Causality Introduction
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Our Knowledge of the External World As a Field for Scientific Method In
Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy By Bertrand Russell 1 PREFACE The following lectures[1] are an attempt to show, by means of examples, the nature, capacity, and limitations of the logical-analytic method in philosophy. This method, of which the first complete example is to be found in the writings of Frege, has gradually, in the course of actual research, increasingly forced itself upon me as something perfectly definite, capable of embodiment in maxims, and adequate, in all branches of philosophy, to yield whatever objective scientific knowledge it is possible to obtain. Most of the methods hitherto practised have professed to lead to more ambitious results than any that logical analysis can claim to reach, but unfortunately these results have always been such as many competent philosophers considered inadmissible. Regarded merely as hypotheses and as aids to imagination, the great systems of the past serve a very useful purpose, and are abundantly worthy of study. But something different is required if philosophy is to become a science, and to aim at results independent of the tastes and temperament of the philosopher who advocates them. In what follows, I have endeavoured to show, however imperfectly, the way by which I believe that this desideratum is to be found. [1] Delivered as Lowell Lectures in Boston, in March and April 1914. The central problem by which I have sought to illustrate method is the problem of the relation between the crude data of sense and the space, 2 time, and matter of mathematical physics. -
Early Buddhist Metaphysics: the Making of a Philosophical Tradition
EARLY BUDDHIST METAPHYSICS This book provides a philosophical account of the major doctrinal shift in the history of early Theravada tradition in India: the transition from the earliest stratum of Buddhist thought to the systematic and allegedly scholastic philosophy of the Pali Abhidhamma movement. Conceptual investigation into the development of Buddhist ideas is pursued, thus rendering the Buddha’s philosophical position more explicit and showing how and why his successors changed it. Entwining comparative philosophy and Buddhology, the author probes the Abhidhamma’s shift from an epistemologically oriented conceptual scheme to a metaphysical worldview that is based on the concept of dhamma. She does so in terms of the Aristotelian tradition and vis-à-vis modern philosophy, exploiting Western philo- sophical literature from Plato to contemporary texts in the fields of philosophy of mind and cultural criticism. This book not only demonstrates that a philosophical inquiry into the conceptual foundations of early Buddhism can enhance our understanding of what philosophy and religion are qua thought and religion; it also shows the value of fresh perspectives for traditional Buddhology. Combining philosophically rigorous investigation and Buddhological research criteria, Early Buddhist Metaphysics fills a significant gap in Buddhist scholar- ship’s treatment of the conceptual development of the Abhidhamma. Noa Ronkin received her PhD from the University of Oxford. She is currently a lecturer in the Introduction to the Humanities Programme and a Research Fellow at the Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University. Her research interests include a range of issues associated with Indian Theravada Buddhist philosophy and psychology, the Abhidhamma tradition and comparative Indian philosophy. -
Causality and Freedom 2012
FREEDOM AND CAUSALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC & WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Mohsen Mohammadi Araghi CAUSALITY AND FREEDOM 2012 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................. 3 PART (1) THE BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY .................... 22 1. CAUSE ................................................................................................................................................... 26 2. NECESSITY OR THE NECESSITY OF EXISTENCE .............................................................. 32 3. FREEDOM ........................................................................................................................................... 35 A BRIEF HISTORY of ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATES ................................................... 39 1. Divine Essence Monotheism (Unity In God’s Essence) .................................................. 43 2. Divine Attribute Monotheism (Unity In God’s Attributes) ........................................... 44 3. Divine Act Monotheism (Unity Of Divine Act) .................................................................... 48 PART (2) FREEWILL AND CAUSALITY in THE CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY .................................................................................................................................................... 66 A. THE THEORY OF NECESSITY ......................................................................................................... -
Modern French Philosophy
Modern French Philosophy J. Alexander Gunn Modern French Philosophy Table of Contents Modern French Philosophy......................................................................................................................................1 J. Alexander Gunn..........................................................................................................................................1 FOREWORD.................................................................................................................................................2 PREFACE......................................................................................................................................................3 CHAPTER I. ANTECEDENTS....................................................................................................................4 CHAPTER II. MAIN CURRENTS.............................................................................................................13 CHAPTER III. SCIENCE............................................................................................................................37 CHAPTER IV. FREEDOM.........................................................................................................................52 CHAPTER V. PROGRESS.........................................................................................................................65 CHAPTER VI. ETHICS..............................................................................................................................83 -
Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility
Journal of Buddhist Ethics ISSN 1076-9005 http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/ Volume 19, 2012 Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility Riccardo Repetti Kingsborough College, CUNY Copyright Notice: Digital copies of this work may be made and distributed provided no change is made and no alteration is made to the content. Re- production in any other format, with the exception of a single copy for pri- vate study, requires the written permission of the author. All enquiries to: [email protected] Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility Riccardo Repetti1 Abstract This is the third article in a four-article series that exam- ines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with “deter- minism,” the doctrine of universal causation. The first ar- ticle (“Earlier”) focused on the first publications on this issue in the 1970s, the “early period.” The second (“Paleo- compatibilism”) and the present articles examine key re- sponses published in the last part of the Twentieth and the first part of the Twenty-first centuries, the “middle period.” The fourth article (“Recent”) examines responses published in the last few years, the “recent period.” Whereas early-period scholars endorsed a compatibilism between free will and determinism, in the middle period the pendulum moved the other way: Mark Siderits argued for a two tiered compatibilism/incompatibilism (or semi- 1 Department of History, Philosophy and Political Science, Kingsborough College, CUNY. Email: [email protected]. 131 Journal of Buddhist Ethics compatibilism) that he dubs “paleo-compatibilism,” grounded in the early Buddhist reductionist notion of “two truths”: conventional truth and ultimate truth; and Charles Goodman argued that Buddhists accept hard de- terminism—the view that because determinism is true, there can be no free will—because in the absence of a real self determinism leaves no room for morally responsible agency. -
The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant
Western Washington University Western CEDAR WWU Honors Program Senior Projects WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship Spring 1982 The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant David Carl Bratz Western Washington University Follow this and additional works at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Bratz, David Carl, "The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant" (1982). WWU Honors Program Senior Projects. 225. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors/225 This Project is brought to you for free and open access by the WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship at Western CEDAR. It has been accepted for inclusion in WWU Honors Program Senior Projects by an authorized administrator of Western CEDAR. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant A Thesis Submitted to the Honors Program In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Bachelor of Arts with Honors Department of Philosophy By David C. Bratz May 1982 The Epistemology of Immanuel Kant by David C. Bratz Accepted by The Honors Program of Western Washington University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts with Honors Honors Program Director & Thesis Advisor Table of Contents I. Introduction II. The Pure Intuitions: Space and Time III. The Pure Concepts of the Understanding IV. Connecting Concepts and Intuition: Schematism and Principles V. Conclusion Footnotes Bibliography "All men by nature desire knowledge." -- Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. 1, ch. 1. It has been the tendency of philosophers in the Twentieth Century to examine the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in parcels, by analyzing key Kantian concepts, arguments, and distinctions without relation to the architectonic to v/hich they belong. -
Journal of Scottish Thought John Laird
Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 6 John Laird: A Scots Professor General Editor: Cairns Craig This edition edited by Cairns Craig. ‘Introduction © Cairns Craig The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY. Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2018 ISSN 1755 9928 Introduction John Laird was Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen from 1922 till 1946, during which time he published fourteen individual books ranging across almost all aspects of philosophy, as can be gathered from some of their titles: The Idea of the Soul (1924), The Idea of Value (1929), Morals and Western Religion (1931), An Enquiry into Moral Notions (1935), Mind and Deity (1941). He also addressed the history of philosophy in books such as Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature (1932) and Theism and Cosmology (1940), as well as issues of contemporary debate in Modern Problems in Philosophy (1928). Even if he was never thought of as one of the leading philosophers of his generation, his career charts many of the key developments of modern philosophy, from the ‘new realism’ that he took up from G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell in the aftermath of World War I – his A Study in Realism appeared in 1920 – to the consequences of contemporary particle physics for our understanding of determinism and free will, as he explored in his posthumously published On Human Freedom which appeared in 1947. -
Paleo-Compatibilism
City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Kingsborough Community College 2012 Buddhist Reductionism and Free Will: Paleo-compatibilism Rick Repetti CUNY Kingsborough Community College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_pubs/117 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Journal of Buddhist Ethics ISSN 1076-9005 http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/ Volume 19, 2012 Buddhist Reductionism and Free Will: Paleo-compatibilism Riccardo Repetti Kingsborough College, CUNY Copyright Notice: Digital copies of this work may be made and distributed provided no change is made and no alteration is made to the content. Re- production in any other format, with the exception of a single copy for pri- vate study, requires the written permission of the author. All enquiries to: [email protected]. Buddhist Reductionism and Free Will: Paleo-compatibilism Riccardo Repetti1 Abstract This is the second article in a four-article series that ex- amines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with “deter- minism,” the doctrine of universal causation. The first ar- ticle focused on the first publications on this issue in the 1970s, the “early period”; the present article and the next examine key responses published in the last part of the Twentieth century and first part of the Twenty-first, the “middle period”; and the fourth article will examine re- sponses published in the last few years. -
