Without so much as an America Online account, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University two centuries ago, learned of an evil plot -- hatched in France by Freemasons hopped up on Enlightenment philosophy -- to overthrow the United States Government. A Bavarian secret society called the Order of the Illuminati was also involved. Unable to access alt.conspiracy or even a good E-mail program, Dwight had to resort to public speaking to spread the word.

Frege puzzles exploit cognitive differences between co-referential terms. Traditionally, they were handled by some version of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, which avoided disruptive consequences for epistemology. However, the Fregean programme did not live up to its original promise, and was undermined by the development of theories of direct reference; for semantic purposes, its prospects now look dim. In particular, well-known analogues of Frege puzzles concern pairs of uncontentious synonyms; attempts to deal with them by distinguishing idiolects or postulating (...) ‘narrow contents’ or elaborate forms of context-sensitivity are inadequate or semantically implausible. Although ascriptions of knowledge, belief, and other attitudes are ubiquitous in epistemology, epistemologists have not properly come to terms with the surprising consequences of anti-Fregean semantic accounts of attitude ascriptions. In ‘A Puzzle about Belief ’, Saul Kripke shows that natural-seeming disquotational principles for ascribing belief lead to apparently unacceptable consequences, including outright contradictions, in problem cases. Such disquotation principles, I argue, are best regarded not as conceptual connections but just as heuristics in the psychological sense, quick and easy ways of assessing belief ascriptions, usually accurate under normal conditions but far from 100% reliable. I discuss similar heuristics for ascribing knowledge and other attitudes. That the principles have a merely heuristic status need not be pre-theoretically manifest to their users. This view vindicates Kripke’s conclusion that it would be wrong-headed to draw semantic conclusions from Frege puzzles. I discuss the epistemological consequences of an anti-Fregean approach to Frege puzzles, including for Kripke’s cases of the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori, but also for evidence, for epistemic modalities, and for epistemic and subjective conceptions of probability. Anna Mahtani’s recent identification of Frege puzzles for the ex ante Pareto Principle as used in welfare economics provides an interesting example. I suggest a model-building methodology as the most promising way of handling at least some of the difficulties. A final issue is the choice between different anti-Fregean approaches to semantics, from very coarse-grained intensional approaches on which sentences express functions from possible worlds to truth-values to more fine-grained hyperintensional approaches on which sentences express functions from possible or impossible worlds to truth-values or else Russellian structured propositions. Some of the hyperintensional theories violate semantic compositionality. More generally, since our attitude ascriptions rely on heuristics, they should be expected to exhibit some level of error; although hyperintensional approaches may be able slightly to reduce the level of postulated error, they do so at the cost of vastly increased theoretical complexity, and so have weak explanatory power. Methodologically, a simple intensional approach does better. (shrink)

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been substansively (...) influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)

1. As John Hawthorne and Maria Lasonen-Aarnio appreciate, some of the central issues raised in their ‘Knowledge and Objective Chance’ arise for all but the most extreme theories of knowledge. In a wide range of cases, according to very plausible everyday judgments, we know something about the future, even though, according to quantum mechanics, our belief has a small but nonzero chance (objective probability) of being untrue. In easily constructed examples, we are in that position simultaneously with respect to many (...) different propositions about the future that are equiprobable and probabilistically independent of each other, at least to a reasonable approximation. (shrink)

Garfinkel's dissertation, "The Perception of the Other," was completed and defended 15 years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel's thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an 'incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate' (...) program of sociological inquiry well before the term 'ethnomethodology' had even been coined. (shrink)

First, some reminiscences. In the years 1973-80, when I was an undergraduate and then graduate student at Oxford, Michael Dummett’s formidable and creative philosophical presence made his arguments impossible to ignore. In consequence, one pole of discussion was always a form of anti-realism. It endorsed something like the replacement of truth-conditional semantics by verification-conditional semantics and of classical logic by intuitionistic logic, and the principle that all truths are knowable. It did not endorse the principle that all truths are known. (...) Nor did it mention the now celebrated argument, first published by Frederic Fitch (1963), that if all truths are knowable then all truths are known. (shrink)

This critical response to Dominic Smith’s ‘Taking Exception: Philosophy of Technology as a Multidimensional Problem Space’ begins by outlining the key contributions of his essay, namely his insightful approach to the transcendental, on the one hand, and his introduction of the topological problem space as an image for thought, on the other. The response then suggests ways of furthering this approach by addressing potential reservations about determinism. The response concludes by suggesting a way out of these questions of determinism by (...) thinking the transcendental in concert with the agonistic. (shrink)

Despite the fact that information systems ontologies [ISOs] support the mutual understanding between human beings and software applications, human beings and software applications do not understand ISOs' contents in the same way. The same applies to ontological integration. This paper attempts to account for such discrepancies by emphasizing that while human being can have access to entities represented in ISOs, software applications cannot.

