The Cosmology of Cognitive Science from Hesiod, Socrates, and Plato to Wittgenstein
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Against Organicism: a Defence of an Ontology of Everyday Objects
Against Organicism: a defence of an ontology of everyday objects Sean Lastone Michael Jennings University College London PhD 2009 1 Declaration I, Sean Lastone Michael Jennings, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This thesis claims that attempts to eliminate everyday objects from ontology on the basis of a priori reasoning about the composition relation fail. The thesis focuses on the positions of ‗Organicist‘ philosophers; philosophers who argue that all that exists are organisms and microscopic (or smaller) mereological simples. Organicist positions have two key foundations: 1) arguments from compositional failure, which conclude that there are no everyday objects because (it is argued) there are no non-living composite entities. 2) A rhetorical move, the ‗O-arranging manoeuvre‘, whereby it is claimed that the elimination of everyday objects from our ontology would make ‗no-difference‘ because object-wise arrangements of mereological simples take their place. The thesis maintains that arguments from compositional failure should be reinterpreted as arguments to the conclusion that the notion of ‗composition‘ being employed by Organicists is inadequate for the purposes of metaphysics. A minimal alternative account of everyday objects is posited. It is shown that by deploying the O-arranging manoeuvre Organicists (and other Eliminativists) commit themselves to all that is required on the presented account to entail the conclusion that everyday objects exist. The thesis concludes that there are everyday objects. It suggests that we should reject the idea that composition is what matters in ontology, but if one does not then the thesis gives reasons for rejecting compositional ontologies that entail the non-existence of everyday objects. -
Approaches to Organic Form Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editor ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University Editorial Advisory Board ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of the City University of New York VOLUME 105 APPROACHES TO ORGANIC FORM Permutations in Science and Culture Edited by FREDERICK BURWICK University of California, Los Angeles D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Poblication Data Approaches to organic form. Boston studies in the philosophy of science v. 105) Includes index. 1. Organism (Philosophy) 2. Aesthetics. I. Burwick, Frederick. II. Series. 0174.B67 vol. 105 001'.01 s (146) 87-23482 [B105.074) ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8237-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3917-2 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-3917-2 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. All Rights Reserved © 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1987 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner TABLE OF CONTENTS Editorial Preface VB FREDERICK BURWICK / Introduction ix Acknowledgments xix RICHARD OLSON / On the Nature of God's Existence, Wisdom and Power: The Interplay between Organic and Mechanistic Imagery in Anglican Natural Theology- 1640-1740 1 NINA GELBART / Organicism and the Future of Scientific Utopia 49 WALTER D. -
New Yorkers Had Been Anticipating His Visit for Months. at Columbia
INTRODUCTION ew Yorkers had been anticipating his visit for months. At Columbia University, where French intellectual Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Nwas to give twelve lectures in February 1913, expectations were es- pecially high. When first approached by officials at Columbia, he had asked for a small seminar room where he could directly interact with students and faculty—something that fit both his personality and his speaking style. But Columbia sensed a potential spectacle. They instead put him in the three- hundred-plus-seat lecture theater in Havemeyer Hall. That much attention, Bergson insisted, would make him too nervous to speak in English without notes. Columbia persisted. So, because rhetorical presentation was as impor- tant to him as the words themselves, Bergson delivered his first American lec- ture entirely in French.1 Among the standing-room-only throng of professors and editors were New York journalists and “well-dressed” and “overdressed” women, all fumbling to make sense of Bergson’s “Spiritualité et Liberté” that slushy evening. Between their otherwise dry lines of copy, the reporters’ in- credulity was nearly audible as they recorded how hundreds of New Yorkers strained to hear this “frail, thin, small sized man with sunken cheeks” practi- cally whisper an entire lecture on metaphysics in French.2 That was only a prelude. Bergson’s “Free Will versus Determinism” lec- ture on Tuesday, February 4th—once again delivered in his barely audible French—caused the academic equivalent of a riot. Two thousand people attempted to cram themselves into Havemeyer. Hundreds of hopeful New Yorkers were denied access; long queues of the disappointed snaked around the building and lingered in the slush. -
Sydney Shoemaker A
Eric T. Olson Churchill College Cambridge What does Functionalism Tell Us about Personal Identity? abstract: Sydney Shoemaker argues that the functionalist theory of mind entails a psychological-continuity view of personal identity, as well as providing a defense of that view against a crucial objection. I show that his view has surprising consequences, e.g. that no organism could have mental properties and that a thing's mental properties fail to supervene even weakly on its microstructure and surroundings. I then argue that the view founders on "fission" cases and rules out our being material things. Functionalism tells us little if anything about personal identity. 1. Most philosophers believe that our identity through time consists in some sort of psychological continuity. You are, necessarily, that future being who in some sense inherits his mental features from you: the one who has the mental features he has then in large part because you have the mental features you have now. And you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited. Though there is dispute about what sort of "inheritance" counts--about whether those features must be continuously physically realized, for instance--most agree that some sort of mental continuity is necessary or sufficient (or both) for us to persist. So magnetic is this view that many feel entitled to assert it without argument. Such arguments as we find typically amount to little more than telling science-fiction stories and remarking that most of us (Western philosophy teachers and their students) are inclined to think that the character at the end of the story is identical with the character at the beginning of the story with whom he is psychologically continuous. -
