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Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre‐theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Growing concern with the panpsychist's ostensive inability to solve the ‘combination problem’ has led some authors to adopt a view titled ‘Cosmopsychism’. This position turns panpsychism on its head: rather than many tiny atomic minds, there is instead one cosmos‐sized mind. It is supposed that this view voids the combination problem, however I argue that it does not. I argue that there is a ‘de‐combination problem’ facing the cosmopsychist, which is equivalent to the combination problem as they are both concerned with subjects being proper parts of other subjects. I then propose two methods for both theorists to avoid the problem of subject‐subject proper parthood relations: a distinction between absolute and relative phenomenal unity, and a modification of the essential nature of subjects. Of these two options, I find the latter option wanting and propose that the first should be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper I take up the question of whether and in what sense action might be the conclusion of practical reasoning and argue against the answer provided by Sebastian Rödl's account of practical reasoning. Rödl's account aspires to steer a middle ground between the attitudinal and the neo‐Aristotelian accounts of practical reasoning, by proposing that its conclusion is at once a thought and a movement. This account is worth considering for it promises to explain both practical reasoning's practicality (that it brings about action) and its rationality (that it is subject to thought governing norms) in one move. But, I argue in this paper, a Rödlian account—an account which grants Rödl's central theses—fails to deliver on its promise. The reason is that, like others, a Rödlian also assumes that the only sense in which practical reasoning is practical is the sense in which it has a conclusion. Challenging this assumption in the right way, I finally suggest, helps us reassess the task of explaining practical reasoning in a way that goes beyond Rödlian, attitudinal and neo‐Aristotelian accounts alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case of Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay that 'turned into a Nazi' after less than 24 hours from its release on the Internet. The first section presents a brief recapitulation of Alan Turing's proposal for a test for artificial intelligence and the way it influenced subsequent discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the second section, I offer a few arguments appealing for caution regarding the identification of an accomplished chatbot as a thinking being. These are motivated principally by Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussions of mind and soul and by some Wittgensteinian philosophers' criticisms of AI endeavours. I will try to show that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of AIs such as chatbots as thinking beings, rather independently of their technical perfection and accomplishment. In the third section, the case of the 'Nazi chatbot' Tay will offer me material for some light to be shed on the peculiar (primitive) character of our interconnected concepts of thinking, soul and person and on the importance of their further ramified connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What capacities for discrimination must a subject possess in order to entertain singular thoughts? Evans has suggested that a subject must be able to discriminate his referent from all other entities in order to be able to do so; what he calls Russell's Principle. Evans' view has few followers, and he has been repeatedly accused of presenting no argument in its favour. In this paper I present what I take to be Evans' argument. I suggest that he has been misinterpreted as introducing Russell's Principle for the purpose of fixing reference. Rather, he introduces it in order to ensure that our conceptual capacities have the functional complexity to allow for objective thought. I suggest that the logical types of our thought are constituted by their inferential potential and argue that, even though singular thought may be possible without the satisfaction of Russell's Principle, singular thought that forms part of an objective world view is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an interpretation of Kant's conception of transcendental subjectivity, which manages to avoid many of the concerns that have been raised by analytic interpreters over this doctrine. It is an interpretation put forward by selected C19 and early C20 neo-Kantian writers. The article starts out by offering a neo-Kantian interpretation of the object as something that is constituted by the categories and that serves as a standard of truth within a theory of judgment (I). The second part explicates transcendental subjectivity as the system of categories, which is self-referential and constitutes objects (II), in order to then evaluate this conception by means of a comparison with Hegel's absolute subject (III). Rather than delineating the differences between neo-Kantian writers, the article systematically expounds a shared project, which consists in providing the ultimate foundation for judgments by means of an anti-psychologist and non-metaphysical interpretation of transcendental subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is open-mindedness a moral virtue? Surprisingly, this question has not received much attention from philosophers. In this paper, we fill this lacuna by arguing that there are good grounds for thinking that it is. In particular, we show that the extant account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue faces an objection that appears to show that exercising the character trait may not be virtuous. To offset this objection, we argue that a much stronger argument can be made for the case that open-mindedness is a moral virtue by appealing to the notion of moral understanding. Specifically, we provide a new rationale as to why we should exercise open-mindedness and offer several arguments to allay the concern that doing so can at times cause us to be in an epistemically and morally weaker position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A definitive feature of Kant's moral philosophy is its rationalism. Kant insists that moral theory, at least at its foundation, cannot take account of empirical facts about human beings and their circumstances in the world. This is the core of Kant's commitment to 'metaphysics of morals', and it is what he sees as his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. The paper clarifies what it means to be committed to metaphysics of morals, why Kant is committed to it, and where he thinks empirical considerations may enter moral theory. The paper examines recent work of contemporary Kantians ( Barbara Herman, Allen Wood, and Christine Korsgaard) who argue that there is a central role for empirical considerations in Kant's moral theory. Either these theorists interpret Kant himself as permitting empirical considerations to enter, or they propose to extend Kant's theory so as to allow them to enter. With some qualifications, I argue that these interpretive trends