Overview of the Stoic position. Looks at the roots of their determinism in their theology, their response to the 'lazy argument' that believing that all things are fated makes action pointless, their analysis of human action and how it allows actions to be 'up to us,' their rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, their rejection of anger and other negative reactive attitudes, and their contention that submission to god's will brings true freedom.

William James’ celebrated lecture on “The Will to Believe” has kindled spirited controversy since the day it was delivered. In this lively reappraisal of that controversy, Father O’Connell contributes some fresh contentions: that James’ argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Pascal and Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our “over-beliefs” ; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our “passional nature” as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief.

Machine generated contents note: Part 1 - The Constituent Disciplines of Cognitive Science -- Philosophical Epistemology -- Glossary -- 1.0 What is Philosophical Epistemology? -- 1.1 The reduced history of Philosophy Part I - The Classical Age -- 1.2 Mind and World - The problem of objectivity -- 1.3 The reduced history of Philosophy Part II - The twentieth century -- 1.4 The philosophy of Cognitive Science -- 1.5 Mind in Philosophy: summary -- 1.6 The Nolanian Framework (so far) -- (...) Psychology -- 2.0 Why is Psychology so difficult? -- 2.1 A brief history of Experimental Psychology -- 2.2 Methodologies in Psychology -- 2.3 Perception -- 2.4 Memory -- 2.5 Mind in Psychology -- Linguistics -- 3.0 Introduction -- 3.1 Why Linguistics? -- 3.2 Computation and Linguistics -- 3.3 The main grammatical theories -- 3.4 Language development and linguistics -- 3.5 Toward a definition of context -- 3.6 The multifarious uses of Language -- 3.7 Linguistics and Computational Linguistics -- 3.8 Language and other symbol systems -- 3.9 On the notion of context -- 3.10 Mind in Linguistics: summary -- Neuroscience -- 4.0 The constituent disciplines of Neuroscience -- 4.1 The methodology of Neuroscience -- 4.2 Gross Neuroanatomy -- 4.3 Some relevant findings -- 4.4 Connectionism (PDP) -- 4.5 The victory of Neuroscience? -- 4.6 Mind in Neuroscience: summary -- Artificial Intelligence -- 5.0 Introduction -- 5.1 Al and Cognitive Science -- 5.2 Skeptics and their techniques -- 5.3 Al as Computer Science -- 5.4 Al as software -- 5.5 The current methodological debate -- 5.6 Context, syntax and semantics -- 5.7 Mind in Al -- 5.8 Texts on Al -- Etholoqy and Ethnoscience -- 6.1 Etology -- 6.2 Ethnoscience -- 6.3 Mind in Ethology arid Ethnoscience -- Part II - A New Foundation for Cognitive Science -- - Symbol Systems -- 7.1 Characteristics of symbol systems -- 7.2 Context and the layers of symbol systems -- 7.3 Mind and symbol systems -- Consciousness and Selfhood -- 8.0 Introduction -- 8.1 Cognitive views -- 8.2 What is at stake? -- 8.3 Consciousness as treated in Philosophy -- 8.4 The Development of Selfhood -- 8.5 The minimal requirements for this theory -- 8.6 Self as a filter -- 8.7 Self and motivation -- 8.8 Conclusions -- 8.9 Recent developments -- Cognitive Science and the Search for Mind -- 9.1 Introduction -- 9.2 Review -- 9.3 A Theory of Mind anyone? -- 9.4 Foundational considerations -- 9.5 Coda: the Nolanian Framework. (shrink)

Central to Sellars’ account of human cognition was a clear distinction, expressed in varying terminology in his different works, “between conceptual and nonconceptual representations.” Those who have come to be known as ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have tended to reject Sellars’ appeals to nonconceptual sensory representations. So-called ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ such as Ruth Millikan and Jay Rosenberg, on the other hand, have embraced and developed aspects of Sellars’ account, in particular the central underlying idea (...) that human perceptual cognition involves a certain naturalistic ‘mapping’ correspondence or structural ‘picturing’ isomorphism between internal mental representations and the layout and behavior of objects in the surrounding environment. Sellars, despite his defenses of nonconceptual representational content throughout his career, has with no small irony come to be cited as one of the “founding fathers of conceptualism.” While recognizing the strong conceptualist elements in Sellars’ Kantian account of perceptual cognition, I argue that a central core of Sellars’ account of nonconceptual sensory contents does not by itself fall afoul of the philosophical worries raised by the left-leaning Sellarsians, and that in fact it has significant merits in its own right. (shrink)

