Rafts, Boats, and Cruise Ships Verhaegh, Sander
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
September 2007 Volume 81, Issue 1 Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association apa THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION Eastern Division Program University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 www.apaonline.org The American Philosophical Association Eastern Division One Hundred Fourth Annual Meeting Marriott Waterfront Hotel Baltimore, MD December 27 - 30, 2007 Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (ISSN 0065-972X) is published five times each year and is distributed to members of the APA as a benefit of membership and to libraries, departments, and institutions for $75 per year. It is published by The American Philosophical Association, 31 Amstel Ave., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. Second-Class Postage Paid at Newark, DE and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Proceedings and Addresses, The American Philosophical Association, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. Editor: David E. Schrader Phone: (302) 831-1112 Publications Coordinator: Erin Shepherd Fax: (302) 831-8690 Associate Editor: Richard Bett Web: www.apaonline.org Meeting Coordinator: Linda Smallbrook Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association, the major publication of The American Philosophical Association, is published five times each academic year in the months of September, November, January, February, and May. Each annual volume contains the programs for the meetings of the three Divisions; the membership list; Presidential Addresses; news of the Association, its Divisions and Committees, and announcements of interest to philosophers. Other items of interest to the community of philosophers may be included by decision of the Editor or the APA Board of Officers. -
Susan Haack SERIOUS PHILOSOPHY1
Susan Haack SERIOUS PHILOSOPHY1 Abstract What is serious philosophy? What does it demand of us? And is it true, as some suppose, that a philosopher can’t be serious about his work unless he is solemn and humorless? Calling on ideas from C.S. Peirce, Haack argues first that philosophy is a serious form of inquiry, requiring real commitment and real intellectual effort, and then that playfulness and humor may actually be of help in such inquiry, while solemnity and self-importance will, for sure, impede it .“The serious philosopher,” she concludes “must indeed work in earnest – but not in grim earnest.” “… the spirit … is the most essential thing – the motive…” (C.S. Peirce)2 At dinner the night before I was to give a talk in her department, a young professor solemnly told me that there’s no place for humor in serious philosophy. Since the paper on the relation of science and literature I was to present the next day was full of playful literary allusions and verbal jokes this was, to say the least, an awkward moment.3 Nonetheless, my paper was a serious piece of work – jokes and all. Now, thanks to Spazio filosofico’s imaginative choice of theme, at last I have my opportunity to explore what’s wrong with the idea that, to be serious, philosophical work must be humorless. It’s been a long time coming; but, as the saying goes, better late than never. “Serious,” of course, has a whole raft of uses, and many subtly-interrelated meanings. We laugh about the apocryphal billionaire who complains that household expenses are skyrocketing – “a million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking serious money”; meaning real money, a significant sum of money. -
9:30 - 11:00 SZB, Room 240
PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE Department of Philosophy, UT, Austin Phil 332, Spring 2013 Unique Number 42755 T/TH: 9:30 - 11:00 SZB, Room 240 INSTRUCTOR Lawrence Ray Buchanan E-mail: [email protected] Phone: (512) 471-7396 Office: Waggener Hall 4th Floor Room # 416B Office hours: Tuesdays 11:30 – 12:30 COURSE SUMMARY The course focuses on various philosophical issues concerning language. Topics to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the following: speaker-meaning, conversational implicature, sentence/expression-meaning, reference, modality, and propositional attitude ascriptions. COURSE REQUIREMENTS Assignments: • Two 6-7 page papers on topics selected from a list of prompts given by instructor. The first of these papers will be worth 20% of the student’s final grade for the course; the second will be worth 25% of the grade for the course. • One in-class midterm worth 25% of the student’s final grade. • A take-home final exam worth 25% of the grade. • Class participation and attendance (5%). Regarding the *participation* component of your grade: I expect regular attendance and participation in our course. Moreover, I expect you to have read the material for lecture carefully in advance. However, should my expectations on either front fail to be met, I reserve the right to assign (short) in-class written assignments regarding the required reading for the day that will then be counted towards the participation component of your grade. Late work: I do not accept work after the due date without a valid documented excuse. Please Note: One of the principal aims of this course is to give students experience with writing in an academic discipline. -
