scholarly journals Peter Browne on the Metaphysics of Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 215-237
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Interesting Application ◽  
Cognitive Mechanism ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Material Things

AbstractThe central unifying element in the philosophy of Peter Browne (d. 1735) is his theory of analogy. Although Browne's theory was originally developed to deal with some problems about religious language, Browne regards analogy as a general purpose cognitive mechanism whereby we substitute an idea we have to stand for an object of which we, strictly speaking, have no idea. According to Browne, all of our ideas are ideas of sense, and ideas of sense are ideas of material things. Hence we can conceive of spiritual things – including even our own spirit – only by analogy. One interesting application Browne makes of his theory is an account of how concepts such as knowledge can be correctly applied to beings that have no intrinsic properties in common, such as non-human animals, humans, angels, and God. I argue that this is best understood as what, in the contemporary literature, is known as a ‘multiple realizability’ problem and that Browne's solution to this problem has important similarities to functionalist theories in recent philosophy of mind.

Religious Language after J. L. Austin

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
James M. Smith ◽  
James WM. Mcclendon
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Linguistic Action ◽  
The Way

John L. Austin believed that in the illocution he had discovered a fundamental element of our speech, the understanding of which would disclose the significance of all kinds of linguistic action: not only proposing marriage and finding guilt, but also stating, reporting, conjecturing, and all the rest of the things men can do linguistically.2 We claim that the illocution, the full-fledged speech-act, is central to religious utterances as well, and that it provides a perspicuity in understanding them not elsewhere provided in the work of recent philosophy of religion. In particular we hold that understanding religious talk through the illocution shows the way in which the representative and affective elements are connected to one another and to the utterance as a whole. There may, further, be features in such an analysis which can be extended to other forms of discourse than religious.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Star
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Way

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.

Metaphysics of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darragh Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

Philosophy of mind addresses fundamental questions about mental or psychological phenomena. The question held by many to be most fundamental of all is a metaphysical one, often labeled the “mind-body problem,” which concerns the relation between minds and material or physical phenomena. Physicalists (and/or materialists) contend that mental phenomena are physical, or at least that they may be accounted for in terms of physical phenomena (brains, for example). Dualists deny this, maintaining that mental phenomena have fundamentally nonphysical natures, so that to account for minds we must assume the existence of nonphysical substances or properties. Nowadays physicalism is more widely espoused than dualism, but physicalists differ over which physical states/properties should be considered relevant, and over the precise nature of the relation between physical and mental phenomena. This is one of four bibliography entries on the philosophy of mind, and this particular entry concentrates on this metaphysical issue of the relation between mental and physical/material phenomena. Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap between this and topics covered in the other three entries. For example, this entry includes authors who attack physicalism by arguing that it cannot account for the distinctive phenomenal qualities of conscious experiences; but that line of antiphysicalist argument features even more prominently in the entry on consciousness. Moreover, the other entries feature various issues that might perfectly properly be categorized as concerning the metaphysics of mind: for example, the debate between internalists—philosophers who hold that propositional attitudes (mental states such as beliefs and desires, which have representational contents) are intrinsic properties of minds/brains—and externalists, who think of certain attitudes as extrinsic or relational, is surely a question about the metaphysics of mind: but this is discussed in the entry on intentionality instead of here.

Closet Dualism and Mental Causation

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter ◽  
Alexander Miller
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental Causation ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Multiple Realizability ◽  
Jaegwon Kim ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nonreductive Materialism ◽  
Tyler Burge ◽  
Argumentative Strategy ◽  
Stephen Yablo

Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental causation — in particular, the specter of epiphenomenalism — has really captured the interest of philosophers in general in recent years.This growing attention has spawned a large body of literature, which it is not our aim here to explore or assess. Rather, we want to call attention to what we believe is a new and quite different argumentative strategy against epiphenomenalism voiced in some recent articles by Tyler Burge and Stephen Yablo. Each has challenged two central assumptions of the existing mental causation debate.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Do So

The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity contains forty-four commissioned chapters on a wide range of topics. It will appeal especially to readers with an interest in ethics or epistemology, but also to those with an interest in philosophy of mind or philosophy of language. Both students and academics will benefit from the fact that the Handbook combines helpful overviews with innovative contributions to current debates. A diverse selection of substantive positions are defended by leading proponents of the views in question. Few concepts have received as much attention in recent philosophy as the concept of a reason. This is the first edited collection to provide broad coverage of the study of reasons and normativity across multiple philosophical subfields. In addition to focusing on reasons as part of the study of ethics and as part of the study of epistemology (as well as focusing on reasons as part of the study of the philosophy of language and as part of the study of the philosophy of mind), the Handbook covers recent developments concerning the nature of normativity in general. A number of the contributions to the Handbook explicitly address such “metanormative” issues, bridging subfields as they do so.