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated the relatedness (...) of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

Some commentators have criticized bioethics as failing to engage religion both as a matter of theory and practice. Bioethics should work toward understanding the influence of religion as it represents people's beliefs and practices, but bioethics should nevertheless observe limits in regard to religion as it does its normative work. Irreligious skepticism toward religious views about health, healthcare practices and institutions, and responses to biomedical innovations can yield important benefits to the field. Irreligious skepticism makes it possible to raise questions (...) that otherwise go unasked and to protect against the overreach of religion. In this sense, bioethics needs a vigorous irreligious outlook every bit as much as it needs descriptive understandings of religion. (shrink)

There is relatively little comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s theory of essences despite his ubiquitous use of essences. It is commonplace in contemporary analytic philosophy to view essences as the ground for true de re modal claims. I argue that Heidegger offers an account of essences that can best be understood as a type of relative essentialism. Relative essentialism is the view that more than one being can occupy the same space at the same time and those beings have distinct sets (...) of de re modal truths about them. Heidegger’s account of essences allows for true de re modal claims about a wide variety of things including scientific and cultural entities. At the same time, Heidegger rejects absolute essentialism: the view that there is one privilege collection of beings whose natures determine the truth values of de re modal claims about them. Relative essentialism is distinguished from contextual essentialism. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the modularity of harmonic expectations that are based on cultural schemata despite the availability of more predictive veridical information. Participants were presented with prime–target chord pairs and made an intonation judgment about each target. Schematic expectation was manipulated by the combination of prime and target, with some transitions being schematically more probable than others. Veridical information in the form of prime–target previews, local transition probabilities, or valid versus invalid previews was also provided. Processing was facilitated when a (...) schematically probable target chord followed the prime. Furthermore, this effect was independent of all manipulations of veridical expectation. A solution to L. B. Meyer's (1967b) query "On Rehearing Music" is suggested, in which schematic knowledge contributes to harmonic expectation in a modular manner regardless of whether any veridical knowledge exists. (shrink)

0. Platitudinously, cognitive science is the science of cognition. Cognition is usually defined as something like the process of acquiring, retaining and applying knowledge. To a first approximation, therefore, cognitive science is the science of knowing. Knowing is a relation between the knower and the known. Typically, although not always, what is known involves the environment external to the knower. Thus knowing typically involves a relation between the agent and the external environment. It is not internal to the agent, for (...) the internal may be the same whether or not it is related to the external in a way that constitutes knowing. Cognition enables agents to achieve their goals by adjusting their actions appropriately to the environment. Such adjustment requires what is internal to the agent to be in some sense in line with what is external; that matching depends on both internal and external sides. Thus if cognitive science were restricted to what is internal to the agent, it would lose sight of its primary object of study. Although cognition depends on both the internal and the external, one can try to analyse it into internal and external factors. Call a state S narrow if and only if whether an agent is in S at a time t depends only on the total internal qualitative state of S at t, so that if one agent in one possible situation is internally an exact duplicate of another agent.. (shrink)

Covering both practical and theoretical aspects of strategic management, this three-volume work brings the complex topic down to earth and enables readers to gain competitive business advantages in their marketplace. This clear, insightful, and interesting work covers all aspects of strategic management, including chapters that discuss SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, the Resource-Based View, transaction cost economics, and real options theory. Unlike other books, this three-volume work examines strategic management from different perspectives, effectively interweaving seemingly disparate subdisciplines, such (...) as entrepreneurship and international business, with specialized foci, such as creativity, innovation, and trust. Incorporating information from contributors as varied as a proprietor of a worldwide motorcycle business to one of the most published scholars in the field of international strategic management, the practical and theoretical perspectives presented in Strategic Management in the 21st Century will benefit business strategists, professors of strategic management, and graduate students in the field. (shrink)