In the author's view, the proper verdict on the reconcilability of the content of Christian revelation with the full‐blown natural theological concept of God found in the works of classical theologians is much less clear than many contemporary theologians would have it. The author argues that one can reasonably accept the philosophical concept of God as necessary being while rejecting the more problematic notions of immutability and simplicity. This chapter briefly discusses the strands of thought offered by natural theology. It (...) describes Luis de Molina's problematic notion of middle knowledge to assess the timeless eternity theorist's conception of God's knowledge of and actions in response to the world. It argues that the eternity thesis is committed to the doctrine of middle knowledge (or, as with Leftow's alternative, something very much like it), and tries to persuade the reader that this constitutes something of a reductio of the eternity thesis. (shrink)

Anaxarchus accompanied Pyrrho on Alexander the Great’s expedition to India and was known as “the Happy Man” because of his impassivity and contentment. Our sources on his philosophy are limited and largely consist of anecdotes about his interactions with Pyrrho and Alexander, but they allow us to reconstruct a distinctive ethical position. It overlaps with several disparate ethical traditions but is not merely a hodge-podge; it hangs together as a unified whole. Like Pyrrho, he asserts that things are indifferent in (...) value and that realizing this indifference leads to contentment. But this doctrine of indifference is rooted in Democritean atomism. And in his pursuit of pleasure and dismissiveness of conventional standards of what is just, noble, and pious, Anaxarchus is closer to fifth century thinkers such as Aristippus, Antiphon, and Critias. (shrink)

Introduction. Anthropotechnical turn in culture is based on educational practices that characterize a person as a subject and at the same time as an object of educational and corrective influence. Theoretical basis. We use the method of categorical analysis, which allows revealing the main outlook potentials of anthropotechnical turn as an essential transformation of modern socio-culture. Originality. For the first time, we conducted a categorical analysis of the glossary of anthropotechnical turn as dialectic of active and passive in the personal (...) and social modes such as education. Conclusions. The anthropotechnical turn of modern socio-culture means the actualization of the dialectic of active and passive in the process of socialization and formation of a person in a modern society. The world-view potential of the anthropotechnical turn is producing a new maxim and stratagem of person's behaviour through the formation of a new way of self-identification and self-esteem. The modern educational system, given the theory of anthropotechnical rotation, should change the content of timological energies from obedience to self-actualization and self-improvement. A prerequisite for this task is the change in the motivation of the education sector and the improvement of the social status of the teacher as an intellectual and leader of opinion. The analysis of the specificity of the information society and its determinatory impact on the individual provides grounds for identifying modern culture as a culture of lost opportunities. Thus, the main cause of disorientation and ignorance of a person is not the lack of information, but the lack of motivation. Therefore, the fundamental principles of anthropotechnical turn are productive in solving pressing problems of our time. (shrink)

On Lord Buddha's main ethical code especially contentment and its relevant in today's daily life.

ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis for (...) presenting some of the most familiar ‘analytic Kantian’ themes that continue to animate current debates. I also argue that the complex relationships between Sellars’ philosophy and Kant’s thought are often misunderstood. Overall the chapter examines Sellars’ analytic appropriations of Kant in three topic-areas of significant current philosophical debate: (1) conceptual analysis and the structure of human knowledge; (2) laws of nature, the causal modalities, and the pragmatic or relative a priori; and (3) the disputes concerning Kant and nonconceptual content. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its motivation and in its content, whether considered conceptually, historically, or in his own estimation, and that this is the case even in the important respects in which his views differ from most pragmatists. However, this assessment has been rejected by many recent pragmatists, with “classicalist” pragmatists frequently objecting to Sellars’s analytic-pragmatist privileging of language at the alleged expense of experience, while many analytic pragmatists themselves emphasize (...) that Sellars’s philosophy arguably runs against the grain of pragmatism in central respects, with Brandom for instance recently remarking that “Sellars never explicitly identified himself with pragmatism.” Part I explores the classical pragmatist influences on the development of Sellars’s philosophy, with reference to aspects of the intellectual background in which those views formed. Part II then outlines more abstractly some of the enduring pragmatist themes in Sellars’s philosophy, including his conceptions of the myth of the given, the space of reasons, and his normative-inferentialist theory of meaning. I conclude in Part III with Sellars’s views on truth and “picturing,” which present a complex case for the question of “how pragmatist” Sellars’s views both were and ought to be. (shrink)

Abstract In this essay, I critically discuss a theory of utterance content and de re communication that Anne Bezuidenhout has recently developed in a series of articles. This theory regards the significance of utterances as more pragmatic in nature than allowed by traditional accounts; further, it downplays logical considerations in explaining de re communication, choosing instead to emphasize its psychological character. Included among the implications of this approach is the rejection of what can be called ?common content?, or utterance content (...) that is held in common by speaker and listener. After describing this theory, I argue that Bezuidenhout does not supply a compelling reason to prefer her account of utterance content over more traditional alternatives that make room for elements of content held in common between speaker and listener. Further, I argue that her account of de re communication supplies even more reason to reject the view of content to which she subscribes. In the end, it will be clear that she has no principled reason for rejecting common content. (shrink)

