Ted Honderich's Determinism
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The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer, with Replies 55 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS FRONTISPIECE iv INTRODUCTION vii FOUNDER'S GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xii PREFACE XVll PART ONE: INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A.J. AYER 1 Facsimile of Ayer's Handwriting 2 A.J. Ayer: My Mental Development 3 Still More of My Life 41 PART TWO: DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF A.J. AYER, WITH REPLIES 55 1. Evandro Agazzi: Varieties of Meaning and Truth 57 2. James Campbell: Ayer and Pragmatism 83 REPLY TO JAMES CAMPBELL 105 3. David S. Clarke, Jr.: On Judging Sufficiency of Evidence 109 REPLY TO DAVID S. CLARKE, JR. 125 4. Michael Dummett: The Metaphysics of Verificationism 128 REPLY TO MICHAEL DUMMETT 149 5. Elizabeth R. Eames: A.J. Ayer's Philosophical Method 157 REPLY TO ELIZABETH R. EAMES 175 6. John Foster: The Construction of the Physical World 179 REPLY TO JOHN FOSTER 198 xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS 7. Paul Gochet: On Sir Alfred Ayer's Theory of Truth 201 REPLY TO PAUL GOCHET 220 8. Martin Hollis: Man as a Subject for Social Science 225 REPLY TO MARTIN HOLLIS 237 9. Ted Honderich: Causation: One Thing Just Happens After Another 243 REPLY TO TED HONDERICH 271 lO. Tscha Hung: Ayer and the Vienna Circle 279 REPLY TO TSCHA HUNG 301 1l. Peter Kivy: Oh Boy! You Too!: Aesthetic Emotivism Reexamined 309 REPLY TO PETER KIVY 326 12. Arne Naess: Ayer on Metaphysics, a Critical Commentary by a Kind of Metaphysician 329 REPLY TO ARNE NAESS 341 13. D.J. O'Connor: Ayer on Free Will and Determinism 347 REPLY TO D.J. -
Just Deserts: the Dark Side of Moral Responsibility
(Un)just Deserts: The Dark Side of Moral Responsibility Gregg D. Caruso Corning Community College, SUNY What would be the consequence of embracing skepticism about free will and/or desert-based moral responsibility? What if we came to disbelieve in moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal re- lationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some re- cent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masi- campo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of what Bruce Waller calls the “moral responsibility system” (2014, p. 4)? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public procla- mations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing free will and moral responsibility are illusions,1 we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what the responsibility is of professionals. In recent years a small industry has actually grown up around pre- cisely these questions. In the skeptical community, for example, a num- ber of different positions have been developed and advanced—including Saul Smilansky’s illusionism (2000), Thomas Nadelhoffer’s disillusionism (2011), Shaun Nichols’ anti-revolution (2007), and the optimistic skepti- cism of Derk Pereboom (2001, 2013a, 2013b), Bruce Waller (2011), Tam- ler Sommers (2005, 2007), and others. -
SAKAE KUBO Honderich, Ted. How Free Are You? the Determinism
BOOK REVIEWS 123 set forth his own view of the "center" without giving equal space to others. An article which sets forth differing views should not be written by a person who represents one of these views. Or if the author is a protagonist for one of the views under discussion, he or she should at least avoid setting forth hidher own view as unquestionably the best. In light of the editors' remarks in the preface, it is difficult to understand how P. W. Barnett could write his article on the "Opponents of Paul" without any reference to Sanders's view. Sanders is neither mentioned in the article nor listed in the bibliography. Whether Sanders is correct or not is not the issue. There is nothing wrong with Barnett's view that most of Paul's opponents were Judaizers, but at least he should state why he takes this position in light of Sanders's challenge to this view. The cross-referencing of all the articles is a welcome feature that considerably heightens the volume's usefulness. The work also includes a Pauline letter index, a subject index, and an article index. On format, it would have been much easier to locate the end of each article if the word BIBLIOGRAPHY had been laced in bold print with space between it and the cross references. A few typographical errors were noted. The word "human" is repeated (877, col. 2, para. I), and "Moreover" (673) and "condemns" (942) are misspelled. Especially because of the timeliness of the volume it will serve as a handy reference to check where evangelicals stand with regard to recent Pauline studies. -
Nkrumah and Hountondji on Ethno-Philosophy a Critical Appraisal