Scientism and Its Discontents Susan Haack
SCIENTISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS SUSAN HAACK University College, Dublin, September 2016 2 PART II: SCIENTISTIC PHILOSOPHY, NO; SCIENTFIC PHILOSOPHY, YES 3 “The kind of philosophy that interests me and must, I think, interest everybody, is that philosophy which uses the most rational methods it can devise, for finding out the little that can as yet be found out about the universe of mind and matter from those observations which every person can make in every hour of his waking life. It will not include matters which are more conveniently studied by students of special sciences such as psychology…” 4 “It is true that philosophy is in a lamentably crude condition at present; that very little is really established about it; while most philosophers set up a pretension of knowing all there is to know---a pretension calculated to disgust anybody who is at home in any real science. But all we have to do is turn our backs upon all such vicious conduct, and we shall find ourselves enjoying the advantages of having an almost virgin soil to till…”---C. S. Peirce, “Scientific Philosophy,” c.1905 5 Peirce urged that philosophy be undertaken in the same spirit as the best work of the sciences, and that it should rely on experience as well as reason---though not recondite experience 6 today’s cultural landscape is very different • & philosophy today very different than in Peirce’s day • it is no longer dominated by theologians (given to “sham reasoning” according to Peirce) • & by now the threat from “lawless rovers of the sea of literature” is receding -
Susan Haack: Putting Philosophy to Work. Inquiry and Its Place in Culture
Susan Haack: Putting Philosophy to Work. Inquiry and Its Place in Culture. Essays on Science, Religion, Law, Literature, and Life, Expanded Edition, New York, Prometheus Books, 2013 Reviewed by Teodor Dima In the preface to the expanded edition of the volume reviewed here, Susan Haack, Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami, explains its genesis as follows: “... after the publication of my Evidence and Inquiry (1993), Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1998), and Defending Science— Within Reason (2003), I received such a variety of intriguing invitations – from people in the natural, the medieval, and the social sciences, from scholars in literature and scholars in law, from humanists and theologians, even from professors of architecture and the editors of an avant-garde art magazine – asking me to write or speak about the bearing of my work on their concerns” (p. 12). At the same time, these invitations were challenges to new research topics and answers regarding the epistemological significance of several concepts always debated in specialized literature: “truth; evidence; fact; objectivity; bias; self- deception; reason and the emotions; the demands of rationality and the limits of formalism; the ways in which unbiased inquiry differs from advocacy research, and inquiry in the sciences from inquiry in other fields; the threats to the integrity of the scientific enterprise posed by pressures from political and commercial interests; the difficulties our legal system has had in handling the scientific (and quasi-scientific) testimony so often crucial to the reduction of key factual issues; the tensions between science and religion; the possibility of learning true things from works of fiction; and even what gives human lives meaning” (p. -
Representation and Deconstruction of Turkish German Stereotypes Through Gegen Die Wand and Kebab Connections
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work 5-2011 Representation and Deconstruction of Turkish German Stereotypes through Gegen die Wand and Kebab Connections Charli Celine Kerns [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Part of the Other German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kerns, Charli Celine, "Representation and Deconstruction of Turkish German Stereotypes through Gegen die Wand and Kebab Connections" (2011). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1428 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Representation and Deconstruction of Turkish German Stereotypes through Gegen die Wand and Kebab Connections Charli Kerns Honors Thesis submitted German Section of the Department Of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Art and Sciences Introduction: When we as the audience watch a film, we step into a world overtly comprised of plot, climax, and resolution. However, in every film, cultural nuances covertly exist that repossess -
Stephen Neale, Facing Facts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, Xv + 254 Pp