Self, Language, and World: Problems from Kant, Sellars, and Rosenberg Edited by James R. O'Shea and Eric M. Rubenstein Introduction KANT Willem deVries, Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy David Landy, The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept LANGUAGE AND MIND William G. Lycan, Rosenberg On Proper Names Douglas Long, Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green, Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning David Rosenthal, The Mind and Its Expression MIND AND (...) KNOWLEDGE Jeffrey Sicha, The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental Bruce Aune, Rosenberg on Knowing Joseph C. Pitt, Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism Matthew Chrisman, The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg James O’Shea, Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide ONTOLOGY Anton Koch, Persons as Mirroring the World Eric M. Rubenstein, Form and Content, Substance and Stuff Ralf Stoecker, On Being a Realist About Death William G. Lycan, Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg. (shrink)

Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call ‘joint attention to mental content’ plays a key role. JAM is the ability to focus (...) together in conversation on the content of our mental states, such as beliefs and reasons. In such conversations it can be made clear that our attitudes to beliefs or reasons may conflict—that what I think is true, you might think is false, or that what I think is a good reason for believing something, you might think is a bad reason. We argue that through JAM, children discover that mental contents can be evaluated under various attitudes, and that this discovery transforms their mind-reading and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he developed as (...) an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content. (shrink)

Most mainstream attempts to understand the “placebo effect” invoke expectancy theory, arguing that expecting certain outcomes from a treatment or intervention can manifest those outcomes. Expectancy theory is incompatible with the phenomena of placebo responses, more appropriately named “meaning responses.” The expectancy account utilizes reflexive consciousness to connect a world of conceptual representations to mechanical physiology. An alternative account based upon Merleau-Ponty's motor intentionality argues that the body understands and is capable of responding to meanings without the need for any (...) conceptual or linguistic content. A motor intentional framework of meaning poses dramatic implications for the interpretation of clinical trials and in the clinical practice of medicine. Most strongly, it argues that the empathic physician can facilitate the physiologic effects of treatments through skillful participation and manipulation of the meaning response. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more particularly in relation to the nature and status of what he calls ‘epistemic principles’; and I attempt to show that this remains a plausible and distinctive position even when detached from Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible objects of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist, i.e., as conceived within that common sense framework. I first explain the complex Kant-inspired sense in (...) which Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to persons. In this primary Kantian sense, I suggest, persons as thinkers and agents exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this in principle would enable an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology, one that is independent of Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. Finally, I examine in some detail how this defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes turns out to be what is fundamental in Sellars’s complex and controversial views on the nature and status of epistemic principles. (shrink)

Discussion of J. Kevin O’Regan’s “Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness” Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s13164-012-0090-7 Authors J. Kevin O’Regan, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS - Université Paris Descartes, Centre Biomédical des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France Ned Block, Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, 5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA Journal Review of Philosophy and (...) Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158. (shrink)

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it. The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling these (...) apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

At the turn of the millennium, the problem of its further existence, of the realities of existence within the next millennium coordinate system, is of particular importance to man. It is becoming increasingly clear that the crisis experienced by modern culture is primarily the manifestation of anthropological crisis, a crisis of man and that type of consciousness based on its consumer attitude to the world and to other people. Awareness of this implies a change in ideological and value paradigm, which, (...) in turn, requires a thorough study of those traditions of philosophical, ethical and religious thought, which can become an important component of the formation of the spiritual and moral basis of national culture. (shrink)

In their target article, Hutto and Satne eloquently articulate the failings of most current attempts to naturalize mental content. Furthermore, we think they are correct in their insistence that the only way forward is by drawing a distinction between two kinds of intentionality, one of which is considerably weaker than—and should be deployed to explain—the propositional variety most philosophers take for granted. The problem is that their own rendering of this weaker form of intentionality—contentless intentionality—is too weak. What’s needed is (...) a species of intentionality distinct from both the industrial-strength version beloved by philosophers and the intentionality lite recommended by Hutto and Satne. We briefly motivate and sketch this alternative, and say a few words about the account of cognition that it spawns. (shrink)

This paper reports on an investigation of issues surrounding the use of ethical codes/codes of conduct in Irish based companies. Using a comprehensive questionnaire survey, the paper examines the incidence, content and enforcement of codes of conduct among a sample of the top 1000 companies based in Ireland. The main findings indicate that the overall usage of codes of conduct amongst indigenous Irish companies has increased significantly from 1995 to 2000. However, in line with prior research, these codes focus primarily (...) on issues surrounding company and employee protection as opposed to society protection. Almost half of all codes are written by company personnel or provided by head office. Revisions of codes are common but formal ongoing methods of instructing new staff about codes are not prevalent. Less than one-third of companies with codes have formal channels for reporting violations but a high percentage have formal disciplinary procedures in place for breaches of codes. (shrink)