are not supported by the texts, and that the proposed extensions are not plausibly Kantian. Kant's insistence on the exclusion of empirical considerations from the foundations of moral theory is not an incidental feature of his thought which might be modified while the rest remains unchanged. Rather, it is the very centre of his endeavours in moral philosophy. If we disagree with it, I argue, we have grounds for moving to a distinctly different theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreement has been grist to the mills of sceptics throughout the history of philosophy. Recently, though, some philosophers have argued that widespread philosophical disagreement supports a broad scepticism about philosophy itself. In this paper, I argue that the task for sceptics of philosophy is considerably more complex than commonly thought. The mere fact that philosophical methods fail to generate true majority views is not enough to support the sceptical challenge from disagreement. To avoid demanding something that human reasoning cannot supply, sceptics must show that philosophers have sufficient overlap to resolve their disagreements in particular concrete cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On its face, Hume's account of mental representation involves at least two elements. On the one hand, Hume often seems to write as though the representational properties of an idea are fixed solely by what it is a copy or image of. But, on the other, Hume's treatment of abstract ideas (and other similar cases) makes it clear that the representational properties of a Humean idea sometimes depend, not just on what it is copied from, but also on the manner in which the mind associates it with other ideas. Past interpretations of Hume have tended to focus on one of these elements of his account to the neglect of the other. But no interpretation of this sort is likely to capture the role that both copying and association play within Hume's discussion. In what follows, I argue that the most plausible way of understanding Hume's discussion involves attributing to him a unified account of mental representation in which both of these elements play a central role. I close by discussing the manner in which reading Hume in this way would alter our understanding of the relationship between Hume's thought and contemporary philosophy of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Perceptual Dogmatism (PD) holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perceptual judgments of novices and experts, and, b) the problem of the speckled hen. Using somewhat different terminology, perceptual seemings are supposed to be high-level percepts instead of low-level sensations. I argue that although it is right that perceptual seemings should not be identified with sensations, they should also not be identified with percepts. There is no strong reason to assume that sensations and percepts exist as separate conscious states, and it appears therefore best to identify perceptual seemings simply with perceptual experiences interpreted as entities incorporating aspects from both sensations and percepts. However, even with this plausible identification in hand, the speckled hen will remain problematic for PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often thought that there is little that seems more obvious from experience than that time objectively passes, and that time is, in this respect, quite unlike space. Yet nothing in the physical picture of the world seems to correspond to the idea of such an objective passage of time. In this paper, I discuss some attempts to explain this apparent conflict between appearance and reality. I argue that existing attempts to explain the conflict as the result of a perceptual illusion fail, and that it is, in fact, the nature of memory, rather than perception, that explains why we are inclined to think of time as passing. I also offer a diagnosis as to why philosophers have sometimes been tempted to think that an objective passage of time seems to figure directly in perceptual experience, even though it does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In philosophy, 'singular thought' refers to our capacity to represent entities as individuals, rather than as possessors of properties. Philosophers who defend singularism argue that perception allows us to mentally latch onto objects and persons directly, without conceptualizing them as being of a certain sort. Singularists assume that singular thought forms a unified psychological kind, regardless of the nature of the individuals represented. Empirical findings on the special psychological role of persons as opposed to inanimates threaten singularism. They raise the possibility that tracking individuals specifically as persons might require conceptualizing them in certain ways, for example, as persons. In this paper, we take such a possibility seriously but ultimately reject it. Instead, we propose to revise a prominent singularist theory, the theory of mental files, in order to accommodate data on the psychological distinctiveness of persons: We advocate the postulation of perceptual person-files. Perceptual tracking via person-files is different from object-tracking but also from descriptive classification under the sortal concept PERSON. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reply to Michael Campbell, I reformulate my questions of Raimond Gaita, avoiding the expression 'form of life'. I examine what might remove the need for my questions, before taking up Campbell's line of thought about what he calls the 'inwardness' of moral concepts. Campbell helps to clarify the picture of moral concepts advanced by Wittgensteinian moral philosophers. But at a general level, the picture remains unclear where a grammar meets its scaffolding of facts. Some may find this unproblematic, and indeed unavoidable. But I remain unsure of this, and hope to provide at least a useful caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual experience is perspectival, and human minds occupy a variety of 'viewpoints.' These considerations provide grounds for both realist and anti-realist philosophies. Each is represented in adjacent areas of thought, and often connects with familiar debates between 'conservatives' and 'liberals,' which in turn are commonly related to disputes about religious and naturalistic accounts of the world and of the place of human beings within it. These have been joined from an orthogonal direction by Thomas Nagel in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. This is considered and contrasted with the ideas of Thomas Aquinas before returning to the possibility of reconciling perspectivalism with an account of what it could mean to speak of the world as it is in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on phenomenology of thought and intentional content in Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth. Twin Earth, a thought experiment presented by Hilary in a 1975 essay "The Meaning of Meaning," describes a paradox about content and intended reference of mental states. Twin Earth refers to a planet exactly like the earth, except for water, which in twin earth has a different composition. The thought experiment aimed to counter the idea that meanings are in the mind.

Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow 'absolute'. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although rhetoric might be thought of as nothing more than an archaic art of manipulation, its ability to bring about action—particularly as the intellect and will engage in acts of persuasion amid the operations of the practical intellect—is a possibility that has gone largely unnoticed among philosophers of human nature. In this paper I explore the possibility that natural rhetoric, much as it serves the practical intellect in precipitating action, serves the speculative intellect as it stimulates acts of cognizing and understanding, thus leading to the acquisition of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frank B. Ebersole died recently. Here I remind philosophers of the thinking of this reclusive philosopher who brought out the value of Wittgenstein's dictum that philosophers should “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” I illustrate Ebersole's singular thinking by focusing on his philosophical investigation of Wittgenstein's family resemblance metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barry Stroud suggests that when we want to explain a certain kind of knowledge philosophically we feel we must explain it on the basis of another, prior kind of knowledge that does not imply or presuppose any of the knowledge we are trying to explain. If we accept this epistemic priority requirement (EPR) we find that we cannot explain our knowledge of the world in a way that satisfies it. If we reject EPR then we will be failing to make all of our knowledge of the world intelligible all at once. I respond to this dilemma by questioning EPR and arguing that it is, in any case, a requirement that is satisfied by explanations of our knowledge in terms of non-epistemic seeing. Since non-epistemic seeing is not a form of knowing, such explanations show how knowledge of the world can come to be out of something that is not knowledge of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offer views concerning the commentary of Bernard Williams on British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion about idealism. He explains that the conclusion of William's paper implies an objection to the later conception of Wittgenstein's philosophy. The author then claims that there is a possibility that William's understanding of Wittgenstein might be inflected to its determinant and benefits.

