Volume 11, No. 2

Compayre, Gabriel. “Montaigne’s Pedagogy of Judgment.” 2-­3. De Puig, Irene. “Beyond Knowledge, Wisdom: A Revindication of the Practical Character of Philosophy.” 22-­24. Godlovitch, S. “On Wisdom.” 14­-21. Lim, Tock Keng. “The Philosophy for Children Project in Singapore.” 33­-37. MacColl, San. “The Context of Reasoning and Teaching Reasoning.” 25-­29. Malcolm, Norman. “Should a Philosophy Consist of Nothing but Jokes and Questions?” from Thinking and Literacy by Jane Roland Martin. 44­-51. Martin, David. “Report from North America.” 38­-40. Matthews, Gareth: “Thinking in Stories: Now Everybody Really Hates Me by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx.” 1. Redshaw, Sarah. “Philosophical Applications: Cultivating Alternative Approaches to Dispute Resolution.” 10­-13. Sasseville, Michel. “Self­Esteem, Logical Skills and Philosophy for Children.” 30­-32

Millican on the Ontological Argument

Peter Millican (2004) provides a novel and elaborate objection to Anselm’s ontological argument. Millican thinks that his objection is more powerful than any other because it does not dispute contentious ‘deep philosophical theories’ that underlie the argument. Instead, it tries to reveal the ‘fatal flaw’ of the argument by considering its ‘shallow logical details’. Millican’s objection is based on his interpretation of the argument, according to which Anselm relies on what I call the ‘principle of the superiority of existence’ (PSE). I argue that (i) the textual evidence Millican cites does not provide a convincing case that Anselm relies on PSE and that, moreover, (ii) Anselm does not even need PSE for the ontological argument. I introduce a plausible interpretation of the ontological argument that is not vulnerable to Millican’s objection and conclude that even if the ontological argument fails, it does not fail in the way Millican thinks it does

Philosophy of Dreaming: A New Kind of Reality

Dreaming has been a subject for debate for thousands of years as to what it entails and how it affects daily living. This paper goes into depth about if dreaming holds reality within, and if morality should be taken into consideration

Organizational Learning: A Process Between Equilibrium and Evolution

This paper aims to analyze learning as a two-type process. A dynamic equilibrium process represents a stable learning process, that may express an individualistic behavioral learning or an organizational adaptation. A teleological process represents an intentional, goal-oriented, learning process. This second type of learning can express an individualistic cognitive learning or a managerial organizational change. It is argued that this learning typology can helps to understand why similar organizations or individuals may learn differently when confronted to the same environmental stimuli.Dynamic Equilibrium; Learning; Organizational Learning; Teleology

Modified Gaunilo-Type Objections Against Modal Ontological Arguments

Modal ontological arguments are often claimed to be immune to the flqqperfect islandfrqq objection of Gaunilo, because necessary existence does not apply to material, contingent things. But Gaunilo’s strategy can be reformulated: we can speak of non-contingent beings, like quasi-Gods or evil God. The paper is intended to show that we can construct ontological arguments for the existence of such beings, and that those arguments are equally plausible as theistic modal argument. This result does not show that this argument is fallacious, but it shows that it is dialectically ineffective as an argument for theism

Is the God Hypothesis Improbable? A Response to Dawkins

In this chapter, Logan Paul Gage examines the only real attempt to disprove God’s existence by a New Atheist: Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747 Gambit.” Central to Dawkins’s argument is the claim that God is more complex than what he is invoked to explain. Gage evaluates this claim using the main extant notions of simplicity in the literature. Gage concludes that on no reading does this claim survive scrutiny. Along the way, Dawkins claims that there are no good positive arguments for God’s existence. Gage attempts to show that Dawkins’s argument depends upon distinctively philosophical assumptions that do not appear to withstand scrutiny

Anselm’s Metaphysics of Nonbeing

In his eleventh century dialogue De Casu Diaboli, Anselm seeks to avoid the problem of evil for theodicy and explain the fall of Satan as attributable to Satan’s own self-creating wrongful will. It is something, as such, for which God as Satan’s divine Creator cannot be held causally or morally responsible. The distinctions on which Anselm relies presuppose an interesting metaphysics of nonbeing, and of the nonbeing of evil in particular as a privation of good, worthy of critical philosophical investigation in its own right. Anselm’s concept of nonbeing does not resolve the philosophical problem of evil implied by Satan’s fall from grace, but is shown perhaps more unexpectedly to enable Anselm’s proof for the inconceivable nonexistence of God as the greatest conceivable intended object of thought to avoid Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason objection to the general category of ”ontological’ arguments

Episodic memory, the cotemporality problem, and common sense

Direct realists about episodic memory claim that a rememberer has direct contact with a past event. But how is it possible to be acquainted with an event that ceased to exist? That’s the so-called cotemporality problem. The standard solution, proposed by Sven Bernecker, is to distinguish between the occurrence of an event and the existence of an event: an event ceases to occur without ceasing to exist. That’s the eternalist solution for the cotemporality problem. Nevertheless, some philosophers of memory claim that the adoption of an eternalist metaphysics of time would be too high a metaphysical price to be paid to hold direct realist intuitions about memory. Although I agree with these critics, I will try to show two things. First, that this kind of “common sense argument” is far from decisive. Second, that Bernecker’s proposal remains the best solution to the cotemporality problem