335,040 research outputs found

    Panpsychism and Neutral Monism: How to Make Up One's Mind

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    This material was originally published in Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359943.001.0001 and http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359943.001.0001/acprof-9780199359943. Under embargo until 3 November 2018. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://global.oup.com/academic/rights. Sam Coleman, ‘Panpsychism and Neutral Monism: How to Make Up One's Mind’, in Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, eds. Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), ISBN: 9780199359943 © Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.With reference to Chalmers's taxonomy of combination problems, I argue that while the subject combination problem reveals panpsychism as ultimately theoretically unmotivated, a rival neutral monist/panprotopsychist theory known as 'panqualityism' is much better placed to solve Chalmers's combination problems. In the final section I defend panqualityism against Chalmers's objection that it fails because of the possibility of 'awareness zombies'. I conclude that, in view of the advantages panpsychism and panqualityism share with respect to more mainstream theories of mind, panqualityism is our best hope for solving the problem of consciousness.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

    Heavenly freedom, derivative freedom, and the value of free choices

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    Sennett (1999) and Pawl & Timpe (2009; 2013) attempt to show how we can praise heavenly agents for things they inevitably do in heaven by appealing to the notion of derivative freedom. Matheson (2017) has criticized this use of derivative freedom. In this essay I show why Matheson's argument is inconclusive but also how the basic point may be strengthened to undermine the use Sennett and Pawl & Timpe make of derivative freedom. I then show why Matheson is mistaken to claim that the value of free choice depends on an agent retaining the ability to change their mind; in so doing I demonstrate that some choices which result in fixed outcomes - a feature of the choices leading to impeccability - can indeed be valuable even if they cannot be undone

    Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune system

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    A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor

    The Meaning of Brahmacharya

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    Practicing Hope

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    In this essay, I consider how the theological virtue of hope might be practiced. I will first explain Thomas Aquinas’s account of this virtue, including its structural relation to the passion of hope, its opposing vices, and its relationship to the friendship of charity. Then, using narrative and character analysis from the film The Shawshank Redemption, I examine a range of hopeful and proto-hopeful practices concerning both the goods one hopes for and the power one relies on to attain those goods. In particular, I show how the film’s picture of the role friends and friendship play in catalyzing hope is a compelling metaphor for Christian hope’s reliance on Go

    Self-Understanding And Community In Wordsworth\u27s Poetry

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    Something, nothing : space, substance, and sexual identity in Shakespeare

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    This paper argues that early, "preoedipal" anxieties about dependency, autonomy, the boundaries of the self, the dangerous interpenetration of inner and outer worlds--the outer world contaminating the inner self, the self afraid of losing the precious "substance" that keeps it alive--play a significant role in Shakespeare's plays, specifically Hamlet and King Lear. It argues further that childhood dependence on a mother influences later feelings about the opposite sex and sexual conflicts revive early anxieties about autonomy and independence, so that the attempt to establish a proper balance between inner and outer worlds is inextricably tied (in the plays) to conceptions of sexual identity. In broader social terms, these plays reflect the problem of being (1) a separate, self-conscious individual at a time when the old values of an ordered, hierar"chical society were giving way to a new, middle-class, Protestant ethic of "individualism" and (2) a man at a time when sexual roles were becoming polarized in new ways. As the plays themselves imply--and as the paper tries to show--we can't understand the dilemmas of modern "individualism" without understanding the sexual parameters (learned in early childhood, reinforced by social experience) in terms of which these dilenrnas are lived out

    Fall 1979

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    Moral Discernment and Culpability

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    Intentions, Intending, and Belief: Noninferential Weak Cognitivism

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    Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders
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