Chapter 4 Multifaceted Ecology Between Organicism, Emergentism and Reductionism Donato Bergandi1 the Classical Holism-Reductioni
Chapter 4 Multifaceted Ecology Between Organicism, Emergentism and Reductionism Donato Bergandi1 The classical holism-reductionism debate, which has been of major importance to the development of ecological theory and methodology, is an epistemological patchwork. At any moment, there is a risk of it slipping into an incoherent, chaotic Tower of Babel. Yet philosophy, like the sciences, requires that words and their correlative concepts be used rigorously and univocally. The prevalent use of everyday language in the holism-reductionism issue may give a false impression regarding its underlying clarity and coherence. In reality, the conceptual categories underlying the debate have yet to be accurately defined and consistently used. There is a need to map out a clear conceptual, logical and epistemological framework. To this end, we propose a minimalist epistemological foundation. The issue is easier to grasp if we keep in mind that holism generally represents the ontological background of emergentism, but does not necessarily coincide with it. We therefore speak in very loose terms of the “holism-reductionism” debate, although it would really be better characterised by the terms emergentism and reductionism. The confrontation between these antagonistic paradigms unfolds at various semantic and operational levels. In definitional terms, there is not just emergentism and reductionism, but various kinds of emergentisms and reductionisms. In fact, Ayala (1974; see also Ruse 1988; Mayr 1988; Beckermann et al. 1992; Jones 2000) have proposed a now classic trilogy among various semantic domains – ontology, methodology and epistemology. This trilogy has been used as a kind of epistemological screen to interpret the reductionist field. It is just as meaningful and useful, however, to apply the same trilogy to the emergentist field. -
The Concept of Organism, a Historical and Conceptual Critique
Do organisms have an ontological status? Charles T. Wolfe Unit for History and Philosophy of Science University of Sydney [email protected] forthcoming in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32:2-3 (2010) Abstract The category of „organism‟ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the “phenomenology of organic life” in the 20th century, with authors such as Kurt Goldstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem. In this paper I try to reconstruct some of the main interpretive „stages‟ or „layers‟ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might „organism‟ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of „organismic‟ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the „projective‟ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying. 1. What is an organism? There have been a variety of answers to this question, not just in the sense of different definitions (an organism is a biological individual; it is a living being, or at least the difference between a living organism and a dead organism is somehow significant in a way that does not seem to make sense for other sorts of entities, like lamps and chairs; it is a self-organizing, metabolic system; etc.) but more tendentiously, in the 1 sense that philosophers, scientists, „natural philosophers‟ and others have both asserted and denied the existence of organisms. -
Putnam's Argument That the Claim That We Are Brains-In-A-Vat Is Self
Richard McDonough / Putnam’s Argument… META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. X, NO. 1 / JUNE 2018: 149-159, ISSN 2067-3655, www.metajournal.org Putnam’s Argument that the Claim that We are Brains-in-a-vat is Self-Refuting Richard McDonough Arium Academy of Arts and Sciences, Singapore Abstract In Reason, Truth and History, Putnam provides an influential argument for the materialist view that the supposition that we are all “actually” brains in a vat [BIV’s] is “necessarily false”. Putnam admits that his argument, inspired by insights in Wittgenstein’s later views, is “unusual”, but he is certain that it is a correct. He argues that the claim that we are BIV’s is self-refuting because, if we actually are BIV’s, then we cannot refer to real physical things like vats. Although the present author agrees, fundamentally, with Heidegger’s view that we are essentially “in a world” (a real world, not a private “vat-world”), and, therefore, with Putnam’s conclusion that we cannot possibly be BIV’s, the paper argues that Putnam’s argument is fallacious. The proper conclusion to draw from Putnam’s argument is that asserting that one is a BIV is beyond the limits of a BIV’s (private) language. That is, Putnam only shows that if we actually are BIV’s, then we cannot think or assert either that we are or that we are not BIV’s. It does not show that we are not “actually” BIV’s. The cogency of this criticism is illustrated with a concrete “science-fiction” example. -
Front Matter
Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-41471-6 - Consciousness and the Self: New Essays Jeeloo Liu and John Perry Frontmatter More information CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SELF “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry’s collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke, and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood, and the epistemic access to one’s own thoughts, desires, or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive sci- entists, and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self. jeeloo liu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (2006). john perry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (2001), Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (2002), and a number of other books. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org -
The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), Pp. 357-381
The Inverted Spectrum Sydney Shoemaker The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 79, No. 7. (Jul., 1982), pp. 357-381. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198207%2979%3A7%3C357%3ATIS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jphil.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 4 09:58:34 2007 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXIX, NO. 7, JULY 1982 THE INVERTED SPECTRUM* s best I can determine, the idea of spectrum inversion made its first appearance in the philosophical literature when A John Locke, in the Essay, entertained the possibility that "the same Object should flroduce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. -
The Transitivity of Material Constitution*
NOUSˆ 43:2 (2009) 363–377 The Transitivity of Material Constitution∗ ROBERT A. WILSON University of Alberta I. Introduction Material constitution and physical realization are both relations that have been used in articulating views in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For example, Lynne Baker1 has recently defended the idea that material con- stitution is a general relation that holds between statues and what they are made of, dollar bills and pieces of paper, and persons and bodies, contin- uing a longer tradition within metaphysics that takes constitution to be an important relation holding between pairs of things in the world.2 Appeal to physical realization, especially to multiple realization, has been central to the discussion of mental causation and non-reductive forms of materialism about the mind.3 Both constitution and realization are often contrasted with the relation of identity. Formally, identity is reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive. Con- stitution and realization, by contrast, are irreflexive and asymmetrical. But are constitution and realization transitive relations? In metaphysics, the view that material constitution is transitive is ubiq- uitous, an assumption expressed by both proponents and critics of con- stitution views.4 Likewise, it is typically assumed within the philosophy of mind that physical realization is a transitive relation. In both cases, this assumption of transitivity plays a role in discussion of the broader implica- tions of a metaphysics that invokes either relation. Here I provide reasons for questioning this assumption and the uses to which this appeal to tran- sitivity is put. As my title suggests, I shall focus on the case of material constitution, using a brief discussion of realization at the outset to motivate the discussion of the transitivity of material constitution at the core of the paper. -
Holism Organicism Verific
HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM Charles Wolfe To cite this version: Charles Wolfe. HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM. Verifiche. Rivista di scienze umana, 2014. hal-02070000 HAL Id: hal-02070000 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02070000 Submitted on 26 Mar 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM by Charles T. Wolfe Abstract. In this essay I seek to critically evaluate some forms of holism and organicism in biological thought, as a more deflationary echo to Gilbert and Sarkar’s reflection on the need for an ‘umbrella’ concept to convey the new vitality of holistic concepts in biology (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000). Given that some recent discussions in theoretical biology call for an organism concept (from Moreno and Mossio’s work on organization to Kirschner et al.’s research paper in Cell, 2000, building on chemistry to articulate what they called “molecular vitalism,” studying the “vitalistic” properties of molecular, cellular, and organismal function, -
Whitehead's Philosophy
Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought1 The rapid spread of the term postmodern in recent years witnesses to a grow- ing dissatisfaction with modernity and to an increasing sense that the modern age not only had a beginning but can have an end as well. Whereas the word modern was almost always used until quite recently as a word of praise and as a synonym for contemporary, a growing sense is now evidenced that we can and should leave modernity behind—in fact, that we must if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and most of the life on our planet. Modernity, rather than being regarded as the norm for human society toward which all history has been aiming and into which all societies should be ushered—forcibly if necessary—is instead increasingly seen as an aberration. A new respect for the wisdom of traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured for thousands of years and that, by contrast, the existence of modern civilization for even another century seems doubtful. Likewise, modernism as a worldview is less and less seen as The Final Truth, in comparison with which all divergent world- views are automatically regarded as “superstitious.” The modern worldview is increasingly relativized to the status of one among many, use- ful for some purposes, inadequate for others. Although there have been antimodern movements before, begin- ning perhaps near the outset of the nineteenth century with the Romanticists and the Luddites, the rapidity with which the term post- modern has become widespread in our time suggests that the antimodern sentiment is more extensive and intense than before, and also that it in- cludes the sense that modernity can be successfully overcome only by going beyond it, not by attempting to return to a premodern form of ex- istence.