Creativity of Ivan Vyshensky is one of the outstanding ideological and artistic phenomena of the end of XVI - beginning of XVII century. Closely linked to the events of the time, she witnessed the arrival in the Ukrainian spiritual culture of the artist, who put all her talent in defense of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Although, to be more specific, Ivan Vyshensky's person would be more right to recognize the apologist of the foundations of ancient Ukrainian Orthodoxy, whose spokesmen strongly opposed the (...) measures connected with the preparation, proclamation and implementation of the Orthodox-Catholic Union in the territory of the Commonwealth. The problem, it is known, turned out to be so significant and complex that it divided the Ukrainian ethnic group at the time of its active national self-awareness into two denominationally opposing camps. In such circumstances, the "Russian faith" and the Orthodox Church as a whole became the subject of special affection, the most touching place, its national banner and slogan, "or, as A. Richinsky noted, signs of nationality. It is understandable that dignitaries, including church and religious ones, also had denominators of Orthodox Catholic unification. Therefore, the attempt to objectify the view of the need for church-religious union within the framework of the Commonwealth, as well as to improve the understanding of those initial principles, which were guided by Ivan Vyshensky, requires an expansion and deepening of thematic expositions. In this sense, the task of the proposed article we would like to reduce to a brief analysis of the polemical works of anti-union content of the late XVI - early XVII centuries, that is, the time when Ivan Vyshensky lived and created, and which in one way or another will help them to comprehend their congruence or contradiction artist's credo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This volume collects seven articles of Carlo Paolazzi, O.F.M., previously published in journals and congress proceedings between 1996 and 2004, each of them dealing with the Writings of Francis. The essays are not arranged chronologically but move from more general to more specific studies on the Writings of Francis of Assisi. The titles of the essays included are: 1) The Birth of the Writings and Constitution of the Canon (...) ; 2) Francis, Theology and the Letter to brother Anthony ; 3) Anthony cites Francis: the Epilogue of the Sunday Sermons and the Early Rule XVI ; 4) The Writings between Francis and his secretaries: a Knot to be Untied ; 5) Concerning the Autographs of brother Francis: Doubts, Verifications and Confirmations ; 6) Concerning the Authenticity of the Writings of Francis to the "Poor Ladies" ; 7) The Lesser Brothers and Books: Concerning the Exegesis of "the books necessary to fulfill their office" and "Those who do not know how to read" . Each of the essays displays a careful methodology and appreciation for the evangelical content of the texts.The first essay deals with the establishment of the "canon" of Francis's writings in which the author demonstrates that the writings are born and develop from Francis's relationship with the Word of God. In this context, "writing" takes on the character of an "essential moment" in Francis's relationship with the Word , with God and with the brotherhood. This explains for Paolazzi, the passion with which Francis recommends the writings to those to whom they are addressed.The second and third essays are related to Anthony of Padua and the writings. The second essay deals with the content and authenticity of the Letter to Anthony, included by Kajetan Esser in the canon of Francis's writings. Paolazzi argues that the expression, "Brother Anthony my bishop" goes back to Francis himself. He suggests that Anthony's request for permission to teach reflects the concern of the novice who had permission from his minister to have a breviary, but was uncomfortable and needed Francis's explicit permission , a characteristic of the tension in the brotherhood upon Francis's return from Egypt in 1220. The conditions Francis places on the teaching of Anthony reflect Francis's concern that the Word of God not be approached purely from an intellectual perspective, but rather as a Word which must transform life. The third essay attempts to demonstrate that the Epilogue to Anthony's Sunday Sermons integrates sections of chapter 17 of the Early Rule. Paolazzi concludes this careful lexical study with the affirmation that Anthony had the Early Rule's exhortation to preachers in chapter 17 before his eyes as he concluded his Opus Evangeliorum .In the fourth essay Paolazzi tackles the question of the role played by secretaries in the production of the Writings of Francis. Scholars, including Esser, have suggested that because of his health and/or because of his status as "illiterate," Francis depended on secretaries to put his thoughts on paper. Paolazzi approaches the question by citing a saying attributed to Francis from the Mirror of Perfection . That this saying goes back to the historical Francis Paolazzi concludes based on both the content and the fact that it reflects Francis's literal approach to the Gospel. The saying states that Francis wanted no one to call him good, father or master because of the teaching of Christ in the Gospel who said that only God should be addressed with these titles . He then studies the usage and appearance of these three terms in the Writings of Francis, which confirm a consistent usage in accord with this saying. This demonstrates that the Writings reflect the "speech" of Francis and not simply his conceptual thought. Paolazzi considers that "in the Writings religious thought and the verbal lexicon of evangelical inspiration respond one to.. (shrink)