The article examines the response of Jaegwon Kim to the argument concerning his developed notion about mental properties. An overview of the supervenience and the generalization arguments that was formulated by Kim is presented. It analyzes the level/order distinction and the relation of functionalism, realizers versus role functionalism. It then argues that a proper analysis of the belief by Kim undermines supervenience arguments by showing that mental properties are being construed.

In this article I contest a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations—a reading of it as debunking philosophy. I concede that such a reading is not groundless, but I show why it is nonetheless mistaken. To do so, I distinguish two different ways of viewing Philosophical Investigations and its concern with philosophical problems, an External View and an Internal View. On the External View, readers of the book are taken to know ahead of time what philosophical problems are. On the Internal View, readers are not taken to know this ahead of time: the task of the book is to disclose what philosophical problems are, to show them coming into being. One thing disclosed is our participatory role in philosophical problems coming to be. Learning about the nature of philosophical problems is thus learning about our own nature; metaphilosophical knowledge is in part self-knowledge. If the Internal View is correct (as I believe it is), then Philosophical Investigations does not debunk philosophy but provides a different conception of philosophy and the philosopher's task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being there from the beginning, philosophical approaches have never had a settled place in cognitive research and few cognitive researchers not trained in philosophy have a clear sense of what its role has been or should be. We distinguish philosophy in cognitive research and philosophy of cognitive research. Concerning philosophy in cognitive research, after exploring some standard reactions to this work by nonphilosophers, we will pay particular attention to the methods that philosophers use. Being neither experimental nor computational, they can leave others bewildered. Thought experiments are the most striking example but not the only one. Concerning philosophy of cognitive research, we will pay particular attention to its power to generate and test normative claims, claims about what should and should not be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the framework of rationalism on obligation. It discusses that the idea does not shape practical deliberation solely by constituting a point in favor of fulfilling it. It specifies that like a command, it also constraints a person's practical deliberations. According to philosophers, it must be overriding practical considerations that a person obliged to do is also what makes most sense to do. Meanwhile, a simple rationalism exemplifies that duties and obligations have no special normative force attached to them and without distinctive role playing in practical deliberation.

The article discusses dialogue in the philosophy of Martin Eger. It profiles Eger who was a professor of physics at the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York. His works include "Science, Understanding, and Justice," and "Hermeneutics and Natural Science." The article mentions that Eger supported the hermeneutic techniques of interpreting concepts and propositions. Eger also supported the idea that dialogue is needed in interpretation. The article also discusses the role of dialogue in hermeneutics.

The article discusses a form of reductionism based on the thinking pf Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle. The new reductionism is based on discoveries in quantum physics and on a program by Gell-Mann and Santa Fe Institute on complexity and emergence. The new reductionism has been neglected by philosophers due to the technical nature of the papers as well as the focus on structures and dynamics. The article discusses several types of reductionism including epistemological, ontological, and methodological. An overview of the new reductionism is provided.

The article focuses on Hermann Cohen's conception of Neo-Kantianism. The author argues that Cohen's interpretation of Kant's goal in pursuing epistemology is ambiguous and his idea seems that Kant claims the accomplishment of revolution of the way of thinking. The author believes that Cohen is not in favor of Kant's reading on space and substance because of psychologism or logicism. He also explains the aspects when reflecting on the possibility of cognition. Furthermore, the author adds that Cohen is not aware about Kant as critic of dogmatic physics.

The article discusses issues related to the paper of philosopher John McDowell, being a good objection to the argument of Bernard Williams against externalism. It mentions the significant contribution of the paper to the debate over the existence of external reasons. It presents the author's view concerning the appeal to conversion by McDowell and the latter's positive account which do not seriously engage with the views of Williams about reasons and explanations. The article further examines McDowell's reply to the argument of William.

