The Tree of Life: Universal and Cultural Features of Folkbiological Taxonomies and Inductions

Two parallel studies were performed with members of very different cultures—industrialized American and traditional Itzaj-Mayan—to investigate potential universal and cultural features of folkbiological taxonomies and inductions. Specifically, we examined how individuals organize natural categories into taxonomies, and whether they readily use these taxonomies to make inductions about those categories. The results of the first study indicate that there is a cultural consensus both among Americans and the Itzaj in their taxonomies of local mammal species, and that these taxonomies resemble and depart from a corresponding scientific taxonomy in similar ways. However, cultural differences are also shown, such as a greater differentiation and more ecological considerations in Itzaj taxonomies. In a second study, Americans and the Itzaj used their taxonomies to guide similarity- and typicality-based inductions. These inductions converge and diverge crossculturally and regarding scientific inductions where their respective taxonomies do. These findings reveal some universal features of folkbiological inductions, but they also reveal some cultural features such as diversity-based inductions among Americans, and ecologically based inductions among the Itzaj. Overall, these studies suggest that while building folkbiological taxonomies and using them for folkbiological inductions is a universal competence of human cognition there are also important cultural constraints on that competence.     

Women Philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle

This paper argues that there were women involved with philosophy on a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity. It does so by tracing the lives and where extant the writings of these women. However, since the sources, both ancient and modern, from which we derive our knowledge about these women are so sexist and easily distort our view of these women and their accomplishments, the paper also discusses the manner in which their histories come down to us as well as the histories themselves. It discusses in detail the following women: the Pythagorean women philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Aspasia and Diotima of the 5th century B.C., Arete, Hipparchia, Pamphile and the women Epicureans—all from the 4th century B.C. the five logician daughters of a famous Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C., and finally Hypatia who lived in the 4th century A.D.     

Tall is typical: Central tendency, ideal dimensions, and graded category structure among tree experts and novices

Many accounts of categorization equate goodness-of-example with central tendency for common taxonomic categories; the best examples of a category are average members--those that are most similar to most other category members. In the present study, we asked 24 tree experts and 20 novices to rate goodness-of-example for a sample of 48 trees and found (1) that the internal structure of the category tree differed between novices and experts and (2) that central tendency did not determine goodness-of-example ratings for either group. For novices, familiarity determined goodness-of-example ratings. For experts, the "ideal" dimensions of height and weediness, rather than average similarity to other trees, were the primary predictors of goodness-of-example ratings for experts. The best examples of tree were not species of average height, but of extreme height. The worst examples were the weediest trees. We also found systematic differences in predictors of goodness-of-example as a function of type of expertise. We argue that the internal structure of taxonomic categories can be shaped by goal-related experience and is not necessarily a reflection of the attributional structure of the environment. Implications for models of category structure and category learning are discussed.     

“Stand Up Straight”: Notes Toward a History of Posture

The essay presents a set of interlinked claims about posture in modern culture. Over the past two centuries it has come to define a wide range of assumptions in the West from what makes human beings human (from Lamarck to Darwin and beyond) to the efficacy of the body in warfare (from Dutch drill manuals in the 17th century to German military medical studies of soldiers in the 19th century). Dance and sport both are forms of posture training in terms of their own claims. Posture separates ‘primitive’ from ‘advanced’ peoples and the ‘ill’ from the ‘healthy.’ Indeed an entire medical sub-specialty developed in which gymnastics defined and recuperated the body. But all of these claims were also part of a Western attempt to use posture (and the means of altering it) as the litmus test for the healthy modern body of the perfect citizen. Focusing on the centrality of posture in two oddly linked moments of modern thought—modern Zionist thought and Nationalism in early 20th century China—in terms of bodily reform, we show how “posture” brings all of the earlier debates together to reform the body.     

Values Extolled in U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Value themes were extracted from U.S. presidential inaugural addresses of the 19th and 20th centuries. The values most frequently extolled were liberty, belief in God, patriotism, justice, personal responsibility, and peace. More references to lowering taxes were made in the 19th compared with the 20th century and by Republicans compared with Democrats. Truth/honesty was more frequently mentioned in the 19th century than in the 20th century, but courage was more frequently mentioned in the 20th century. Implications are discussed.     

Seeing bodies in pain: from Hippocrates to Freud

The study of pain has a history as long as that of Western medicine. In the 20th and 21st centuries much has been made about the epistemological problem of seeing somatic as well as psychic pain in the clinical setting. The two schools seem to be those which rely on self-reporting and those that rely on the interpretation of visual materials (expression or brain scans) by trained specialists. That this problem was central to the 19th century study of pain is clear as these origins (especially Darwin) are often cited in today's literature as 'proof' of their validity. That the problem was also central to one of the early 20th century thinkers most indebted to Darwin, Sigmund Freud, is less well known and how he resolved this paradox of self-reporting versus seeing seems to have been overlooked.     