The humanitarian idea underlying this article is to attempt an epidemiological interpretation of the classic Hippocratic triad "Medicine consists of three elements: the disease, the patient and the doctor". In the XIII century, the Syrian doctor Abul-Faraj in his saying: "Look, there are three of us – you, me, and the disease. If you are on my side, it will be easier for the two of us to defeat her. But, if you go over to her side, I alone will (...) not be able to defeat you both" deciphered the magical meaning of these words. For centuries, the fundamental integrity of this formula has been an ethical and professional guarantee of the success of each patient's treatment and the prospect of building a personalized healthcare system. In this particular article, we have searched for new content of three key elements of the textbook aphorism in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. An understanding of the role of the doctor – "I" as the whole complex of efforts aimed at fighting the pandemic. Patient status "You" means the whole society during a pandemic, and even is as a long-term message for the physical, mental, social and geopolitical health of future generations. The meaning of "Disease" should be understood from the perspective of the problems of the entire health system and logistical ignorance, which has become an obstacle to achieving ethical integrity in managing epidemic challenges. The paper shows how adherence to the ethical principles of social responsibility, trust, and solidarity should become the moral accompaniment of the entire complex of sanitary, anti-epidemic, economic, legal, and social technologies that can ensure success in the fight against the pandemic and prevent the development of unjustified risks. (shrink)

For the Enlightenment, science represented an ideal of rational argument, behaviour and community against which could be judged the arbitrary power and authority of other spheres of human practice. This Enlightenment ideal runs through much liberal and socialist theory. However, the Enlightenment picture of science has appeared to many to be increasingly uncompelling. What explains the apparent decline of the Enlightenment vision? This book explores one neglected answer originally proposed by Husserl, that its decline is rooted in formalism, in the (...) view that all there is to theoretical science is the construction and mastery of formal systems. O'Neill demonstrates formalist accounts of mathematics and natural science to be inadequate, and then considers and rejects Husserl's views on the origin of the formalization of the sciences. The book concludes by arguing that the rise of a formalist view of the sciences is founded in the professionalization of modern science, and discusses the significance of this professionalization for the fate of the Enlightenment view of science. Worlds Without Content: Against Formalism tackles an important set of issues which have been neglected in recent philosophy of science, and in so doing highlights themes in Husserl's later works which have been ignored by most commentators. It will be of particular interest for philosophers of mathematics, science and social theory, and for historians of mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

"Content and Comportment argues persuasively that the answer to some long-standing questions in epistemology and metaphysics lies in taking up the neglected question of the role of our bodily activity in establishing connections between representational states—knowledge and belief in particular—and their objects in the world. It takes up these ideas from both current mainstream analytic philosophy—Frege, Dummett, Davidson, Evans—and from mainstream continental work—Heidegger and his commentators and critics—and bings them together successfully in a way that should surprise only those who (...) persist in maintaining this barren dichotymization of the field.". (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of the cognitive status of moral judgements in moral philosophy and cognitive science. Having a cognitive status means that a judgement ade­quately expresses moral content in a form specific to morality. In moral philosophy, be­ginning with the Modern Times, the problem of cognitive status has been presented as a question about the nature of moral judgements and formulated as a dilemma of rea­son and sense. In the process of discussing this problem, two schools of (...) thought emerged: intellectualism and sentimentalism, which set a paradigm for thinking about moral judge­ments that is also incorporated in contemporary ethics. In both, the assertion of the ‘ratio­nal’ or ‘emotional’ nature of moral judgements was used to justify such features as un­conditionality, directness, universality, imperativeness, and non-utilitarianism. In contem­porary cognitive science, the issue of the ‘rational’ or ‘emotional’ nature of moral judge­ments is related to the issue of the emotional-intuitive and rational-discursive factors in the formation of moral judgements. By analysing the theories of Jonathan Haidt, ac­cording to which sense-intuitive moral judgements have cognitive status, and Joshua Green, according to which only rational-discursive judgements have such status, it was shown that the dilemma of reason and feeling is not clarified in cognitive science, but only reproduced. The lesson that moral philosophy must learn from the discussion of moral judgements in cognitive science is to recognise that neither the validity of moral judgements nor their specific features depend on whether reason or feeling, reasoning or intuition is involved in their formation. These features are entirely determined by the specificity of morality as a cultural phenomenon and are not produced by natural mecha­nisms. (shrink)

The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically (...) been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given, since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses –both turn out to be mistaken. (shrink)

_The purpose_ of the article is to clarify the philosophical principle of the local in the context of modern political governance. _The theoretical basis_ of the research embraces scenario analysis, dialectical and existential approaches, as well as philosophical anthropology and philosophy of communication. Local communities are a specific reflection of the connection between a person and a place. The specifics of the formation of a special mode of being, which forms and reproduces relations of loyalty, mutual understanding, and a common (...) feeling in the locus, are established. _Originality._ The article for the first time focuses on the anthropological content of local existence, which is the matrix of civil culture and the prospects of its integration into the global cultural space. _Conclusions._ Local identity as an object of purposeful formation in the conditions of nation-building requires considering the philosophical provisions that were introduced in the anthropological discourse. At the current stage, Ukrainian civil culture strives to invent specific local meanings of political identity in the conditions of external aggression. Its main components will be consensus, mutual respect, integrity, and the will to unite in order to protect statehood. Interdisciplinary meanings of locality form subject-object relations within which modern political management should be carried out. Taking into account the ethnic, cultural, and socio-functional, and role aspects of locality promises to ensure effective decision-making and increase the well-being of modern local communities. The political context of locality is formed based on the interaction of local political actors and institutions. Their examination within the framework of the case studies approach allows for empirically substantiating the local priorities of political actions. It also indicates the specific functionality of local political and administrative structures. at the local level, the discussed source of locality is the question of the origin or authenticity of the local population. For political governance, this is one of the meaningful contexts for justifying local autonomy or even sovereignty. (shrink)

