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Discursive and Non‐Discursive Thought

Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson

in Plotinus on Intellect

In this chapter the relationship between non‐discursive and discursive thought is addressed. It is argued that non‐discursive thought has a multiple object and is nevertheless not propositional. The ... More

In this chapter the relationship between non‐discursive and discursive thought is addressed. It is argued that non‐discursive thought has a multiple object and is nevertheless not propositional. The holism of Intellect is explained. Finally, some explanation is given of the fact that according to Plotinus non‐discursive thought is the primary kind of thought on which discursive thought necessarily depends.Less

Intuitive Knowledge

William A. Richards and G. William Barnard

in Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences

Insights into God, Immortality, Interrelationships, Love, Beauty and Emerging Wisdom.

Categories and Principles of the Understanding

Georges Dicker

in Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical Introduction

This chapter introduces Kant’s theory of categories and corresponding principles. It explains and evaluates Kant’s attempt to derive his categories from forms of judgment. It also discusses in detail ... More

This chapter introduces Kant’s theory of categories and corresponding principles. It explains and evaluates Kant’s attempt to derive his categories from forms of judgment. It also discusses in detail the principles that do not depend on the Transcendental Deduction–namely, the Axioms of Intuition, the Anticipations of Perception, the Postulates of Empirical Thought–and introduces those that do depend on the Transcendental Deduction–namely, the Analogies of Experience.Less

The Intuition of Distinctness

David Papineau

in Thinking about Consciousness

Even materialists will admit that mind‐brain identity is counterintuitive. Some materialist philosophers think that this intuition is due to the plausibility of the standard antimaterialist ... More

Even materialists will admit that mind‐brain identity is counterintuitive. Some materialist philosophers think that this intuition is due to the plausibility of the standard antimaterialist arguments, like Jackson's knowledge argument or Kripke's modal argument. Papineau shows that this cannot be right, since these arguments apply equally in cases in which we feel no intuition of distinctness. Instead, he draws on remarks of Thomas Nagel to argue that the intuition of distinctness is due to an “antipathetic fallacy”: we move from the true premise that phenomenal concepts don’t involve conscious feelings to the false conclusion that they don’t refer to them.Less

Introduction

Victor Tadros

in The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law

This introduction sets up the problem of punishment, indicating why it requires serious philosophical investigation. It outlines the philosophical method of the book. Finally, it provides an overview ... More

This introduction sets up the problem of punishment, indicating why it requires serious philosophical investigation. It outlines the philosophical method of the book. Finally, it provides an overview of the argument.Less

Scientific Ontology and Speculative Ontology

Paul Humphreys

in Scientific Metaphysics

This chapter provides six arguments in favor of scientifically based ontology and against speculative ontology, a branch of analytic metaphysics. Parts of contemporary speculative ontology are ... More

This chapter provides six arguments in favor of scientifically based ontology and against speculative ontology, a branch of analytic metaphysics. Parts of contemporary speculative ontology are untenable because they are factually false; intuitions are not domain-invariant; conceptual analysis is too closely tied to everyday experience; what counts as an acceptable philosophical idealization is left unarticulated; the world is not scale-invariant; and anthropocentric epistemology does not always minimize epistemic risk. Nevertheless, specifically philosophical arguments are necessary when making ontological claims and complete deference to scientific consensus is unreasonable. The overall strategy is to recognize that different domains of reality require different methods of discovery and justification, and that a significant part of contemporary metaphysics is employing methods that are inappropriate to its goals.Less

Outerness without Ontological Commitment

M. Chirimuuta

in Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy

Numerous authors have claimed that color relationism is simply not compatible with the deliverances of introspectible experience. But is the non-relationality of color as easily recovered from ... More