Stephen Neale, Facing Facts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, xv + 254 pp. Reviewed by Jaroslav Peregrin, Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic. E-mail: [email protected]. It is now often taken for granted that facts are entia non grata, for there exists a powerful argument (dubbed the slingshot), which is backed by such great names as Frege or Gödel or Davidson (and so could hardly be wrong), that discredits their existence. There indeed is such an argument, and it indeed is not wrong on the straightforward sense of wrong. However, in how far it knocks down any conception of facts is another story, a story which is anything but simple and perspicuous. In his book, Stephen Neale takes pains to excavate the origins of the argument and the presuppositions which it needs to be usable for the purpose of exorcising facts. In the introduction of the book, Neale expresses his conviction that his analysis of the slingshot will not only compromise its usability for the purpose of discrediting facts, but also save representationalist conceptions of language and mind from the attacks of the anti- representationalist philosophers like Davidson and Rorty. „Representational philosophy,“ he claims, „survives the Davidson-Rorty onslaught because non-truth-functional logics and ontologies of facts, states of affairs, situations and propositions survive not only the actual arguments deployed against them, but also the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments that can be constructed.“ However, what he does take his analyses to show is that „the most precise and powerful slingshot arguments demonstrate conclusively that the logical and ontological theories originally targeted must satisfy non-trivial conditions if they are to avoid logical or ontological collapse.“ (P. -
Review of "Bertrand Russell De La Logique À La Politique", Special Issue of Herm
Reviews 103 A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE ON RUSSELL ALASDAIR URQUHART Philosophy / University ofToronto Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S IAI Bertrand Russell de fa logique a fa politique. Hermes. NO.7 (1990). Paris: Edi tions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Pp. ii, 303. 8sE he new journal Hermes, which first appeared in 1988, bears the subtitle T "Cognition, Communication, Politique" and has set itself the admirable goal of introducing French readers to analytic philosophy, theories of ethics, and systems theory, in order to rescue internal French debate from the bog in which it is stuck. The publication of the present volume, containing a varied 104 Reviews Reviaus 105 collection of essays on both the technical and political writings of Russell, opens with an admirable essay by Alan Ryan; this is not a summary of his testifies to increasing French interest in Russell, an interest shown also in the recent book, but a clearly written critical discussion of the philosophical recent publication of a collection of Russell's writings on philosophical logic background of Russell's political writings, his ambivalence towards pacifism, (introduced and translated by J. M.. Roy), and of new translations (by Fran and his relationship with his public. Adam Stephenson expresses dissatisfac rrois Rivenc) of The Problems ofPhilosophy and Introduction to Mathematical tion that Russell never produced his grand work of Hegelian synthesis; this Philosophy. failure is blamed on Russell's atomism and individualism, which leave man a The first part of the collection is devoted to philosophy and logic. In the "metaphysical orphan". Dominique Colas provides a brief and sympathetic opening section of this part, on logic and ontology, Philippe de Rouilhan note on Russell's trip to the Soviet Union. -
Evidence Matters
Book Reviews EVIDENCE MATTERS: SCIENCE, we later seek to gather more facts and clarity I’ll mention just one of the many hotly PROOF, AND TRUTH on the subject, this 90 percent figure serves contested issues at the trial. Two police IN THE LAW as our “prior.” officers testified that they saw Sacco put BY SUSAN HAACK Now, in this population (P), bike owner- his hand under his coat when they arrived Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2014. ship is much less prevalent than automobile to arrest him. They interpreted this gesture 432 pages, $34.99. ownership. We will say that among those in as his effort to draw his revolver. The pros- P who own an automobile, 10 percent also ecution suggested to the jury that this was Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille own a bike. Among those in P who don’t own evidence of consciousness of guilt. an automobile, 20 percent own a bike. These Let’s fast forward to the 1990s. Joseph B. Susan Haack, an Englishwoman who figures, in decimal form, .10 or .20, are “con- Kadane and David A. Schum, two prominent studied philosophy at both Oxford and ditional” probabilities. We do some checking academic statisticians with Bayesian philo- Cambridge, and who now teaches it at the and learn something new about Jones. He sophical inclinations, wrote A Probabilistic University of Miami, has produced this book owns a bike. Analysis of the Sacco and Vanzetti on the philosophy of law or, more strictly, Can we say anything more about the Evidence. In the book, Kadane and Schum on the philosophy behind the tasks that law probability that Jones owns a car, using both don‘t seek to resolve the case, but they do assigns to its finders of fact. -