NKRUMAH AND HOUNTONDJI ON ETHNO-PHILOSOPHY A CRITICAL APPRAISAL Martin Odei Ajei (Ghana) 1. Introduction Today, ‘African philosophy’ is well understood as a culturally determined specifi cation of philosophy comprising both oral and written traditions of speculative and analytical thought1. Th is consensus on the nature and pos- sibility conditions of this type of philosophy was achieved by considerable debate in which the term ‘ethno-philosophy’ was a most contested notion. Th e term was introduced to philosophical vocabulary by Kwame Nkrumah in the title of an uncompleted2 thesis entitled Mind and Th ought in primi- tive Society: A Study in Ethno-philosophy, which was intended for partial fulfi llment of the award of a PhD degree3. Henceforth, this work will be rendered as ‘the thesis’. 1 Wiredu, K. 1995, “African Philosophy”, in Ted Honderich (ed.), Th e Oxford Companion to Philoso- phy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 17-18. 2 Professor Hountondji, in an email correspondence with me dated 22 August 2010, expressed the opinion that the thesis is perhaps not well described as “uncompleted” because “it seems to be quite complete as it is”. Although this is a fair judgment of the state of the work, I maintain the description as uncompleted for this reason: as mentioned in the footnote above, Nkrumah confi rms going to England with the aim of completing his thesis in ethno-philosophy. He does not indicate elsewhere that the work was actually completed. Th erefore I consider it is safer to describe it as “uncompleted”. 3 Th e most probable period for the composition of this work is between 1943 and 1945, at the earliest. -
Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) Ambition
A.J. Ayer (1910-1989) 83 ing, gave Richard Wollheim space on its front page to praise Ayer as a ehituarp philosopherand intellectual. After calling him "one ofthe foremost philos ophers ofhis day" he proceeded to describe the sort ofphilosopher he was: As significant as Ayer's philosophy was the kind of philosopher that he was. Fundamentally he believed that philosophy was a profound part of human culture. In this way he was an intellectual in the European sense. But he thought that the diffusion ofphilosophy did not require a diminution either in rigour or in Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) ambition. No philosophical view, he always thought, was worth more than the by John G. Slater arguments that could be brought fOlWard in its favour. And no philosophical view could beofinterest unless it could be generalized into a principle. In his obituary in the same newspaper John Foster led off by saying that A.I. Ayer was the most important British philosopher ofhis generation. Indeed, I HAPPENED TO bein London on 27 June 1989 when A.J. Ayerdied, and among twentieth-century British philosophers, he ranks second only to Russell. I made a point of collecting the obituaries that were published in the newspapers.· As I expected, there was quite a splash of publicity: BBC That remark would have pleased Ayer, since he ended the first volume of Radio assembled a panel of his friends to discuss his life and work, and his autobiography, Part ofMy Life, which took him up to his thirty-fifth most of the serious newspapers announced his death on their front pages. -
1 Realism V Equilibrism About Philosophy* Daniel Stoljar, ANU 1
Realism v Equilibrism about Philosophy* Daniel Stoljar, ANU Abstract: According to the realist about philosophy, the goal of philosophy is to come to know the truth about philosophical questions; according to what Helen Beebee calls equilibrism, by contrast, the goal is rather to place one’s commitments in a coherent system. In this paper, I present a critique of equilibrism in the form Beebee defends it, paying particular attention to her suggestion that various meta-philosophical remarks made by David Lewis may be recruited to defend equilibrism. At the end of the paper, I point out that a realist about philosophy may also be a pluralist about philosophical culture, thus undermining one main motivation for equilibrism. 1. Realism about Philosophy What is the goal of philosophy? According to the realist, the goal is to come to know the truth about philosophical questions. Do we have free will? Are morality and rationality objective? Is consciousness a fundamental feature of the world? From a realist point of view, there are truths that answer these questions, and what we are trying to do in philosophy is to come to know these truths. Of course, nobody thinks it’s easy, or at least nobody should. Looking over the history of philosophy, some people (I won’t mention any names) seem to succumb to a kind of triumphalism. Perhaps a bit of logic or physics or psychology, or perhaps just a bit of clear thinking, is all you need to solve once and for all the problems philosophers are interested in. Whether those who apparently hold such views really do is a difficult question. -
The Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy: Program History
The Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy: Program History 1960 FIRST COLLOQUIUM Wilfrid Sellars, "On Looking at Something and Seeing it" Ronald Hepburn, "God and Ambiguity" Comments: Dennis O'Brien Kurt Baier, "Itching and Scratching" Comments: David Falk/Bruce Aune Annette Baier, "Motives" Comments: Jerome Schneewind 1961 SECOND COLLOQUIUM W.D. Falk, "Hegel, Hare and the Existential Malady" Richard Cartwright, "Propositions" Comments: Ruth Barcan Marcus D.A.T. Casking, "Avowals" Comments: Martin Lean Zeno Vendler, "Consequences, Effects and Results" Comments: William Dray/Sylvan Bromberger PUBLISHED: Analytical Philosophy, First Series, R.J. Butler (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell's, 1962. 1962 THIRD COLLOQUIUM C.J. Warnock, "Truth" Arthur Prior, "Some Exercises in Epistemic Logic" Newton Garver, "Criteria" Comments: Carl Ginet/Paul Ziff Hector-Neri Castenada, "The Private Language Argument" Comments: Vere Chappell/James Thomson John Searle, "Meaning and Speech Acts" Comments: Paul Benacerraf/Zeno Vendler PUBLISHED: Knowledge and Experience, C.D. Rollins (ed.), University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964. 1963 FOURTH COLLOQUIUM Michael Scriven, "Insanity" Frederick Will, "The Preferability of Probable Beliefs" Norman Malcolm, "Criteria" Comments: Peter Geach/George Pitcher Terrence Penelhum, "Pleasure and Falsity" Comments: William Kennick/Arnold Isenberg 1964 FIFTH COLLOQUIUM Stephen Korner, "Some Remarks on Deductivism" J.J.C. Smart, "Nonsense" Joel Feinberg, "Causing Voluntary Actions" Comments: Keith Donnellan/Keith Lehrer Nicholas Rescher, "Evaluative Metaphysics" Comments: Lewis W. Beck/Thomas E. Patton Herbert Hochberg, "Qualities" Comments: Richard Severens/J.M. Shorter PUBLISHED: Metaphysics and Explanation, W.H. Capitan and D.D. Merrill (eds.), University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966. 1965 SIXTH COLLOQUIUM Patrick Nowell-Smith, "Acts and Locutions" George Nakhnikian, "St. Anselm's Four Ontological Arguments" Hilary Putnam, "Psychological Predicates" Comments: Bruce Aune/U.T. -
How False Assumptions Still Haunt Theories of Consciousness
The Myth of When and Where: How False Assumptions Still Haunt Theories of Consciousness Sepehrdad Rahimian1 1 Department of Psychology, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia * Correspondence: Sepehrdad Rahimian [email protected] Abstract Recent advances in Neural sciences have uncovered countless new facts about the brain. Although there is a plethora of theories of consciousness, it seems to some philosophers that there is still an explanatory gap when it comes to a scientific account of subjective experience. In what follows, I will argue why some of our more commonly acknowledged theories do not at all provide us with an account of subjective experience as they are built on false assumptions. These assumptions have led us into a state of cognitive dissonance between maintaining our standard scientific practices on one hand, and maintaining our folk notions on the other. I will then end by proposing Illusionism as the only option for a scientific investigation of consciousness and that even if ideas like panpsychism turn out to be holding the seemingly missing piece of the puzzle, the path to them must go through Illusionism. Keywords: Illusionism, Phenomenal consciousness, Predictive Processing, Consciousness, Cartesian Materialism, Unfolding argument 1. Introduction He once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” -Anscombe, G.E.M (1963), An introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus In a 2011 paper, Anderson (2011) argued that different theories of attention suffer from somewhat arbitrary and often contradictory criteria for defining the term, rendering it more likely that we should be excluding the term “attention” from our scientific theories of the brain (Anderson, 2011). -
Illusionism As the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness
Daniel C. Dennett Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness Abstract: Using a parallel with stage magic, it is argued that far from being seen as an extreme alternative, illusionism as articulated by Frankish should be considered the front runner, a conservative theory to be developed in detail, and abandoned only if it demonstrably fails to account for phenomena, not prematurely dismissed as ‘counter- intuitive’. We should explore the mundane possibilities thoroughly before investing in any magical hypotheses. Keith Frankish’s superb survey of the varieties of illusionism pro- vokes in me some reflections on what philosophy can offer to (cog- nitive) science, and why it so often manages instead to ensnarl itself in an internecine battle over details in ill-motivated ‘theories’ that, even Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2016 if true, would be trivial and provide no substantial enlightenment on any topic, and no help at all to the baffled scientist. No wonder so For personal use only -- not for reproduction many scientists blithely ignore the philosophers’ tussles — while marching overconfidently into one abyss or another. The key for me lies in the everyday, non-philosophical meaning of the word illusionist. An illusionist is an expert in sleight-of-hand and the other devious methods of stage magic. We philosophical illusion- ists are also illusionists in the everyday sense — or should be. That is, our burden is to figure out and explain how the ‘magic’ is done. As Frankish says: Illusionism replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem — the problem of explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and Correspondence: Daniel C. -
Smilansky-Free-Will-Illusion.Pdf
IV*—FREE WILL: FROM NATURE TO ILLUSION by Saul Smilansky ABSTRACT Sir Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called ‘Illusionism’, is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson’s position. We have to believe in free will to get along. C.P. Snow ir Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (1982, first Spublished in 1962) was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. It has been widely influ- ential and subjected to penetrating criticism (e.g. Galen Strawson 1986 Ch.5, Watson 1987, Klein 1990 Ch.6, Russell 1995 Ch.5). Most commentators have seen it as a large step forward over previous positions, but as ultimately unsuccessful. This is where the discussion within this philosophical direction has apparently stopped, which is obviously unsatisfactory. I shall attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. -
Ted Honderich
2 also published by OXFORD UNIVerSITY PreSS The Opacity of Mind An Integrative Theory of Self-Knowledge Peter Carruthers Explaining the Brain Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience What is it for you to be conscious? There is no agreement whatever in philosophy or science: Carl F. Craver it has remained a hard problem, a mystery. Is this partly or mainly owed to the existing honderich theories not even having the same subject, not answering the same question? In Actual TED HONDERICH, Grote Professor The Character of Consciousness Consciousness, Ted Honderich sets out to supersede dualisms, objective physicalisms, abstract Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic David J. Chalmers functionalism, externalisms, and all other theories. He argues that the theory of Actualism, at University College London, past chairman of right or wrong, is unprecedented, in nine ways. (1) It begins from a gathered database and the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and visiting Subjective Consciousness proceeds to an adequate initial clarification of consciousness in the primary ordinary sense. professor at Yale and the CUNY Graduate A Self-Representational Theory This consciousness is summed up as something’s being actual. (2) Like basic science, Actualism Centre, came to England from Canada as a Uriah Kriegel proceeds from this metaphorical or figurative beginning to what is wholly literal and explicit— graduate student. He has lived in London for Actual Actual constructed answers to the questions of what is actual and what it is for it to be actual. (3) In most of his life, and lectured in much of Europe so doing, the theory respects the differences of consciousness within perception, consciousness and the East. -
The Illusion of Realism in Film
Trinity University Digital Commons @ Trinity Philosophy Faculty Research Philosophy Department 7-2002 The Illusion of Realism in Film Andrew Kania Trinity University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/phil_faculty Part of the Philosophy Commons Repository Citation Kania, A. (2002). The illusion of realism in film. British Journal of Aesthetics, 42(3), 243-258. doi:10.1093/ bjaesthetics/42.3.243 This Post-Print is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy Department at Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Illusion of Realism in Film Andrew Kania [This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in The British Journal of Aesthetics following peer review. The version of record (Andrew Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 243-58) is available online at: http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/42/3/243.abstract?sid=31bb4bc4-514f- 46ef-9efc-c7b4544506d4. Please cite only the published version.] The moviegoer’s brain, hoodwinked by this succession of still lives, obligingly infers motion. − Nicholson Baker, “The Projector”1 In “Film, Reality, and Illusion,”2 one of his many concentrated yet lucid writings on film, Gregory Currie argues, among other things, that when we watch a film we have the impression that we are seeing a ‘moving picture’ not because of an illusion perpetrated against our visual faculty, but because the images that we see up on the screen really are moving.