Classifying Muslims: Contextualizing Religion and Race in the United Kingdom and Germany

Since the late 20th century, public discourse in Muslim-minority countries has centered around the question of how to classify Muslims. In this paper, we compare the state, academic, and self-classification of Muslims in two countries: the United Kingdom and Germany. We propose that the historical experience of anti-Semitism makes religion a more salient master category to understand Muslims in Germany, while the history of both anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism largely resulting from colonial domination means that religion together with race are master categories used to understand Muslims in the United Kingdom. Through this multilayered ethnographic and historical analysis, we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in both the political and academic milieu about what it means to be Muslim, emphasizing the importance of the interplay between sociopolitical categories and self-identifications.     

Toward a Post-Representational Politics?: Participation in the 21St Century

Representational democracy has been the main form of government in the West since the English, American, and French revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, there are indications that its ability to frame the relationship between citizen and state has begun to weaken. This weakening can be traced to many factors. One of these is the emergence of new collective actors, such as social movements, and the (re)recognition of the arena of “civil society” just as the articulating power of political parties began to erode. Although these emerged initially under the umbrella of the nation state, toward the end of the 20th century a qualitatively new dynamic of networked social activism illustrated that the nation-state was no longer the only location for political action and the exercise of citizenship. These trends point to a new participatory dynamic, which could not yet be said to offer a serious challenge to representative forms of politics, but that arguably marks the beginning of the decline of that form. However, we are far from understanding how a participatory democracy might replace representational government. This article argues that we should begin now to discuss the uncomfortable gaps in our understanding of what “qualifies” participation, in order to develop a new theory of new practice and strengthen the content and potential of this new political imaginary.     

由知识对伦理的辩护到伦理对知识的批判——论知识的伦理价值

古希腊哲学最早将美德与知识相联系,“真”的达到就是“善”的实现,人的合目的性是建立在其合规律性的基础上的,伦理学从此有了独立存在的根据。近代知识论提出“知识就是力量”,将获得知识与获得幸福视为同一,知识(理性)是建立伦理的绝对普遍的坚实基础,人的尊严和主体性成为伦理追求的最大价值。20世纪以来,由于科学知识的异化,“知识与人的幸福和命运问题”凸现在当代伦理学面前。为知识找寻一条“应然”的光明之路,不仅是伦理学的理论使命,也是人类自身的神圣使命。     

Teleological Essentialism: Generalized

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments.     

Does Mary know I experience plus rather than quus? A new hard problem

Realism about cognitive or semantic phenomenology, the view that certain conscious states are intrinsically such as to ground thought or understanding, is increasingly being taken seriously in analytic philosophy. The principle aim of this paper is to argue that it is extremely difficult to be a physicalist about cognitive phenomenology. The general trend in later 20th century/early 21st century philosophy of mind has been to account for the content of thought in terms of facts outside the head of the thinker at the time of thought, e.g. in terms of causal relations between thinker and world, or in terms of the natural purposes for which mental representations have developed. However, on the assumption that consciousness is constitutively realised by what is going on inside the head of a thinker at the time of experience, the content of cognitive phenomenology cannot be accounted for in this way. Furthermore, any internalist account of content is particularly susceptible to Kripkensteinian rule following worries. It seems that if someone knew all the physical facts about what is going on in my head at the time I was having a given experience with cognitive phenomenology, they would not thereby know whether that state had ??straight?? rather than ??quus-like?? content, e.g. whether the experience was intrinsically such as the ground the thought that two plus two equals four or intrinsically such as to ground the thought that two quus two equals four. The project of naturalising consciousness is much harder for realists about cognitive phenomenology.     

The cultural salience of moral character and virtue declined in twentieth century America

In a large corpus of American books, we tracked how frequently words related to moral excellence and virtue appeared over the twentieth century. Considering the well-established cultural trend in the USA toward greater individualism and its implications for the moral domain, we predicted that terms related to morality and virtue would appear with diminishing frequency in American books. Two studies supported our predictions: Study 1 showed a decline in the use of general moral terms such as virtue, decency and conscience, throughout the twentieth century. In Study 2, we examined the appearance frequency of 50 virtue words (e.g. honesty, patience, compassion) and found a significant decline for 74% of them. Overall, our findings suggest that during the twentieth century, moral ideals and virtues have largely waned from the public conversation.     

Revisiting the Antecedents of Interreligious Dialogue

This article looks critically at the trend to connect contemporary interreligious dialogue with certain events and developments that took place in Europe and India during the 19th and early 20th centuries: (i) the comparative study of religion, (ii) the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, (iii) three World Missionary Conferences in the first half of the 20th century, (iv) renascent Hinduism in India, and (v) Indian Christian efforts for inculturation. These events/developments are often perceived as the formative factors of dialogue. But this essay argues that they had their own complexities, agendas, and targets and rarely had interreligious dialogue as their objective or focus. Uncritical reading of the history of interreligious dialogue ignores how colonialism and imperialism have shaped these “antecedents.”     