A Thesis Entitled Hume, Skepticism, and the Search for Foundations By
A Thesis entitled Hume, Skepticism, and the Search for Foundations by James B. Andrew Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy _______________________________________ Dr. Madeline Muntersbjorn, Committee Chair _______________________________________ Dr. Susan Purviance, Committee Member _______________________________________ Dr. John Sarnecki, Committee Member _______________________________________ Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2014 Copyright 2014, James B. Andrew This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. An Abstract of Hume, Skepticism, and the Search for Foundations by James B. Andrew Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2014 In this paper I present an account of how epistemology should be pursued. I challenge epistemological projects which focus exclusively on how our fundamental beliefs about the world – specifically our beliefs about inductive and mathematical knowledge – can be foundationally justified. To their detriment, these projects often ignore the naturalistic question of why we have these beliefs in the first place. Chapter one begins with an account of David Hume’s doctrine of knowledge, which is read most often as bifurcating knowledge into two epistemological classes. I refer to this bifurcation as the Received View of Hume’s epistemology. On this interpretation, knowledge divides exhaustively into relations of ideas, on the one hand, and matters of fact on the other. Chapter One concludes that attempts to justify either epistemological class unduly overemphasizes the importance of this distinction and risks undermining Hume’s actual epistemological goals. -
Epistemological Problems in Marketing. Donald Pier Robin Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1968 Epistemological Problems in Marketing. Donald Pier Robin Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Robin, Donald Pier, "Epistemological Problems in Marketing." (1968). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1617. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1617 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 70-264 ROBIN, Donald Pier, 1939- E PISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN MARKETING. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, D.B.A., 1969 Business Administration University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan © Donald Pier Robin 1970 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN MARKETING A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Business Administration in The Department of Management and Marketing by Donald Pier Robin B.S., Louisiana State University, 1963 M.B.A., Louisiana State University, 1966 May, 1969 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The writer is indebted to his major professor, Dr. Charles G. Walters, for his hard work and rapid turnover of material on this dissertation. Thanks are also due the two other reading members of this writer's committee, Dr. William J. Stober and Dr. -
Toward a Demarcation of Forms of Determinism1
Organon F 24 (1) 2017: 54-84 Toward a Demarcation of Forms of Determinism1 VLADIMÍR MARKO ABSTRACT: In the current philosophical literature, determinism is rarely defined explic- itly. This paper attempts to show that there are in fact many forms of determinism, most of which are familiar, and that these can be differentiated according to their particular components. Recognizing the composite character of determinism is thus central to de- marcating its various forms. KEYWORDS: Determinism – fatalism – logical determinism – scientific determinism – logical fatalism. Determinism is a basic philosophical concept. It is usually assumed that both the term “determinism” and determinism as a philosophical concep- tion or theory are clear and obvious. In the literature, however, the precise contours of determinism are not explicitly defined – an obscurity that often leads to inconsistencies and misunderstandings. In this article, I put to the side questions concerning the soundness or adequacy of the philosophical views I shall consider. Instead, I am inter- ested only in the basic conceptual contours of different kinds of determin- ism and whether it is possible to sort them into some kind of interrelated order for the purposes of better demarcating varieties of determinism. My 1 Received: 24 October 2016 / Accepted: 2 January 2017 Vladimír Marko Department of Logic and Methodology of Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava Gondova 2, 814 99 Bratislava, Slovak Republic e-mail: [email protected] © 2017 The Author. Journal compilation © 2017 Institute of Philosophy SAS T OWARD A D EMARCATION OF F ORMS OF D ETERMINISM 55 main thesis consists of three claims: (i) there are many forms of determin- ism; (ii) each form of determinism, as a philosophical conception, has a composite character; and (iii) conceptions of determinism can be differen- tiated according to the particular elements used in their composition. -
Matter, Causality, and Henry David Thoreau
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English Spring 5-2-2018 "Irresistible Motion": Matter, Causality, and Henry David Thoreau Kristen Carlson Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Recommended Citation Carlson, Kristen, ""Irresistible Motion": Matter, Causality, and Henry David Thoreau." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/232 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “IRRESISTIBLE MOTION:” MATTER, CAUSALITY, AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU by KRISTEN CARLSON Under the Direction of Mark Noble, PhD ABSTRACT This thesis positions Thoreau’s texts alongside theories of materialist-determinist and indeterminist causality that developed from the causal debate of Enlightenment and nineteenth- century philosophy and science. These debates frame Thoreau’s progression from an epistemological Baconian-Newtonian inductionism to an ontological New Materialist vitalism in his observations of natural causation. As Thoreau traces relations back to possible causes, his language shifts from empirical observations to imaginative inductions and inferences that attempt to complete insoluble causal equations. For Thoreau, thinking about causality in these terms leads to an equivocation of ontological boundaries between human and nonhuman where Thoreau’s mental and physical actions are inseparable from the motions of nonhuman agents. Examining causal events in Thoreau’s texts provides a new interpretation that views theories of motion and causality as central to his epistemology and ontology.