Numerous authors have claimed that color relationism is simply not compatible with the deliverances of introspectible experience. But is the non-relationality of color as easily recovered from experience as has been claimed? This chapter addresses this major objection to relationism, and tackles the implications for color adverbialism in particular. It is argued that the objectors to relationism have yet to demonstrate that experiences of color per se—and not experiences of objects with color, shape, size, and numerous other properties—are the source of their intuition that colors are out there in the world, and perceiver independent. Phenomenology, it is argued, is uncommitted about the ontological issues. Moreover, the objectors have yet to show that their supposed phenomenological facts are independent of theoretical views about the nature of color. Color adverbialism is no more vulnerable to phenomenological objections than other versions of relationism. Finally, the material presented suggests new ways to think about the phenomena of color constancy.Less

God and Moral Obligations

C. Stephen Evans

in God and Moral Obligation

This chapter argues that moral obligations are experienced as having a number of distinguishing characteristics, which collectively are described as the “Anscombe intuition,” since they are ... More

This chapter argues that moral obligations are experienced as having a number of distinguishing characteristics, which collectively are described as the “Anscombe intuition,” since they are highlighted in a famous article by Elizabeth Anscombe, in which she argues that moral obligations require a law-giver. Moral obligations appear to have the following characteristics: (1) They are objective. (2) They are binary (verdict-like) in character. (3) They bring deliberation to closure. (4) They are overriding reasons. (5) They have motivational power. (6) They are universal, both in the sense that they apply to all humans, and that some of them involve obligations that extend to all humans. One does not have to be an adherent of a revealed religion to understand morality in this way, since Socrates clearly recognized these characteristics of morality. Anscombe intuitionLess

Intuitions and Counterexamples

Max Deutsch

in The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method

This chapter identifies an important ambiguity in the claim that many philosophical arguments treat intuitions as evidence and a corresponding ambiguity in the term “intuition” itself. On one reading ... More

This chapter identifies an important ambiguity in the claim that many philosophical arguments treat intuitions as evidence and a corresponding ambiguity in the term “intuition” itself. On one reading of “intuition”—the “content” reading—it might be accurate to describe philosophers as relying on intuitions as evidence. This fact is cited as one of the main reasons for the appeal of the idea that philosophy trades heavily in intuitions. However, the chapter argues that the negative xphi critique depends taking “intuition” is the “state” sense in attributing a flawed method to analytic philosophers, but goes on to argue that analytic philosophers do not appeal to intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence. The chapter also includes case studies of famous arguments from Gettier and Kripke (demonstrating that these philosophers appeal to arguments, not intuitions) and a discussion of the crucial difference between a counterexample and an intuitive counterexample.Less

Intelligence and Discourse Failure

Kjetil Anders Hatlebrekke

in The Problem of Secret Intelligence

Intelligence as an activity and practice is an extremely complex process. It is this complexity that needs to be understood if intelligence institutions are to hope to diminish the force of discourse ... More

Intelligence as an activity and practice is an extremely complex process. It is this complexity that needs to be understood if intelligence institutions are to hope to diminish the force of discourse failure. The essence of intelligence needs to be acknowledged, and intelligence operatives need proper education and training. Intelligence is a highly demanding profession that is identified by the twelve images that will be described in this chapter. These images also serve as reminders of the challenges of intelligence. Intelligence is method, it is a phenomenon and it is science and knowledge. It constantly deals with uncertainty, and its ultimate objective is to make uncertainty less uncertain through its estimation about the future. It is arguably tempting for many to close cognition, overlook the challenging and displace those factors that do not fit with orthodox beliefs and political assumptions.Less

Still Deeper: The Non-Conscious Sublime or the Art and Science of Submergence

Barbara Maria Stafford

in Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Archaeology, before the birth of psychiatry, was the preeminent nineteenth-century science to embody both the act and the concept of delving. Strikingly, those two major interpreters of Western ... More