Modern Chinese psychology: Its indigenous roots and international influences

Psychological thinking in China originated 2000 years ago when Chinese philosophers debated about the goodness and evilness of human nature. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Jesuit missionaries introduced the Catholic scholastic psychology into China. Modern Chinese psychology was mainly introduced from Germany, America, and Japan in the early 20th century. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Chinese psychology tried to stage a reform by taking the psychology of the Soviet Union as its model. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) psychology was abandoned due to its Western roots. In the late 1970s psychology was rehabilitated and new fields were opened up for study. Currently, Chinese psychology is adopting a multi‐dimensional approach to meet the demands of China's modernization movement.     

HUME ON KNOWLEDGE,CERTAINTY AND PROBABILITY: ANTICIPATING THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE ANALYTIC/SYNTHETIC DIVIDE?

Abstract:  This paper contends that the first argument of Hume's "Of scepticism with regard to reason" entails that humans have no knowledge as Hume understands knowledge. In defending this claim, we also see how Hume's argument anticipates an important aspect of an extremely influential 20th century development: the collapse of the analytic/synthetic distinction.     

One ring to rule them all: Master discourses of enlightenment—and racism—from colonial to contemporary New Zealand

We interrogated historical continuity and change in discourses of enlightenment and racism through the analysis of 160 years of New Zealand Speeches from the Throne (1854–2014, 163 speeches). Enlightenment discourses of benevolence and perfectibility were prevalent in all periods, much more so than racism. ‘Old‐fashioned’ racism took the form of an assumed civilizational superiority (including accusations of ‘barbarism’) during colonization, with ‘modern’ racism taking forms like blaming Māori for not ‘productively’ using the land. Both declined to almost zero by the 20th century, undermining the idea of ‘old‐fashioned’ versus ‘modern’ racism. Utilitarian discourses peaked in the late 19th to early 20th centuries as justification for Māori land alienation. ‘Master discourses of enlightenment’ consisted of a central core of social representations that changed at the periphery, with a gradual expansion of symbolic inclusion of Māori in discourses of national identity to the point where biculturalism is the dominant discourse for elites today.     

THE NATURALIZATION OF SCRIPTURAL REASON IN SEVENTEENTH‐CENTURY EPISTEMOLOGY

Several scholars have claimed that the decline of revealed or Scriptural mysteries in the early Enlightenment was a consequence of the trajectories of Reformed theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reformed theology's fideistic stance, it is claimed, undermined earlier frameworks for relating reason to revealed mysteries; consequently, rationalism emerged as an alternative to such fideism in figures like the Cambridge Platonists. This article argues that Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century were not fideists but re‐affirmed Medieval claims about the eschatological concord of reason and revealed mysteries. Furthermore, the article suggests that early Enlightenment attitudes to religious mysteries owe more to innovations in Socinianism and Cambridge Platonism than to mainstream Reformed theology.     

Perception: Mirror-Image or Action?

In the article two viewpoints on the mind’s influence on perception are considered. One of them was developed on the assumption that perception is a nonproblematic source of knowledge about the world, which is free from mind’s influence—perception as a mirror-image. Another viewpoint is perception as action, i.e. active search and gathering the relevant information, its processing and evaluation. First viewpoint has dominated in philosophy for a long time, the second one has been developing in psychology from the 80th of the 20th century. The aim of the paper is to examine some philosophically significant corollaries from both positions concerning objectiveness, epistemological status of an observation, truth, meaning of name. Analysis showed that perception as action is non-compatible with many traditional concepts, and it goes both against empiricism and against realism as it involves some critical arguments, e.g. theory ladenness of observations, underdetermination of theory by facts, the historical development of a scientific fact.     

The form of the soul ― on the body in Freud’s psychoanalysis

To formulate the problem of the relation between body and soul in terms of how one should understand the relation between consciousness and the brain, or in terms of explaining how mind can arise out of matter, is a modern and far from innocent tendency that has instigated the whole spectrum of theories and answers suggested by the philosophy of mind of the so-called Analytic tradition during the 20th century. During the last 5 decades, we have seen a number of attempts at incorporating Freud into this discussion about the relation between body and soul. In this article, the author develops an argument according to which the philosophy of mind of the Analytic tradition is not really an appropriate intellectual environment for Freud´s theory of the body and its constitutive rôle. Rather, we should turn to phenomenology and transcendental philosophy where the body is thematized, not in terms of matter taken to give rise to consciousness in an empirical sense, but rather in terms of the “lived body” that is taken, in a transcendental sense, to constitute the organization of meaning in our conscious and our unconscious psychological life. On the basis of an outline of this phenomenological theory, the author argues that Freud, most of all in his theory of psychosexual development, thematizes the body as the form of the soul.