The degree to which the early dharma literature was an extrapolation from the earlier ritual codes can be seen from a number of shared features of form and content. One of these that has not received more than passing notice is the fact that the Dharmaśāstric principle of regarding customary norms as a valid basis of dharma, both in general and in limited spheres, has its origins in ritual rules in the śrautasūtras and gṛhyasūtras. Passages from the Baudhāyanaśrautasūtra and numerous (...) gṛhyasūtras show that already in these rulebooks established practices of particular social groups were accepted as a valid authority in certain contexts where explicit textual warrant was lacking, and that a further distinction was there made between the general norms of experts and the valid particular norms of locality or social group. (shrink)

The core of Tony Brueckner’s critique in ‘Knowledge, Evidence, and Skepticism according to Williamson’ is his claim in section 5 that my account of perceptual knowledge has an unacceptable consequence. My reply will concentrate on that claim and largely ignore the rest of Brueckner’s interesting discussion, for it is easy to check that the claim is essential to Brueckner’s argument against my analysis of skepticism and evidence. The alleged consequence at issue concerns a case in which Brueckner knows by seeing (...) that his cup is red. According to Brueckner, I am committed to the implausible view that ‘[his] belief of the proposition that [his] cup is red is justified in virtue of [his] belief of the proposition that [his] cup is red!’ Why does he take my account of.. (shrink)

Originally published in 1950 by Yale University Press.

What role does religious transcendence play in liberal democracies? In Jürgen Habermas’s early political theory of the bourgeois public sphere, religion was downplayed if not dismissed completely. In the past several years however, he has developed a greater interest in religion. Habermas seems to like the positive solidarity-forming effects religion can have on communities that mediate in a public sphere between private individuals and state authority. However, in light of continuing terrorist activity, he is deeply critical of any sort of (...) other worldly transcendence that is too open to violent cooption. Nonetheless, Habermas relates his renewal of a critically engaged public sphere of debate to universalized rational procedures which he discusses in light of a philosophical notion of “detranscendentalization.” However, if it is the case that the solidarity of communities is being eroded by the influences of mass media and free market globalization as Habermas claims, then a further reflection on the way religious communities form around shared transcendent beliefs is required. Are his detranscendentalized rational procedures of critical debate adequate in inspiring the critical power communities need to solidify themselves against state authority? It is in light of this questions that I will develop the thought of Karl Barth. (shrink)

While the clinical promise of much stem cell research remains largely theoretical, patients are nonetheless pursuing unproven stem cell therapies in jurisdictions around the world—a phenomenon referred to as “stem cell tourism.” These treatments are generally advertised on a direct-to-consumer basis via the Internet. Research shows portrayals of stem cell medicine on such websites are overly optimistic and the claims made are unsubstantiated by published evidence. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that parents are pursing these “treatments” for their children, despite potential (...) physical and financial risk. Physicians are in a unique position as they can be expected to be involved in, or privy to, such decisions. In this paper, we consider what duties physicians may have toward minor patients whose parents/guardians wish to engage in stem cell tourism on their behalf. We use the Canadian perspective to address the broadly relevant issues raised by this trend. (shrink)

Depuis le début de ce siècle, l'art et la littérature n'ont cessé de déborder leurs limites et de bousculer leurs catégories. Cette démarche radicale a contribué, en retour, à réveiller une théorie jusqu'alors quelque peu engourdie dans des conceptions héritées de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, aux confins des âges classique et romantique. Les études ici réunies témoignent de ce renouveau de l'esthétique, particulièrement dans la philosophie de tradition analytique. Leur trait commun est le caractère relativiste de leurs critères. Les (...) "symptômes" de la relation artistique sont de l'ordre de l'usage, de la circonstance, de la fonction : il n'y a d'oeuvre qu'à la rencontre d'une intention et d'une attention. Pour le public comme pour les créateurs, l'art est aussi une pratique. (shrink)

Blend classically beautiful illustrations with the wisdom of the ages to awaken your inner being as never before. Read this collection from cover to cover, and then concentrate on applying the different thoughts on your daily life. Start with first light, going with the flow, detachment, and harmony. Turn to a quote each day as a focus for meditations like these: Being a good listener spares one the burden of giving advice. Peace and knowledge will be yours!

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

The Bible, a religious text, is also often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume explores how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied, often problematically, in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics, and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's roles, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word.