Introduction

Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

The Introduction outlines the history of the narrow content debate. It introduces the famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, discusses why the debate only came to prominence in the 1970s, and outlines what is to come.

Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

Narrow mental content, if there is such a thing, is content that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker. A central topic in the philosophy of mind since the mid-1970s has been whether there is a kind of mental content that is narrow in this sense. It is widely conceded, thanks to famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, that there is a kind of mental content that is not narrow. But it is often maintained that there is also a kind of mental content that is narrow, and that such content can play various key explanatory roles relating, inter alia, to epistemology and the explanation of action. This book argues that this is a forlorn hope. It carefully distinguishes a variety of conceptions of narrow content and a variety of explanatory roles that might be assigned to narrow content. It then argues that, once we pay sufficient attention to the details, there is no promising theory of narrow content in the offing.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

In Chapter 3 we explore how the question of whether the ordinary notion of content—what we call ‘ur-content’—is narrow, trying as best as we can, on behalf of the internalist, to fend off well-known objections that emerge from the work of Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Those objections turn out not to be completely decisive. However, the project of arguing that ur-content is narrow is portrayed as deeply unpromising.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Clément Mercier

Responding to the provocative phrase ‘The Age of Grammatology’, I propose to question the notion of ‘age’, and to interrogate the powers or forces, the dynameis or dynasties attached to the interpretative model of historical periodisation. How may we think the undeniable actuality of the event beyond the sempiternal history of ages, and beyond the traditional, onto-teleological chain of power, possibility, force or dynamis that undergirds such history?


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

In Chapter 2 we argue that internalists are committed to a kind of relativism, and that theirs is a particularly radical form of relativism. Thought experiments involving certain symmetries across space and/or time play a starring role. If the kinds of symmetries featured in them are possible, we argue, the truth values of narrow content must be relative to some very unusual parameters.


Author(s):  
Simon Kirchin

This chapter introduces the distinction between thin and thick concepts and then performs a number of functions. First, two major accounts of thick concepts—separationism and nonseparationism—are introduced and, in doing so, a novel account of evaluation is indicated. Second, each chapter is outlined as is the general methodology, followed, third, by a brief history of the discussion of thick concepts, referencing Philippa Foot, Hilary Putnam, Gilbert Ryle, and Bernard Williams among others. Fourth, a number of relevant contrasts are introduced, such as the fact–value distinction and the difference between concepts, properties, and terms. Lastly, some interesting and relevant questions are raised that, unfortunately, have to be left aside.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-340
Author(s):  
Kate Rousmaniere

AbstractThis essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education.


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry McMullin

In the late 1940s John von Neumann began to work on what he intended as a comprehensive “theory of [complex] automata.” He started to develop a book length manuscript on the subject in 1952. However, he put it aside in 1953, apparently due to pressure of other work. Due to his tragically early death in 1957, he was never to return to it. The draft manuscript was eventually edited, and combined for publication with some related lecture transcripts, by Burks in 1966. It is clear from the time and effort that von Neumann invested in it that he considered this to be a very significant and substantial piece of work. However, subsequent commentators (beginning even with Burks) have found it surprisingly difficult to articulate this substance. Indeed, it has since been suggested that von Neumann's results in this area either are trivial, or, at the very least, could have been achieved by much simpler means. It is an enigma. In this paper I review the history of this debate (briefly) and then present my own attempt at resolving the issue by focusing on an analysis of von Neumann's problem situation. I claim that this reveals the true depth of von Neumann's achievement and influence on the subsequent development of this field, and further that it generates a whole family of new consequent problems, which can still serve to inform—if not actually define—the field of artificial life for many years to come.


2007 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herwig Wolfram

Throughout the world, historians expand the history of their nations and states into periods when these polities did not yet exist. The French speak of their first dynasty and mean the Frankish Merovingians. Until recently French history textbooks even for students in the French overseas territories started with “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” In the German Kaiserreich between 1871 and 1918, let us say, little Jan Kowalski in Poznan had to accept the Germanic peoples as his forefathers, as every textbook on German history dealt with them at length. Needless to say, not only German medievalists speak of Germans long before theodiscus or teutonicus came to mean deutsch. All over the world people search for the roots of their identity. Take, for instance, the present preoccupation with Celtic ancestors. Not only the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Bretons, but a great many other Europeans also want to be Celts by origin. “Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit the Austrian neutrality perfectly well,” as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976 after Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had openly declared that the Celts and not the Germans were our forefathers.


1972 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 220-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. Thomson

When the history of Sino-American relations since 1949 is written in years to come, it will very likely lump together much of the two decades from the Korean War to the Kissinger-Chou meeting as a period of drearily sustained deadlock. Korean hostilities will be blended rather easily into Indochina hostilities, John Foster Dulles into Dean Rusk. The words and deeds of American East Asian intervention, of the containment and isolation of China, will seem an unbroken continuity. And at the end, under most improbable auspices but for commonsense balance-of-power reasons, will come the Zen-like Nixon stroke that cut the Gordian knot and opened a new era.


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