Putnam and Davidson on Coherence, Truth, and Justification
The Science of Mind (精神科学) 54 (2016), pp. 51-70. Putnam and Davidson on Coherence, Truth, and Justification Lajos L. Brons Nihon University In the early 1980s both Donald Davidson and Hilary Putnam defended theories that superficially appear to be coherence theories of truth, but that upon closer inspection turn out to be better understood as coherence theories of justification (or perhaps, not as coherence theories at all). In Reason, Truth and History (1981a), Putnam argued that “truth is an idealization of rational acceptability” (55), and that rational acceptability of statements is their “coherence and fit” (id.). And in the same year Davidson gave a talk that would be published two years later as “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (1983) in which he defended “what may as well be called a coherence theory of truth and knowledge” (137). There are more interesting similarities between Putnam’s and Davidson’s theories than their closeness in dates of birth, however, and in later work Putnam’s theory further converged with Davidson’s. Furthermore, the most conspicuous difference – the role and nature of “conceptual schemes” – turns out to be smaller and more subtle than it may seem at a first glance. This paper introduces Putnam’s and Davidson’s coherence theories, and discusses the most important differences and similarities. The following two sections summarize “middle” Putnam’s and Davidson’s coherence theories respectively. The two sections after that look into the apparent disagreement on the possibility of different conceptual schemes, and discuss further developments in Putnam’s view and the consequent convergence of Putnam’s and Davidson’s coherentisms. -
Science As Social? - Yes and No'
SUSAN HAACK SCIENCE AS SOCIAL? - YES AND NO' Ours is an age in which partial truths are tirelessly transformed into total falsehoods and then acclaimed as revolutionary revelations [Thomas Szasz j.2 INTRODUCTION Some feminist philosophers of science claim the insight that science is social. It is true that the co-operative and competitive engagement of many people, within and across generations, in the enterprise of scientific inquiry, contributes to its success. It is false that social values are inseparable from scientific inquiry; false that the purpose of science is the achievement of social goals; false that knowledge is nothing but the product of negotiation among members of the scientific com munity; false that knowledge, facts, reality are nothing more than social con structions; false that science should be more democratic; false that the physical sciences are subordinate to the social sciences. I shall first offer an account of what is epistemologically distinctive about scientific inquiry in which the proposition that science is social, in its true inter pretation, plays a significant part. Next, I shall argue that in its other interpretations - the inevitability or desirability of politicized inquiry, social constructivism, "de mocratic epistemology," and the rest - the proposition that science is social is false. And then, turning to the question, what, if anything, all this has to do with femi nism, I shall argue that "science as social" is either a genuine insight, but not a feminist one, or else is no insight at all; and, in conclusion, that feminism has taken a wrong direction in pursuing the project of a feminist epistemology of science - a project that is neither sound epistemology nor sound feminism. -
Proteus Rebound Reconsidering the “Torture of Nature” Author(S): Peter Pesic Source: Isis, Vol
Proteus Rebound Reconsidering the “Torture of Nature” Author(s): Peter Pesic Source: Isis, Vol. 99, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 304-317 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/588627 Accessed: 24-03-2018 04:29 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The History of Science Society, The University of Chicago Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Sat, 24 Mar 2018 04:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CRITIQUES AND CONTENTIONS Proteus Rebound Reconsidering the “Torture of Nature” By Peter Pesic* ABSTRACT Though Carolyn Merchant has agreed that Francis Bacon did not advocate the “torture of nature,” she still maintains that “the very essence of the experimental method arose out of human torture transferred onto nature.” Her arguments do not address serious problems of logic, context, and contrary evidence. Her particular insistence on the influence of the torture of witches ignores Bacon’s skepticism about witchcraft as superstitious or imag- inary.