution to the Methodenstreit. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is unclear what the distinction is supposed to comprise. In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on the motivation for the distinction by looking at a number of (...) recent approaches to healthcare that share a concern with a focus on individuals. Despite this shared element in their motivation, I argue that none help to articulate the nature of the idiographic itself. This chapter broadens the central claim of my chapter in the 2019 Yearbook of Idiographic Science, here drawing on a clue from Windelband’s student Rickert to argue that there is a role for the idiographic in healthcare though not as a form of judgement, understanding or intelligibility but rather a specific singular interest in an individual. It is this that also underpins developments in healthcare related to the individual or person. (shrink)

According to the recovery model, mental healthcare should be aimed towards a conception of recovery articulated by a patient or service user in accord with his or her own specific values. The model thus presupposes and emphasises the agency of the patient and opposes paternalism. Recent philosophical work on the relations between respect, self-respect, self-esteem, shame, and agency suggests, however, two ways in which mental illness itself can undermine self-respect, promote shame and undermine agency, suggesting a tension within the recovery (...) model. I argue, however, that this is a tension rather than a fatal flaw by distinguishing between paternalist and non-paternalist clinical responses to this failure of agency. (shrink)

Harry Collins’s Tacit and Explicit Knowledge characterises tacit knowledge through a number of antonyms: explicit, explicable, and then explicable via elaboration, transformation, mechanization and explanation and, most fundamentally, what can be communicated via “strings”. But his account blurs the distinction between knowledge and what knowledge can be of and has a number of counter-intuitive consequences. This is the result of his adoption of strings themselves rather than the use of words or signs as the mark of what is explicit and, (...) I suggest, it may stem from his earlier response to Wittgenstein’s rules regress. (shrink)

The inclusion of Elizabeth Shore in Thomas More’s History of King Richard III offers important insights into the decisions made by More in shaping his text. This article explores the evidence available to More as he wrote, emphasizing the near-complete absence of Shore from earlier narratives. Shore’s activity in the 1470s and 1480s is examined, along with evidence for her survival and that of her husband, Thomas Lynom, into the 1510s when More was writing. Lynom’s connections are considered, providing an (...) understanding of intersections of his activities with the environment in which More was shaping the History. As a central figure in the events of 1483 who survived into the 1520s, Shore was a prompt to the creation of More’s account—she was not simply a product of More’s literary and philosophical imagination, but part of his effort to respond to the immediate legacies of conflict in politics and society. (shrink)

In response to the concern that criteriological psychiatric diagnosis, based on the DSM and ICD classifications, pigeon-holes patients, there have been calls for it to be augmented by an idiographic formulation [IDGA Workgroup, WPA 2003]. I have argued elsewhere that this is a mistake [Thornton 2008a, 2008b, 2010]. Looking back to its original proponent Wilhelm Windelband yields no clear account of the contrast between idiographic and nomothetic judgement. Abstracting from Jaspers’ account of understanding an idea of idiographic judgement based on (...) the contrast between singular and general causal relations also fails. I argue, however, that Windelband does provide a helpful clue in his remark that ‘every interest and judgement, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular and the unique... Our sense of values and all of our axiological sentiments are grounded in the uniqueness and incomparability of their object’ [Windelband 1980: 182]. This suggests a role for the idiographic not as the content of a particular kind of judgement but rather as characterising its aim. I argue that this connects to the issue of the generalisability of small scale qualitative social science research and to the critique of ‘looking away’ in moral philosophy. (shrink)

This article deals with Jacques Derrida's relationship with the variations of phenomenology represented by Tran Duc Thao and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his public thesis defense of 1980, Derrida aligns himself with Thao, a Vietnamese philosopher who used phenomenology in a critique of colonialist politics, and explicitly opposes himself to the institutionally-valorized Merleau-Ponty. While direct overlaps and typological similarities exist between Thao and Derrida, the latter is shown overall to be closer to Merleau-Ponty, suggesting Derrida deploys the image of Thao as (...) part of a strategy of autobiographical self-representation which emphasizes his critical relationship to philosophical institutions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to many contemporary observers, including Hillel Steiner [1], Herbert Hart [2], John Gray [3] and Isaiah Berlin [4], the equal liberty principle lies at the heart of liberalism. Yet despite its central place in liberal theory, it has attracted little critical appraisal. This paper seeks to examine the meaning and some of the policy implications of the equal liberty principle, paying particular attention to the elucidations produced by Herbert Spencer, Steiner and Hart — the only systematic analysts of (...) the notion of equal liberty. In part 1, the meaning of the equal liberty principle is discussed, and it is shown to be intrinsically ambivalent. In part 2, where certain policy implications are considered, the conclusion is reached that the equal liberty principle is ambiguous in its policy prescriptions, and requires to be supplemented by some other principle before it can be unequivocally applied. (shrink)

This article explores how Mortimer J. Adler's philosophy of history, as it developed from the 1930s through the 1950s, affected the construction of Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World and the same set's Syntopicon. A thorough examination of Adler's influences (e.g. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Jacques Maritain, and Columbia University faculty) demonstrates that his philosophy of history derived from a coincidental confluence of developments in the fields of literature, history, and philosophy. Adler's processing of these trends reveals both irony (...) and paradox, and also explains some philosophical objections articulated by later foes of the great books idea. (shrink)

The review symposium on Soviet-type societies in Telos 60 sought to address a broad range of important questions raised by Zaslavsky s The Neo-Stalinist State and The Dictatorship Over Needs, by Feher, Heller and Markus. In response to this, Zaslavsky has taken exception to my brief characterization of Soviet political economy in his article, “Soviet Society and the World Systems Analysis.” I had argued that Zaslavsky could improve his case by discussing the position of the USSR in the world economy (...) as well as the role played by East-West trade in reproducing the neo-Stalinist state. Zaslavsky admits this weakness and says such remarks are well-taken. But then he turns around and claims, first, that my viewpoint on the USSR, like that of many “within the Amerian community,” is ethnocentric. (shrink)