Other Minds, Facts, and Values

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Heal
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Individual Life ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Recent Philosophy

It is deep fact about us that we are social animals. The idea that ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘we’ are interdependent concepts, and that joint thought and joint projects are central to our lives, is prominent in recent philosophy of mind and action. But the idea is important in ethics as well. Whether my individual life goes well or ill is constitutively intertwined with whether our joint life goes well or ill. If there are facts about the former (which few deny) then there are facts about the latter. So if you and I differ about what we should aim for, what is at stake in the debate is our shared future welfare. The familiar idea of ‘a fact–value distinction’, implying that there is no fact-directed reflection which could help us, presupposes a faulty individualistic account of welfare. It thus misrepresents our position in a seriously unhelpful and disempowering way.

Do Material Things Have Intrinsic Properties?

Metaphysica ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Harris
Keyword(s):  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Material Things

Should Intentionality be Naturalized?

2001 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Thomas Bontly
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Physical System ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Functional Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Semantic Concepts ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
Intentional Systems ◽  
Do So

One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items (objects, properties, facts) in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, informational relations, teleological or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have no mental properties at all.

scholarly journals Analisis Fenomenologi Terhadap Makna dan Realita

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Moh Nadhir Mu’ammar
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
First Person Perspective

<p>Phenomenology is precisely this deepening of self consciousness, this restless search for what lies back of the objects in which we ordinarily and scientifically lose our <em>attention</em>, or as we now call it our <em>intention</em>. Phenomenology is not merely the theory that this is so, but the putting it into practice, the urge to explore its interminable vistas. As a discipline, it is distinct from but related to other keys in philosophy: such as ontology, epistemology, logics, and ethics. The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results. This paper globally makes a try at exploring the history and varieties of phenomenology. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its down in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.</p><p>Fenomenologi lebih tepatnya ialah pendalaman kesadaran-diri, pencarian yang gelisah ini terhadap sesuatu di balik objek-objek yang di dalamnya kita --biasanya dan secara ilmiah-- mengalahkan <em>perhatian</em> kita, atau seperti yang kita sekarang menyebutnya <em>tujuan</em>. Fenomenologi bukan hanya teori bahwa ini adalah begitu, tapi menempatkan dalam praktiknya, dorongan untuk mengeksplorasi pandangan-pandangan yang tak berkesudahan. Sebagai satu disiplin, ia berbeda dari dan terkait dengan kunci-kunci lain dalam filsafat: seperti ontologi, epistemologi, logika, dan etika. Tulisan ini secara umum akan mencoba mengeksplorasi sejarah dan varietas fenomenologi. Fenomenologi  telah berurat-akar selama berabad-abad, namun berbunga pada karya-karya Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty dan lain-lain. Isu-isu fenomenologis mengenai intensionalitas, kesadaran, dan perspektif orang-pertama cukup menyolok pada filsafat pikiran akhir-akhir ini.</p>

scholarly journals Interactive and face-to-face communication:a perspective from philosophy of mind and language

Seminar.net ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Halvor Nordby
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Further Education ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Normative Dimension

The aim of this article is to derive fundamental communication conditions from central assumptions in recent philosophy of mind and language, and then use these conditions to clarify essential similarities and differences between face-to-face and interactive communication. The analyses are to a large extent made on the basis of participant observations and dialogues with students in a further education course for medical paramedics, but the conclusions should be of interest to anyone who has a pedagogical interest in understanding the nature of the two forms of communication. The arguments set out in the article have both a descriptive and a normative dimension. They are descriptive in the sense that they aim to give a philosophical analysis of successful communication; they are normative in the sense that they seek to understand how communication can be improved. The article concludes that the philosophical analysis presented constitutes a plausible conceptual framework for analyzing empirical phenomena related to face-to-face and interactive communication.

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