Voluntary involuntariness: thought suppression and the regulation of the experience of will

Participants were asked to carry out a series of simple tasks while following mental control instructions. In advance of each task, they either suppressed thoughts of their intention to perform the task, concentrated on such thoughts, or monitored their thoughts without trying to change them. Suppression resulted in reduced reports of intentionality as compared to monitoring, and as compared to concentration. There was a weak trend for suppression to enhance reported intentionality for a repetition of the action carried out after suppression instructions had been discontinued.     

The step to rationality: the efficacy of thought experiments in science, ethics, and free will

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were—or, at least, could have been—discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Although problematic for a strict empiricist, the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry may have been crucial for humankind's step to rationality—including the discovery of universal principles of mathematics, physics, ethics, and an account of free will that is compatible with determinism.     

Progress and tradition in medieval Ashkenaz

Intellectual historians have identified differing attitudes toward the notion of progress among the churchmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in western Europe. The present study aims to trace the views of rabbinic figures in medieval Ashkenaz during this period. Tosafists such as Isaiah di Trani, Samson of Sens, and Asher b. Yehiel felt that subsequent teachers and decisors could progress beyond the formulations and rulings of their predecessors, while Rashi and Rashbam believed that progress within the post-Talmudic period, at least with respect to legal rulings, was virtually impossible. At the same time, there was a consensus that the spirituality of earlier generations was greater, and that certain prerogatives in ritual matters which were accepted in the earlier period were no longer valid. As in the Christian world, those who were partisans of progress were criticized by others for their stance. Within the Sefardic orbit, Maimonides was virtually alone in his view that the ``decline of the generations' was not an inexorable process. Those Tosafists who agreed with this position were his nearest contemporary allies. The application of dialectic by the Tosafists to justify existing Ashkenazic practices that appeared to be contrary to Talmudic law parallels the activities of canon lawyers, as do their efforts to deal with new technologies. Even the more conservative group of Ashkenazic rabbinic thinkers looked upon the idea of newness itself quite favorably. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Arthur Prior and medieval logic

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important r?le played by Prior??s research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior??s work in ancient and medieval logic.     

Interpretivism and norms

Philosophical Studies - This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs (and thus...     

The topics in medieval logic

The topics is a theory of argumentation based upon topoi or in Latin loci. The medieval logicians used works by Aristotle and Boethius as their sources for this doctrine, but they developed it in a rather original way. The topics became a higher-level analysis of arguments which are non-valid from a purely formal point of view, but where it is none the less legitimate to infer the conclusion from the premiss(es). In this connection the topics give rise to a number of discussions about the form and the matter of arguments. Further the topic contribute to the elaboration of the important doctrine of the second intentions, i.e. higher-level concepts of the particular things. In some respects the topics may be said to form a link between formal and informal logic. The topics vanished as a part of logic at the end of the Middle Ages, perhaps because the medieval logicians never got rid of Boethius' claim to have compiled a complete list of the loci, which was an unlucky one. The topics does not have an exact parallel in modern formal logic, but some reflections on non-formal argumentation by recent authors contain certain resemblances to it.     

Aristotle'sTopics and medieval obligational disputations

In writing this paper I have gained much from discussions with Simo Knuuttila and Calvin Normore.     

Mobility and marriage in two medieval Jewish societies

A significant characteristic of pre-modern Jewish life in both the Muslim and Christian realms is geographic mobility. There has been little specific scholarly work on Jewish women and geographic mobility but the available primary sources show that women traveled frequently and for a variety of reasons. This essay focuses on women’s mobility and particularly their migrations due to marriage in both Muslim and Christian milieus. It poses questions about how medieval Jewish communities balanced values of family propinquity versus economic interests. Marriage contracts and letters from the Cairo Genizah demonstrate that marriages over significant distances to cement mercantile or intellectual alliances were not uncommon. Genizah writings also reveal that indigent women were frequent travelers, seeking runaway husbands and financial support. Rabbinic responsa literature of the tenth to thirteenth centuries from France and Germany shows that Jewish women’s mobility in Ashkenaz, both for marriage and for business, was generally within a more limited region. In this society, families tended to move as a group and women often preferred migrating with their parents rather than remaining with a husband. The far more frequent long distance marriages among Jewish women in the Muslim world reflect a more developed system of far-flung scholarly contacts and economic alliances. Similarly, the much larger Jewish population in Islamic realms also meant that there were more women from elite families and more indigent abandoned wives, the two groups particularly likely to travel due to marital prospects and marital woes.     

Social group norms,school norms,and children's aggressive intentions

This study examined whether the effect of social group norms on 7‐ and 10‐year‐old children's aggression can be moderated or extinguished by contrary school norms. Children (n=384) participated in a simulation in which they were assigned membership in a social group for a drawing competition against an outgroup. Participants learnt that their group had a norm of inclusion, exclusion, or exclusion‐plus‐relational aggression, toward non‐group members, and that the school either had a norm of inclusion, or no such norm. Findings indicated that group norms influenced the participants' direct and indirect aggressive intentions, but that the school norm moderated the group norm effect, with the school's norm effect tending to be greater for indirect vs. direct aggression, males vs. females, and younger vs. older participants. Discussion focused on how school norms can be developed, endorsed, and presented so that they have their most lasting effect on children. Aggr. Behav. 36:195–204, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Friendship and epistemic norms

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our friends in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety.     

Noncognitivism and agent-centered norms

Philosophical Studies - This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational...