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Perception, Realism and Materialism
Perception, Realism and Materialism By Rob Hoveman Submitted to the Central European University Department of Philosophy in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts CEU eTD Collection Supervisor: Professor Howard Robinson Contents Contents ...................................................................................................................................... i Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter one: The Sense Datum Theory ..................................................................................... 4 Phenomenological direct realism (PDR) ............................................................................... 4 Five arguments against PDR .................................................................................................. 5 The causal argument .............................................................................................................. 9 The phenomenal principle and the spreading argument ...................................................... 10 The privacy of sense data ..................................................................................................... 12 Sense data and the problems of indeterminacy .................................................................... 16 Reality lost and restored? ..................................................................................................... 18 The very concept -
Reverse Engineering Epistemic Evaluations
Reverse Engineering Epistemic Evaluations Sinan Dogramaci∗ 1 A Puzzle: What Is the Function of Epistemically Evaluative Language? What is the function of words like `irrational' as used in ordinary epistemic evaluations? I'm thinking of simple evaluations: criticism like `Smith's belief that Obama's a Muslim is irrational' or praise like `Green's belief that all humans are mortal is rational'. We don't make such claims just for the sake of it, just for fun, or for no reason at all. So what is the real point or purpose of this epistemically evaluative aspect of our linguistic practice? It must have some utility, but what? What would we lose if epistemically evaluative words suddenly disappeared from our vocabulary?1 The question requires some motivation, since discovering a word's func- tion doesn't necessarily call for armchair philosophy. Some words might serve a hidden psycho-sociological function that only empirical science can uncover. This might be true of words like `hello' and `thanks'. And for many words, their basic function isn't particularly mysterious. For example, we ∗I pronounce it, when speaking English, like this: sin·on dor·uh·mudge·uh. 1The question of this paper thus contrasts with the timeworn questions of how to give necessary and sufficient conditions for this or that philosophically interesting property. There are, however, a few excellent philosophical explorations of the function of this or that philosophically interesting word or concept. In philosophy of logic and language, Quine offered an elegantly simple insight about the utility of the truth predicate which precipitated the contemporary development of deflationism about truth; see Quine (1970), Leeds (1978), Horwich (1990/98), and Field (1994). -
Internalism Explained* Ralph Wedgwood
Internalism Explained* Ralph Wedgwood 1. The word ‘rational’ is used in many ways. But when the word is used in the way that is most common among philosophers, the following intuition seems compelling. Consider two possible worlds, w1 and w2. In both worlds, you have exactly the same experiences, apparent memories, and intuitions, and in both worlds you go through exactly the same processes of reasoning, and form exactly the same beliefs. In this case, it seems, exactly the same beliefs are rational in both worlds, and exactly the same beliefs are irrational in both worlds. Now suppose that in w1 you are bedevilled by an evil demon who ensures that many of your experiences are misleading, with the result that many of the beliefs that you hold in w1 are false. In w2, on the other hand, almost all your experiences are veridical, with the result that almost all the beliefs that you hold in w2 are true. Intuitively, this makes no difference at all. Exactly the same beliefs are rational and irrational in both worlds.1 This intuition seems to support an “internalist” conception of rational belief. According to this conception, the rationality of a belief supervenes purely on “internal facts” about the thinker’s mental states — in this example, on facts that hold in both these two possible worlds w1 and w2, not on facts about the external world that vary between w1 and w2. Moreover, this seems to be a completely general feature of rationality, since a parallel claim seems plausible with respect to rational decisions or choices as well. -
Durham E-Theses
Durham E-Theses Theodicy and evolution: aspects of theology from Pierre Bayle to J.S. Mill Loades, Ann Lomas How to cite: Loades, Ann Lomas (1975) Theodicy and evolution: aspects of theology from Pierre Bayle to J.S. Mill, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/8091/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. THEODICY AND EVOUJriON: ASPECTS OF THEOJXXSy FROM PIERRE BAYIE TO J .S . MILL By Atiu Ixsmas Loades, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted in Fullilaient of the Reqtiiremeats for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Durhara University, 1975 Table of Contenta Page Summaxy ii Preface iii Introduotion 1 Section I % Bayle to Kant A Bayle 6 B Leibniz . -
INTENTIONALITY Past and Future VIBS
INTENTIONALITY Past and Future VIBS Volume 173 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno Matti Häyry Mary-Rose Barral Steven V. Hicks Gerhold K. Becker Richard T. Hull Raymond Angelo Belliotti Mark Letteri Kenneth A. Bryson Vincent L. Luizzi C. Stephen Byrum Alan Milchman H. G. Callaway George David Miller Robert A. Delfino Alan Rosenberg Rem B. Edwards Arleen L. F. Salles Andrew Fitz-Gibbon John R. Shook Francesc Forn i Argimon Eddy Souffrant William Gay Tuija Takala Dane R. Gordon Anne Waters J. Everet Green John R. Welch Heta Aleksandra Gylling Thomas F. Woods a volume in Cognitive Science CS Francesc Forn i Argimon, Editor INTENTIONALITY Past and Future Edited by Gábor Forrai and George Kampis Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1817-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in the Netherlands CONTENTS Preface vii List of Abbreviations ix ONE The Necessity and Nature of Mental Content 1 LAIRD ADDIS TWO Reading Brentano on the Intentionality of the Mental 15 PHILIP J. BARTOK THREE Emotions, Moods, and Intentionality 25 WILLIAM FISH FOUR Lockean Ideas as Intentional Contents 37 GÁBOR FORRAI FIVE Normativity and Mental Content 51 JUSSI HAUKIOJA SIX The Ontological and Intentional Status of Fregean Senses: An Early Account of External Content 63 GREG JESSON -
Against Emergent Dualism
Against Emergent Dualism Brandon Rickabaugh [email protected] www.brandonrickabaugh.com Forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism. Edited by Johnathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2018. Introduction Materialism permeates philosophy of mind. Yet, increasing difficulties are triggering dissent.1 William Hasker’s insightful yet underappreciated work in the philosophy of mind is representative. Hasker does not favor the recent turn toward non-reductive physicalism either. Rather, his argument from the unity of consciousness entails SUBSTANCE DUALISM. Additionally, Hasker maintains that the soul is an emergent substance, a view he calls EMERGENT DUALISM. 2 Hasker’s criticisms of materialism are formidable, and his unity of consciousness argument deserves considerable attention. Still, EMERGENT DUALISM faces difficulties. I argue that EMERGENT DUALISM is not more attractive than non-emergent versions of SUBSTANCE DUALISM as Hasker suggests. I raise several new problems for EMERGENT DUALISM that non-emergent versions of SUBSTANCE DUALISM evade. 1. What is Emergent Dualism? According to SUBSTANCE DUALISM the following is true, SUBSTANCE DUALISM: Human persons are not identical to any physical body, but consist of a physical body and a non-physical substantial soul. 1 See for example, The Waning of Materialism, edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); After Physicalism, edited by Benedikt Paul Göcke (Notre Dame, ID: University of Notre -
Robinson-BPG2012-Ch8
8 Qualia, Qualities, and Our Conception of the Physical World Howard Robinson 1. The Real Power of the Knowledge Argument The Initial Predicament The dialectical situation in which the knowledge argument (KA) for property dualism is usually taken to be located is the following.1 It is taken as agreed that physicalism gives an adequate account of non- conscious reality, and that this part of reality constitutes almost 100 percent of the universe. Despite this overwhelming success, however, the physicalist account struggles to accommodate certain features of mental life, namely the ‘what it is like’ or qualia of certain conscious states. These qualia constitute the qualitative nature of sensations and probably of secondary qualities, but have nothing to do with our robust conception of the physical as it applies to the vast mindless 231 232 Howard Robinson tracts of reality. These awkward entities constitute what Chalmers called “the hard problem” for physicalism (Chalmers 2003). But the fact that they also constitute such a tiny part of the world is im- plicitly understood as being a strong prima facie reason for thinking that there must be some way of reconciling their apparent existence with the otherwise triumphant and clearly adequate physicalist ac- count of the world: if it were not for the qualia that occur in a few corners of reality, the adequacy of physicalism would not in any way be in dispute. I think that this interpretation of the situation constitutes a radi- cal misunderstanding of and understatement of the problem that faces physicalism and the role that the knowledge argument plays in bringing out that problem: the dialectic is quite different from the way it is represented in the previous paragraph. -
Berkeley's Theory of Common Sense
Berkeley Studies 24 (2013) 3 Berkeley’s Theory of Common Sense Matthew Holtzman Abstract: This essay situates Berkeley’s views on common sense within the context of eighteenth- century debates about the nature of common sense. It argues that in his Notebooks, Berkeley develops a theory according to which to possess common sense is to use the faculties of the mind properly, and that Berkeley’s approach to common sense can be understood as a response to John Toland’s epistemology of religion. It concludes with a discussion of consequences of this analysis for our understanding of Berkeley’s later works, his methods, and his overarching philosophical aims. In The Principles of Human Knowledge (PHK) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (DHP), Berkeley argues that matter does not exist (PHK 9),1 that spirit is the only substance (PHK 6), and that physical objects are not causes but signs (PHK 66). If these claims initially shock readers’ philosophical sensibilities, the effort required to come to terms with them will seem familiar enough. One must take pains to work one’s way into a perspective from which they can be seen as not only consistent but mutually supporting or even inevitable. Yet Berkeley seems firmly to deny that effort is required, for he repeatedly insists that his philosophy agrees with common sense: immaterialism is difficult to accept not because it is abstruse, but because readers come to it corrupted by modern philosophy.2 Learning to accept immaterialism is not like an initiation into an esoteric system of thought, but, as Berkeley claims in the preface to the Three Dialogues, like a long journey home (DHP 2:168). -
1 This Is the Penultimate Version of the Essay. for the Final Version, Please See Brandon Look (Ed.), the Continuum Companion To
This is the penultimate version of the essay. For the final version, please see Brandon Look (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Leibniz, London/New York: Thoemmes Continuum Press (2011), 289–309. KANT, THE LEIBNIZIANS, AND LEIBNIZ Anja Jauernig, University of Pittsburgh 1. Introduction It is clear that Leibniz’s philosophy was very important for Kant. This importance is reflected, for example, in the number of Kant’s explicit references to Leibniz. He is the most mentioned philosopher in Kant’s corpus overall.1 What is much less clear is in what ways Leibniz was important for Kant, and how exactly the relation between Leibniz’s and Kant’s philosophy should be understood. The historian of philosophy who is trying to clarify this relation is faced with various kinds of difficulties. To begin with, it is not easy to determine which of Leibniz’s own writings Kant had access to, and even less easy to say which of them he actually read. More generally, in Kant’s treatment of broadly speaking Leibnizian themes his sources and targets are often unclear. Is his discussion aimed at Leibniz himself, or at later Leibnizians (broadly conceived)? If we hope to understand Kant’s relation to Leibniz, we have no choice but also to investigate Kant’s relation to these later Leibnizians, and their relations to Leibniz. This reveals yet another difficulty. Which later Leibnizians are we to examine in this context? Some obvious candidates directly come to mind: Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the most well-known philosopher in early eighteenth-century Germany; Conrad Gottlieb Marquardt (1694–1749) and Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), Kant’s teachers in Königsberg; and Friedrich Christian Baumeister (1709–1785), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777), and Johann 1 More precisely, a computer count returns 495 hits for Leibniz in all of Kant’s writings (excluding the lecture notes). -
Stanton Lecture 6