The article discusses the phenomenological description of the difference between non-positional and positional self-consciousness by philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and self-reference by Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. It explores the mutation within Sartre's view and the significance of the two-fold convergence to the nature of one's relation to himself. It examines the distinction between non-thetic and thetic self-consciousness and the difference between the use of "I" as subject and use of "I" as object. The article further discusses the revisions that each view respectively underwent and shows how the revisions converge. It outlines what remains a limit in the views of Sartre, which he shares with the Wittgenstein view.

The article discusses issues and topics related to the development of first-person authority. It presents the epistemic model that emphasizes certain structural features that will disable the model from providing ready explanation of the link between the first-person authority and the psychological capability of an agent. It presents an argument over the replacement of epistemic model with an agency alternative and the version of philosopher Richard Moran which was considered unattractive implications for evaluating rational agency and moral performance.

The article discusses transcendental philosophy by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the writings related to the allegations of atheism that were lodged against Fichte in the autumn of 1798. It explores the understanding of transcendental philosophy as a theory of experience and the reasons underlying Fichte's reminder to philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold about the essence of transcendental philosophy. It examines how transcendental philosophy bears on the allegation that the Wissenschaftslehre is a crypto-atheistic philosophy.

The article discusses the differences between philosophers Nicolas Malebranche and David Hume on the religious aims of the experimental science of man. It stated that the work of Malebranche was motivated by an attempt to understand human nature and the errors to which it is prone. It seeks to alter a false philosophy that confuses man's appreciation on his dependence on God. The article examines two major areas of the issue, which is the causation and the self, and presents various aspects of such relation. A background on the project of Malebranche and a comparison of it to the work of Hume are given.

This paper presents an objection to the view that intentions provide reasons and shows how this objection is also inherited by the more commonly accepted Tie-Breaker view, according to which intentions provide reasons only in tie-break situations. The paper also considers and rejects T. M. Scanlon's argument for the Tie-Breaker view and argues that philosophers might be drawn to accept the problematic Tie-Breaker view by confusing it with a very similar, unproblematic view about the relation between intentions and reasons in tie-break situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humeans believe that at least some of our desires give us reasons for action. This view is widely accepted by social scientists and has some following among philosophers. In recent years important objections were raised against this position by Scanlon, Dancy, and others. The foundations of the Humean view have never been properly defended. In the first part of the paper I discuss some objections to the Humean position. In the second part I attempt to provide an argument for the claim that the Humean view gives us a plausible, even if not exclusive, understanding of our notion of reasons. The particular version of the Humean view I set out to defend is that only desires that the agent is not alienated from, and that are not impulses, are reason giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the philosophical concept of French philosopher René Descartes. He expresses how much knowledge Descartes takes for granted in the Second Meditation, which Descartes has deceived about the existence of an external world. Furthermore, the author focuses on the plausibility that a human mind in that deceived situation could have the knowledge Descartes takes himself to have.

The article discusses the justification that the people who thinks justified belief is possible is committed to thinking that epistemically circular (EC) beliefs can be justified. It notes the objection of philosophers to externalism in epistemology in the grounds that it commits one to thinking that EC-beliefs can be justified, in which one views as an unhappy consequence of externalism. The author also highlights the benign and malignant kinds of EC-beliefs.

This paper provides a new compatibilist definition of free will, which is an elaboration of the classic compatibilist view of free will as absence of restriction, with the help of the causal theory of action and some special categories. This new definition enables us to neutralize a very wide range of counterexamples in a systematic and compelling way, including those left unanswered by hierarchical definitions.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to the generality problem in philosophy. These problems are especially impressive because they target the coherence of reliabilism, leaving aside the issue of whether reliabilism even gets the right result assuming its coherence. Such problems stem from the issue of how one is to characterize a reliable process. In particular, a process can be described at varying levels of generality and depending on what level of description one is working at, one gets different results regarding the reliability of this process. For instance, a seemingly uncontroversial process for generating true beliefs involves a normal human being visually inspecting a mid-sized object in broad daylight and then forming beliefs on that basis.