An ameliorative analysis of the concept of education

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-278
Author(s):  
Jack Marley-Payne

Ameliorative analysis is a powerful new approach to understanding concepts, stemming from cutting-edge work at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. It offers the potential to improve our understanding of a range of subject matters. One topic to which it has not yet been applied is the concept of education. Doing so can enhance our understanding of this vital subject matter and, in particular, help in the push for educational justice. While philosophers and policymakers alike have preferred a broad understanding of education that encompasses many aspects of human development, ameliorative considerations favour a narrower concept, tightly connected to formal schooling. This is because effective pursuit of an egalitarian agenda requires education working alongside a range of other welfare priorities, and it is important that our concept of education does not muddy the waters or undermine other aspects of the pursuit of justice.

Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri

Gadādhara Bhaṭṭācārya was a seventeenth-century Indian philosopher belonging to a school of thinkers, Navya-Nyāya, noted for its extreme realism and its contributions to philosophical methodology. Though Gadādhara’s commentaries on the school’s key texts are recognized as among the latest, most detailed and innovative, his greater claim to fame is due to his composition of a number of independent tracts on topics in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and legal theory. He may be credited in particular with the discovery of a version of the pragmatic theory of pronominal anaphora. His work on case grammar and inferential fallacies is highly admired in India, while recent translations into English have begun to make him better known outside.


Author(s):  
Daniel Star

The purpose and plan of the Handbook is described herein. Key concepts in the contemporary literature on reasons and normativity are introduced, and the forty-four chapters that make up the main body of the Handbook are each summarized. In the process, important connections between the chapters are highlighted. A distinctive feature of the Handbook is said to be the way in which it surveys work on normative reasons in both ethics and epistemology, focusing, when appropriate, on issues concerning unity or lack of it in different domains. It is noted that discussions of reasons and normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics are also surveyed in the Handbook.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-158
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Lim

Experimental Philosophy is a new and controversial movement that challenges some of the central findings within analytic philosophy by marshalling empirical evidence. The purpose of this short paper is twofold: (i) to introduce some of the work done in experimental philosophy concerning issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics and (ii) to connect this work with several debates within the philosophy of religion. The provisional conclusion is that philosophers of religion must critically engage experimental philosophy.


2021 ◽  

The philosophy of language is central to the concerns of those working across semantics, pragmatics and cognition, as well as the philosophy of mind and ideas. Bringing together an international team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics. Chapters are grouped into thematic areas and cover a wide range of topics, from key philosophical notions, such as meaning, truth, reference, names and propositions, to characteristics of the most recent research in the field, including logicality of language, vagueness in natural language, value judgments, slurs, deception, proximization in discourse, argumentation theory and linguistic relativity. It also includes chapters that explore selected linguistic theories and their philosophical implications, providing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Showcasing the cutting-edge in research in the field, this book is essential reading for philosophers interested in language and linguistics, and linguists interested in philosophical analyses.


Problemos ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Jonas Dagys ◽  
Evaldas Nekrašas

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama analitinės kalbos ir mokslo filosofijos raida Lietuvoje. Konstatuojama, kad analitinė filosofija Lietuvoje pradėta plėtoti XX amžiaus aštuntajame dešimtmetyje, kai Evaldas Nekrašas ir Rolandas Pavilionis paskelbė savo pirmųjų mokslo filosofijos ir kalbos filosofijos tyrinėjimų, kuriuose remiamasi analitine tradicija, rezultatus. Straipsnyje analizuojami jų ir kitų tyrėjų, kurie rėmėsi ta pačia tradicija, pirmiausia Algirdo Degučio ir Albino Plėšnio darbai. Analitinė filosofija buvo pirmoji nemarksistinės filosofijos kryptis, pradėta plėtoti pokarinėje Lietuvoje, todėl aštuntajame ir devintajame dešimtmečiuose ji atliko svarbų vaidmenį plečiant šalyje filosofinių tyrinėjimų tematiką ir keičiant jų metodologinius pagrindus. Nors pastaruoju metu jos įtaka Lietuvos filosofijoje kiek sumažėjo, ji aiškiai juntama kai kuriuose pastarojo meto darbuose, kuriuose nagrinėjamos sąmonės filosofijos, priežastingumo, humanitarinių ir socialinių mokslų metodologijos problemos. Ji padarė nemažą poveikį ir pozityvizmo raidos bei politinės filosofijos problemų tyrimui.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: Lietuvos filosofija, analitinė filosofija, kalbos filosofija, mokslo filosofija, pozityvizmas.Analytical Philosophy of Language and Science in LithuaniaJonas Dagys, Evaldas Nekrašas SummaryThe paper presents an overview of analytical philosophy in Lithuania. It is observed that analytical philosophy had not been studied or developed in Lithuania before the 1970s, when Evaldas Nekrašas and Rolandas Pavilionis began their work in philosophy of science and philosophy of language, rooted in analytical tradition. The article discusses the works of Nekrašas and Pavilionis, as well as those of others (e.g., Degutis and Plėšnys). It notes that analytical philosophy was the first non-Marxist trend of philosophy to be developed in post-war Lithuania, and thus it was of considerable influence at the time when the Marxist methodology had to be overthrown. Although the influence of analytical philosophy in Lithuania has diminished during later years in favour of postmodern trends, it is still evident in some recent works on philosophy of mind, philosophy of causation, and methodology of the humanities and social sciences. It has also made a strong impact upon the development of political philosophy and research in the history of positivism.Keywords: Lithuanian philosophy, analytical philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, positivism.


Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Wolf ◽  
Jeremy Randel Koons

Wilfrid Sellars (b. 1912–d. 1989) did some of the most interesting and challenging work in Western philosophy in the 20th century. At a time when most philosophers were moving toward increasingly narrow specialization in their scholarship, he produced a large corpus that was both systematic and extensive in scope. Sellars is also a difficult philosopher to read, however. “I revise my papers until only I can understand them,” he is rumored to have said, “and then I revise them once more.” His prose is both idiosyncratic and ambitious, striking out in novel directions while striving to address the concerns of the past on every page. This article strives to address his most significant contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Most of the details of his work in the history of philosophy, particularly his work on Kant, are passed over. Wherever possible, original dates and sources of publication are included to give the reader a sense of the progression of Sellars’s work, but nearly all of these papers are included in one or more of the anthologies listed.


Author(s):  
Steven R. Kraaijeveld

AbstractExperimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, no connection has been made between developments in experimental philosophy and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology.


Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.


Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.


This series is devoted to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The chapters included in the series provide a basis for understanding recent developments in the field. Chapters in this volume explore topics including the nature of reasons, the tenability of moral realism, moral explanation and grounding, and a variety of epistemological challenges.


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