The general content of the book is dedicated to the dialectical practices and their logical tools and techniques developed after Plato and Aristotle within the philosophical schools of the Hellenis...

If I lose my key in Canada, for instance, and I search for it in the United Kingdom, how long will I take to find it? This paper argues that problems in education are caused by non‐professional teachers who are employed when trained teachers move in search of promotion friendly activities or financially rewarding duties. This shift of focus means that policy makers in education act without adequate professional guidance. The problems in education, therefore, result from demands made on mainstream (...) education based on misconceptions about what education can offer. It is argued that the implementation of e‐learning in education faces the risk of developing on the basis of unproven theories. This scenario increasingly sees the replacement of formal education activities in institutions of learning with non‐formal and informal education practices. Given that the contents and influences of non‐formal and informal education are not under the control of the teacher, the experiences that learners bring to education settings are increasingly difficult to manage. The paper proposes that by integrating e‐learning in teacher education and rewarding ‘good teaching’, there is a potential for a successful e‐learning revolution in education. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une critique sévère de la philosophie politique d'Aristote. Sans entrer dans les détails (il faut le lire pour se faire sa propre idée), ce qui est très significatif, c'est précisément qu'on a choisi de l'ignorer du côté des études aristotéliciennes: tel est le sort réservé aux critiques qui ne se contentent pas de soulever des problèmes d'interprétation en circuit fermé, et qui osent soulever des problèmes fondamentaux remettant en cause la pensée d'Aristote.

Truth exists in the form of true propositions. Therefore identification of the nature of truth means identification of the conditions in which a proposition is true. A proposition is true if its content is not dependent upon the knower, and it constitutes a reflection of objective reality. Such a proposition yields knowledge. We shall call it a cognitive proposition.

There is a huge number of publications devoted to civil society. Nevertheless this theme is inexhaustible, because the very subject of it is multidimensional and changing along with the evolution of society. Alongside this, one of the key problems of the civil society theory is a problem of its perception in our mind. Answering these questions, the author, at first, stresses the necessity to differ three historical types of civil society: ancient classical polis, civil communities of the Modern History and (...) contemporary civil society. They all are substantially different inter se from the axiological point of view. That is a reason not to use the ideological and methodological curves developed for historically previous types of civil society for the analysis of contemporary one. Secondly, the author focuses attention upon epistemological aspect of the civil society theory, in particular he proposes to rethink the concept of “totality” not in a formal logic way but in the “logic” of living systems in order to be able by means of this concept to express the unity of the diversity of social system. Thirdly, the author treats the concept of “citizen” in informal sense, stresses its existential, personal content and contemplates it through the dialectical relation of “totality-peculiarity-individuality.” Fourthly, the author researches the phenomenon of contemporary civil society as a counterpart of a state in the complex society the main features of which are the diversity and individuality. He comes to the conclusion that the civil society is not a society in common sense, but rather is some kind of “soil structure,” so called “social mycelium” that fertilizes social system with new opportunities. In the final part of the article author gives the example of one of the approaches to estimate the degree of maturation of civil society, proposed by the world-wide international organization “Civicus.” He stresses that the logic of power distribution in contemporary society presupposes cooperation of different actors, and one of the most influential of them is the civil society. (shrink)

In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson (1996) argue that cognitive processes, pace classicism, are not governed by exceptionless, “representation-level” rules; they are instead the work of defeasible cognitive tendencies subserved by the non-linear dynamics of the brain’s neural networks. Many theorists are sympathetic with the dynamical characterisation of connectionism and the general (re)conception of cognition that it affords. But in all the excitement surrounding the connectionist revolution in cognitive science, it has largely gone unnoticed that connectionism (...) adds to the traditional focus on computational processes, a new focus – one on the vehicles of mental representation, on the entities that carry content through the mind. Indeed, if Horgan and Tienson’s dynamical characterisation of connectionism is on the right track, then so intimate is the relationship between computational processes and representational vehicles, that connectionist cognitive science is committed to a resemblance theory of mental content. (shrink)

