582 research outputs found

    Contemporary philosophical naturalism: In concept and critique

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    Phenomenology, Empiricism, and Constructivism in Paolo Parrini's Positive Philosophy

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    In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s positive philosophy. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point out some lines of development of the phenomenological form of empirical realism as revealed in Parrini’s reflection, through a comparison of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model and the tradition of neutral monism

    White Habits, Anti‐Racism, and Philosophy as a Way of Life

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    This paper examines Pierre Hadot’s philosophy as a way of life in the context of race. I argue that a “way of life” approach to philosophy renders intelligible how anti-racist confrontation of racist ideas and institutionalized white complicity is a properly philosophical way of life requiring regulated reflection on habits – particularly, habits of whiteness. I first rehearse some of Hadot’s analysis of the “way of life” orientation in philosophy, in which philosophical wisdom is understood as cultivated by actions which result in the creation of wise habits. I analyze a phenomenological claim about the nature of habit implied by the “way of life” approach, namely, that habits can be both the cause and the effect of action. This point is central to the “way of life” philosophy, I claim, in that it makes possible the intelligent redirection of habits, in which wise habits are more the effect than simply the cause of action. Lastly, I illustrate the “way of life” approach in the context of anti-racism by turning to Linda Martín Alcoff’s whiteness anti-eliminativism, which outlines a morally defensible transformation of the habits of whiteness. I argue that anti-racism provides an intelligible context for modern day forms of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” insofar as the “way of life” philosophy is embodied in the practice of whites seeing themselves seeing as white and seeing themselves being seen as white

    John Dewey and an ecological philosophy of religion

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    This dissertation carries out a systematic study of the religious thought of the 20th century American philosopher John Dewey. Its motivation is that Dewey’s religious views have been seriously misunderstood and under appreciated by philosophers and Dewey scholars to date. Breaking with the standard interpretation of Dewey as a thoroughly scientific and secular thinker, the dissertation shows that Dewey’s writings reveal a robust and highly original religious naturalism. It further demonstrates that Dewey’s novel understanding of the religious dimensions of nature and the experiencing self can capably meet the challenges posed to philosophy of religion by the ecological turn presently transforming the philosophical landscape. The driving insight of the ecological turn in contemporary philosophy is the need to reconstruct our basic philosophical concepts and principles in light of the results of the ecological sciences, many of which challenge core tenets of modern Western thought. To make the case for Dewey as a serious religious thinker, the dissertation places him into critical-constructive dialogue with other theorists representing a wide range of philosophical and scientific perspectives, including those of pragmatism, naturalism, ecological and Gestalt psychology, deep ecology, and recent cognitive science. Dewey’s religious views are also analyzed in relation to the self-cultivation doctrines of Daoism and Zen Buddhism, highlighting rich connections between Dewey and Eastern thought; all of these thinkers and schools of thought share Dewey’s overriding concern to restore continuity between facts and values, between knowledge and action, between nature and the full range of human experience. The dissertation shows that by recovering Dewey’s religious naturalism, full of ecological insight and relevance, a new paradigm for philosophy of religion can be discerned, one that promises to bring philosophy of religion’s core problems and methods in line with the most up-to-date scientific developments

    Ontological Frameworks: Carnap and Quine on Methods of Ontology

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    Varieties of Unconventional Scientific Realisms

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    Of the many notable scientific realist positions on offer today few provide penetrating insights which promise to transform the very debate. This thesis provides a critical exposition of three positions that I argue do work to transform the debate. I label these ‘unconventional’ scientific realisms as they go against the more conventional understanding of scientific realism. These are: - Hilary Putnam’s Common Sense Realism - Nancy Cartwright’s Modelling-based Realism - Hasok Chang’s Pragmatic Realism Common sense realism is the last of Putnam’s positions on realism but it is also the least studied and most underappreciated compared to his former positions. It includes a component on direct realism in perception, convergent scientific realism and a form of metaphysical realism. It presents the later Putnam as a metaphysical realist who is keen to reject deflationist accounts of scientific realism and to bring realism back to the common man. Modelling-based Realism rejects common readings of Cartwright as instrumentalist or as entity realist, by showing that underlying her diverse views on realism is a robust unified position which does not fit within the usual theory-based framework. Modelling-based Realism is a form of model-based particularism that denies that theories and laws express claims and treats them instead as principles that are short-hand labels for powers and our practices for using them. It accepts as representative, when successful, local system-specific models and is committed to theoretical entities which powers are properties of. Pragmatic Realism, for Chang, aims to reorient the realism debate away from truth and towards practice. It does that by replacing the common proposition-based framework by an action-based alternative. It does away with truth as correspondence for what Chang calls ‘operational coherence’. It ultimately accepts a pragmatic theory of truth and reality, whereby a claim is considered true and an entity real if taking them as such is pragmatically necessary to carry out a coherent and successful epistemic activity. All three positions highlight different places where the scientific realism debate in its current form is defective, such as failing to appreciate the proper place of scientific realism within metaphysical realism thus positing an illusory conflict between science and common sense, committing to theories despite them not being the proper loci of scientific success, and overlooking the crucial role of practice in arguing from success to truth. Each of these three philosophers suggests ways to overcome these different defects. I argue that their three proposals are all compatible. I conclude by providing some groundwork for a scientific realist position that integrates their diverse insights into a synthetic whole

    Un-debunking ordinary objects with the help of predictive processing

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    Preprint artykuƂu, ktĂłry ukaĆŒe się w czasopiƛmie: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (ISSN 0007-0882) w 2021 roku.Debunking arguments aim to undermine common sense beliefs by showing that they are not explanatorily or causally linked to the entities they are purportedly about. Rarely are facts about the etiology of common sense beliefs invoked for the opposite aim, that is, to support the reality of entities that furnish our manifest image of the world. Here I undertake this sort of un-debunking project. My focus is on the metaphysics of ordinary physical objects. I use the view of perception as approximate Bayesian inference to show how representations of ordinary objects can be extracted from sensory input in a rational and truth-tracking manner. Drawing an analogy between perception construed as Bayesian hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry, I sketch out how some of the intuitions that traditionally inspired arguments for scientific realism also find application with regards to proverbial tables and chairs

    Concepts: neither Representations nor Abilities but Rules

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    Philosophers have always tried to explain what concepts are. Currently, most neo- Fregean philosophers identify concepts with abilities peculiar to cognitive agents. Philosophers who defend a psychological view, in contrast, identify concepts with representations located in the mind. In this paper, I argue that concepts should be understood neither in terms of mental representations nor in terms of abilities. Concepts, I argue, are rules for sorting an inferring. To support this, I follow Ginsborg’s Kantian conception of concepts. Nevertheless, unlike Ginsborg, I provide an explanation of the cognitive relationship between concepts and thinkers that presupposes no linguistic awareness of any normative concept. In doing so, a dispositional approach to the normativity of concepts is proposed
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