Archaeology, before the birth of psychiatry, was the preeminent nineteenth-century science to embody both the act and the concept of delving. Strikingly, those two major interpreters of Western humanistic and scientific traditions, Hans Blumenberg and Alfred North Whitehead, similarly invoke a sublime archaeology of unearthing. Making the submerged emerge permits that which is excessive, or mentally beyond reach, to loom into view. This essay argues that what makes this version of the multifaceted non-conscious, or involuntary, Sublime still relevant across current disciplinary divides is that it integrates what otherwise remains, in Whitehead’s apt word, “bifurcated.” It does this by bringing to the surface separated, buried “causes,” thus allowing them to become attached in the process of entering our unifying awareness. By the Sublime, I refer specifically to that overwhelming psychophysiological intrusion, which—like love’s fury—transiently manages to merge the personal awareness of our affective and cognitive states with the otherwise concealed and impersonal neurophysiological mechanisms underlying them. With our resistance undone, we begin to understand how this raw subjective experience is actually conjoined with objective nature, that is, bound up with the tumultuous environment to which it intuitively corresponds.Less

First Philosophy

Aaron T. Looney

in Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness

This chapter clarifies several of Jankélévitch's core conceptions, including the instant and the interval, intuition, almost-nothing, and the I-know-not-what (je-ne-sais-quoi). Inspired by both the ... More

This chapter clarifies several of Jankélévitch's core conceptions, including the instant and the interval, intuition, almost-nothing, and the I-know-not-what (je-ne-sais-quoi). Inspired by both the dynamism of Bergson’s philosophy of life and the biblical creation narrative, Jankélévitch conceives acts of creation as a third category between being and nothingness. For Jankélévitch, transcendence—the wholly other—is beyond being, essence, truth, and value. This chapter explores what Jankélévitch sees as the limits of understanding and explicates his priority of the deed over knowledge. It demonstrates that for Jankélévitch, as for Levinas, first philosophy is ethics and that he unifies the message of the Gospels with the moral-philosophical insights of Kant by showing the good will to be one and the same as the loving will.Less

Resisting Reductive Realism

N. G. Laskowski

in Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 15

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. Influential proponents of reductive views themselves admit as much. Ethicists also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. ... More

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. Influential proponents of reductive views themselves admit as much. Ethicists also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why ethicists resist reductive views and why ethicists have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures shores up new evidence for various theses about the distinctiveness of our use of normative concepts. This chapter builds on previous work to make a cumulative case for the view that what it is to use a normative concept is to use an unanalyzable natural-cognitive concept that is related to noncognitive elements of our psychology.Less

Materials

Peter Nicholls

in George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

This chapter affirms that George Oppen's last few years in Mexico were difficult ones and his return to poetry is simply not attributed to the ‘rust and copper dream’, which in its partly humorous ... More

This chapter affirms that George Oppen's last few years in Mexico were difficult ones and his return to poetry is simply not attributed to the ‘rust and copper dream’, which in its partly humorous retellings never quite conveys the sudden focusing of his energies. It is also clear that Oppen's reading during the Mexico years had an important part to play in his return to writing, indicating that philosophical works came high on his agenda. This chapter also considers that Oppen's collection of poems in ‘The Materials’ discern traces of his engagement with Jacques Maritain's aesthetics, which finds ‘ontological simplicity’ of a very different kind from that evoked in ‘Creative Intuition’.Less

What Results from Resultant Luck?

Gerald Lang

in Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political Philosophy

This chapter distinguishes, in a preliminary way, among different views on the role of luck in ascriptions of blameworthiness. First, there is the ‘Strict Liability Account’, which makes agents ... More

This chapter distinguishes, in a preliminary way, among different views on the role of luck in ascriptions of blameworthiness. First, there is the ‘Strict Liability Account’, which makes agents blameworthy if and only if their acts cause harm. Second, and in stark contrast, there is the ‘Anti-Luck Account’, which holds that any lucky differences between agents should be neutralized: any lucky differences between them should make no difference to how much agents are blamed. Third, there is the ‘Restricted Luck-Sensitive Account’, which appears to blend elements of these other views. The Restricted Account agrees with the Anti-Luck Account that agents are not eligible for blameworthiness unless they act either maliciously, or negligently, or recklessly. This is the ‘Internal Claim’. But the Restricted Account also contends that agents who have qualified for blameworthiness by satisfying the Internal Claim may then be blameworthy to different degrees, depending on how their acts turn out, even if the differences between them at this stage reflect luck. This is the ‘External Claim’. (The other chapters in Part I of the book will build up a case for the Restricted Account and against the Anti-Luck Account.) This chapter also searches for the fundamental constituents of the Anti-Luck Account, and identifies key roles for the ‘Irrelevance Intuition’ and ‘Fairness Intuition’, and for comparative luck. Finally, it takes issue with anti-luckist ‘accommodation strategies’, which attempt to explain away our habits of assigning different amounts of blameworthiness to agents who seem to be separated only by luck.Less