The discovery of America was one of the major events that determined the establishment of the world-historical process. However, for a long time this large-scale and all-important phenomenon, as well as the concept itself, was interpreted strictly in accordance with the Eurocentric attitudes and assessments of history. The European outlook tended to review the ambiguous, heterogeneous in its content, and accompanied by contradictions phenomenon in narrow geographical, political, economic, and epistemological perspectives. The usual interpretation lacked the cultural-historical, philosophical, and cultural (...) meanings. The author of the article attempts to fill the lost meanings and to expand the very meaning of the concept of “the discovery of America” by changing perspectives - from the European to the American one, in which the concept reaches a new interpretative level by having defined the continent-wide culture-forming strategy, and is able to absorb many meanings of self-identification of the subject involved in the global historical process. (shrink)

The contents of the sixth book of Ennius' Annals have recently become a matter of dispute. Ever since Columna's edition it had been assumed that the book was entirely given over to the story of the war against king Pyrrhus . That view was based on the anecdote told by Quintilian 6.3.6, that Cicero, asked to say something de Sexto Annali, a witness in a law case, replied: ‘Quis potis ingentis oras euoluere belli’. It seems as good as certain that (...) this was the first line of Book VI, and belli was taken by all as referring to the Pyrrhus war. According to Dr T. Cornell, however, ‘unrolling the mighty scroll of war’ means that the poet is now going to describe warfare on the grand scale, thus setting the sequence of the third Samnite War, the Pyrrhus War, and the second Punic War against the minor wars described in the first five books. I doubt if Ennius would have felt that the early Latin war with the story of Lake Regillus, the capture of Veii, the Allia, the fall of Rome to the Gauls, and the second Samnite war were minor wars; but I am certain that bellum in the singular, except in contrast to the notion of pax, cannot refer to war in a general sense, covering a plurality of wars. (shrink)

Video streaming has become very popular among game enthusiasts. Live streams of computer games, where there is the possibility of communi­cation, are developing as community meeting places; a number of social scientists are calling this a trend towards new online “third places”. To­day’s debate draws attention to the reproduction of a participation culture trough streaming, in the space of which everyone can express themselves creatively, share their opinion, experiences, and information. At the same time, there is a tendency towards the (...) capitalist appropriation of streaming by media businesspersons who stimulate the monetization of participation. Investigating the “sociality of streaming”, the authors highlight the supplementation of the “Let’s Play” discourse with topics from the current agenda, understanding live streams as public media arenas. In the public arenas of computer game live streams, the dramatization and selection of global or local news information in a specific media format takes place. The article demonstrates this phenomenon using the example of the corona­virus, the most prominent topic of spring 2020. The pandemic vocabulary appears in different sections of Twitch game streams, such as titles, audio/ video content, and the chat. Banter and obscene vocabulary are charac­teristic of the game stream space, however, this is combined with charity fund-raising broadcasts in support of doctors. ­. (shrink)

In 2013-2022, the Ukrainian ethnic group faced numerous external and internal challenges, which were largely the result of its previous historical development and profound transformations in the public consciousness.These changes, in turn, have become a natural reaction to a number of historical processes and phenomena that have taken place in the territory of the people from ancient times to the present. In this article, the author aims to analyze some factors of stress genesis of the ethnic legal mentality of the (...) Ukrainian ethnic group and show their impact on the content of its behavioral stereotypes. The methodology of this study is comprehensive and is based on socio-philosophical and philosophical and legal analysis of behavioral attitudes of Ukrainians in the field of legal understanding.Results. In the course of analyzing the scientific works of a number of researchers, we found that during its historical existence, the Ukrainian ethnic group has experienced a number of events, phenomena and processes of objective reality, which led to the transformation of the content of its behavioral stereotypes. Factors of stress genesis can be divided into endogenous and exogenous. Exogenous sources of Ukrainian ethnopsychologists include, for example, continuous invasions of various aggressors (Tatar, Polish, Russian, German) and various attempts to acculturate Ukrainians.According to them, endogenous factors include various migration processes that have generated marginality and betrayal by Ukrainian leaders of their people. In the future, the established guidelines play or may play a destructive role in the process of nationbuilding.Conclusions. We found that the stress genesis of domestic political and legal can be defined as the process of creating political and legal mentality of the Ukrainian ethnos under the influence of events, phenomena, processes of its sociohistorical development, as well as factors of geographical location and environmental conditions. community and, as a consequence, cause transformations in the content of its guidelines. In addition, the border situation of Ukrainian lands, long statelessness of the ethnic group, serfdom in the homeland and other factors of socio-historical development of the national ethnic group have led to the emergence or deepening in the people’s consciousness such destructive stereotypes as anarchism, legal nihilism, freedom “, absenteeism and civic passivity, deep corruption traditions and nepotism, low status of state property, etc. (shrink)