1 Stanton Lecture 7: The Objectivity of Feeling By Jon Milbank Simon Blackburn has suggested that philosophy today finds itself essentially back with the set of problematics enunciated by Berkeley and Hume. This is certainly the case, if we abandon the idea that these two non-English thinkers stand in a line of peculiarly English empiricism. To the contrary, they both rejected Locke’s representationalist account of how we verify our thoughts, together with his foundationalist account of how thinking is built-up, step by step, from initial ideas which are direct mental translations of sensory impressions. Nor did they accept the more rationalist side of Locke, deriving from Descartes, which saw the contribution of judgement as clearly deriving from within our own minds, without admixture of anything arriving from exteriority. And so it is clear that, already, both Berkeley and Hume rejected ‘the myth of the given’. But because they were in a wilder sense empiricists, distrustful of any dogmatic claims to given fixities, they also in consequence invoked the spectre of a holism about belief that is entirely fluid. In either case, therefore, it is possible to construe their thought as being as much idealist as it is empiricist. Yet in either case again, both thinkers stepped back from a sceptical mode of idealism through a mode of speculative spiritual realism (and not materialism) that involved some measure of faith and even of religious faith. Berkeley escapes from solipsistic phenomenalism, denial of the reality of matter and scepticism about personal identity through his revival of the Cappadocian view that exteriority consists of finitely imaged mixtures of the divine ideas, or of the divine language. -
The CEU Summer University Announces the Course MATTER, MIND and CONSCIOUSNESS JULY 18-29 2016, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
The CEU Summer University announces the course MATTER, MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS JULY 18-29 2016, BUDAPEST, HUNGARY COURSE DIRECTOR David Pitt, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Los Angeles, USA FACULTY Philip Goff, Philosophy Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Marta Jorba, Philosophy Department, University of Girona, Spain Angela Mendelovici, Philosophy Department, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Galen Strawson, Philosophy Department, University of Texas at Austin, USA Howard Robinson, Philosophy Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Michelle Montague, Philosophy Department, University of Texas at Austin, USA BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION This course will explore three topics of current interest in analytic philosophy of mind: (1) Phenomenal Intentionality – the thesis that the intentionality of mental states, both perceptual and cognitive, is essentially experientially constituted; (2) Panpsychism – the thesis that consciousness (or something like it) is a property of physical entities at all levels of nature, from elementary particles to organisms such as ourselves, to larger-scale structures such as galaxies, to the universe itself as a whole; and (3) Substance Dualism – the view that the mind and the body are metaphysically distinct entities. The course aims to introduce students to the latest research on these topics. It is appropriate for anyone with a serious interest in philosophy of mind. The course will feature three sessions each by the seven faculty members, including lecture and extensive discussion. Participants will invited to offer a 10-15 minute presentation. Application deadline: February 14, 2016 Central European University’s summer school (CEU SUN), established in 1996, is a program in English for graduate students, junior or post-doctoral researchers, teachers and professionals. -
Ideas and Explanation in Early Modern Philosophy∗
Ideas and Explanation in Early Modern Philosophy∗ Kenneth L. Pearce Trinity College Dublin March 9, 2019 Abstract Malebranche argues that ideas are representative beings existing in God. He defends this thesis by an inference to the best explanation of human perception. It is well known that Malebranche's theory of vision in God was forcefully rejected by philosophers such as Arnauld, Locke, and Berkeley. However, the notion that ideas exist in God was not the only controversial aspect of Malebranche's approach. Another controversy centered around Malebranche's view that ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory theory. Opponents of this approach, including Arnauld and Locke, held that our talk about ideas was not explanatory but instead merely descriptive: we use the word `idea' to describe phenomena that we observe by reflecting on our own minds. This controversy has not received much attention from scholars, but in the present paper I will show that it was an explicit and important subject of concern for Malebranche, Arnuald, Locke, and Berkeley and that attention to this controversy can illuminate several aspects of these philosophers' work. For the 17th and 18th century opponents of the `New Philosophy', one of its most visible identifying features was \the talking of ideas, and running endless divisions upon them" (Browne 1697, 3; compare Stillingfleet 1697, 273; Sergeant 1697, Epistle Dedicatory).1 Since their use of the word `idea' was new and controversial, it is surprising that most early modern philosophers say so little about what they take ideas to be and why we ought to believe in such things.