Worldviews: A Whirlwind Tour

Bryan G. Norton

in Toward Unity among Environmentalists

Languages are more like searchlights than floodlights; they do not illuminate equally across the full range of the perceptual field. This generalization is especially true of technical vocabularies ... More

Languages are more like searchlights than floodlights; they do not illuminate equally across the full range of the perceptual field. This generalization is especially true of technical vocabularies that characterize specialized professions such as economics and ecology, and to a lesser extent of systems of favored expressions used by groups that share a special interest, such as nature preservation. Because of this selectivity of focus, languages and special vocabularies can disclose the world differently. If various environmentalists’ descriptions of the same events often sound as though they are perceiving something quite different, it is because environmentalists, who have not adopted a shared worldview, express themselves in a variety of unsystematized languages and vocabularies. It will therefore be useful to examine the systems of concepts that important environmentalists have used to describe what they have perceived. It is important not to think of concepts as abstractions, however. A language and the forms of expression it embodies are the glue that hold worldviews together; our vocabularies therefore carry our perceptions, playing an active role in shaping the world we see. The very meaning attributed to events is affected by the interplay of perceptions, actions, and the linguistic behaviors that express the meaning of events. Perceptions, we assume, directly affect the theoretical hypotheses and conjectures we develop to make sense of our world as we act within it. But theoretical assumptions likewise affect perception; and since perception is the only basis we have for discriminating among theories of reality, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that to some degree at least, the constellation of conceptual, theoretical, and value precepts we operate with, and the vocabulary we use to express them, will determine the shape of the world we encounter. This, loosely put, is the idea behind worldview analysis, as introduced in Chapter 2 and used occasionally throughout this book. Because most people are not accustomed to question their linguistic forms and the philosophical commitments embodied in them, it is often useful to discuss these issues informally in metaphorical terms. For example, the language of atomism as applied to nature is often associated with a mechanistic metaphor, while more holistic approaches are associated with an organicist metaphor. Less

Continuity and Intuition in Eighteenth-Century Analysis and in Kant

Daniel Sutherland

in The History of Continua: Philosophical and Mathematical Perspectives

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, ... More

This chapter considers the status of geometrical and kinematic representations in the foundations of 18th century analysis and in Kant’s understanding of those foundations. It has two aims. First, relying on relatively recent reassessments of the history of analysis, it will attempt to bring forward a more accurate account of intuitive representation in 18th century analysis and the relation between British and Continental mathematics. Second, it will give a better account of Kant’s place in that history. The result shows that although Kant did no better at navigating the labyrinth of the continuum than his contemporaries, he had a more interesting and reasonable account of the foundations of analysis than an easy reading of either Kant or that history provides. It also permits a more accurate and interesting account of how and when a conception of foundations of analysis without intuitive representations emerged, and how that paved the way for Bolzano and Cauchy.Less

Ecclesiological and Epistemological Contours of Neopatristic Theology

Paul L. Gavrilyuk

in Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance

This chapter addresses Florovsky’s interpretation of the sources and norms of neopatristic theology, more specifically, scripture, tradition, divine revelation, and ecclesial experience. Florovsky ... More

This chapter addresses Florovsky’s interpretation of the sources and norms of neopatristic theology, more specifically, scripture, tradition, divine revelation, and ecclesial experience. Florovsky draws on the insights of Aleksei Khomiakov’s epistemology of sobornost’, in which knowledge acquisition depends on the community of knowers bounded by love. Florovsky developed a version of social epistemology of the catholic transformation by ecclesial and Eucharistic participation. Florovsky’s use of different modalities of theological reasoning, especially his appeal to intuition and the antinomic character of religious knowledge, is discussed.Less