In the last years of its history, the Ukrainian ethnic group faced numerous external and internal challenges, which, to a large extent, were the result of its previous genesis and profound transformations in public consciousness. At the same time, one of the central stereotypes of the domestic political and legal mentality is the idea of truth and justice as a basic social ideal and the basis of the legal order. Analysis of research and publications. The problem of mentality and the (...) formation of behavioral stereotypes has been of interest to domestic and foreign scientists for a long time. The concept of «mentality» is most widespread in the writings of the French historical school «Annals». The scientific work of M. Blok, F. Braudel, M. Vovel, J. Le Hoff, J. Lefebvre, L. Fevre, R. Mandr and other scientists reveals the content of mentality and its structures, as well as the peculiarities of their influence on everyday life and activities of individuals who lived in different historical eras. The purpose and objectives of the article. In this article, the authors aim to analyze the idea of truth-justice as a tool for transforming the legal mentality of the Ukrainian ethnic group and to show its influence on the content of its behavioral stereotypes. Research methodology. The methodology of this research has a complex nature and is based on a socio-philosophical and philosophical-legal analysis of the behavioral guidelines of Ukrainians in the field of legal understanding. The results. The social ideology, developed on the basis of ancient social ideas and stereotypes of the national legal mentality, should become a tool for correcting such destructive phenomena in the state-building discourse as legal nihilism, anarchism, civic passivity, corruption, nepotism, etc. At the same time, the concepts of truth-justice, will-freedom and fraternity-equality are key in Ukrainian legal culture. Discussion. The interpretation of this idea in scientific opinion is not unambiguous. This idea clearly manifests itself in the context of the opposition between Truth and Evil in the national culture. Truth is inseparable from human existence and daily activities. The idea of truth is closely related to the idea of justice, which, according to many researchers, is a later, more rational and clearly defined phenomenon derived from truth. Justice as a socio-philosophical phenomenon is intended to act as a kind of moral measure of relations between individuals in society. It is considered as an authoritative criterion for establishing the correspondence between the nature of human activity and its assessment by the social community. Conclusions. Destructive behavioral stereotypes of the Ukrainian ethnic group that were formed, among other things, under the influence of factors of stressogenesis can be corrected with the help of the legal ideology of state building, which should be based on the content of the idea of truth and justice. The developed ideology should be based on the most stable constructive guidelines of the national legal mentality, organically complementing and ideologically justifying them. (shrink)

In the national religious studies there was a tendency to know the origins of national spirituality. Such treatment is required by all those processes that take place in the cultural and religious plane of our country. Religious scholars are working to find their own original manifestations of Ukrainian spirituality, while at the same time seeking identification with a particular tradition. This is precisely the task of finding the national content of Ukrainian spiritual heritage. Let's try to do this on the (...) example of Ukrainian Orthodox preaching culture - a phenomenon that originated in the seventeenth century and had its continuation in several generations of Ukrainian preachers. (shrink)

In the past decades, reductionism has dominated both research directions and funding policies in clinical psychology and psychiatry. The intense search for the biological basis of mental disorders, however, has not resulted in conclusive reductionist explanations of psychopathology. Recently, network models have been proposed as an alternative framework for the analysis of mental disorders, in which mental disorders arise from the causal interplay between symptoms. In this target article, we show that this conceptualization can help explain why reductionist approaches in (...) psychiatry and clinical psychology are on the wrong track. First, symptom networks preclude the identification of a common cause of symptomatology with a neurobiological condition; in symptom networks, there is no such common cause. Second, symptom network relations depend on the content of mental states and, as such, feature intentionality. Third, the strength of network relations is highly likely to depend partially on cultural and historical contexts as well as external mechanisms in the environment. Taken together, these properties suggest that, if mental disorders are indeed networks of causally related symptoms, reductionist accounts cannot achieve the level of success associated with reductionist disease models in modern medicine. As an alternative strategy, we propose to interpret network structures in terms of D. C. Dennett's (1987) notion ofreal patterns, and suggest that, instead of being reducible to a biological basis, mental disorders feature biological and psychological factors that are deeply intertwined in feedback loops. This suggests that neither psychological nor biological levels can claim causal or explanatory priority, and that a holistic research strategy is necessary for progress in the study of mental disorders. (shrink)

In what follows, I will contend that the commonsense view of ourselves as fundamental causal agents - for which some have used the term “unmoved movers" but which I think might more accurately be expressed as “not wholly moved movers” - is theoretically understandable, internally consistent, and consistent with what we have thus far come to know about the nature and workings of the natural world. In the section that follows, I try to show how the concept of ‘agent’ causation (...) can be understood as a distinct species (from ‘event’ causation) of the primitive idea, which I’ll term “causal production”, underlying realist or non-Humean conceptions of event causation. In section III, I respond to a number of contemporary objections to the theory of agent causation. Sections IV-V are devoted to showing that the theory is compatible with ordinary reasons explanations of action, which then places me in a position to respond, in the final section, to the contention that we could never know, in principle, whether the agency theory actually describes a significant portion of human activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of French poetry at the turn (...) of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)