Against the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mind</Emphasis> Argument

The Mind Argument is an argument for the incompatibility of indeterminism and anyone’s having a choice about anything that happens. Peter van Inwagen rejects the Mind Argument not because he is able to point out the flaw in it, but because he accepts both that determinism is incompatible with anyone’s having a choice about anything that happens and that it is possible for someone to have a choice about something that happens. In this paper I first diagnose and clear up a confusion in recent discussions of the Mind Argument and then go on to show why it is a bad argument.     

Probing the Fundamentalist Worldview

The following is a response to Calvin Mercer’s (2009) Slaves to Faith, A Therapist Looks Inside the Fundamentalist Mind from a multicultural pastoral perspective.     

Decade of the Mind

In the Fall of 2007, ten neuroscientists published a proposal for an interdisciplinary research initiative, the Decade of the Mind, that would focus on four "broad but intertwined areas": mental health, research on high-level cognitive functions, education, and computational applications (such as intelligent machines). I review the basic ideas behind the proposal and discuss the four proposed areas of research. I argue that for research on higher cognitive functions and in particular, for research and practice in education, the Decade of the Mind is a welcome initiative that may change our lives for the better. Therefore, the proposal, which is scientifically interdisciplinary in nature, has to be politically international.     

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Books reviewed: Graff, Gerald, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind
Reviewed by Greg Carey
Lancaster Theological Seminary     

More than One Flaw: Reply to Millican

Millican (Mind 113(451):437–476, 2004) claims to have detected ‘the one fatal flaw in Anselm’s ontological argument.’ I argue that there is more than one important flaw in the position defended in Millican (Mind 113(451):437–476, 2004). First, Millican’s reconstruction of Anselm’s argument does serious violence to the original text. Second, Millican’s generalised objection fails to diagnose any flaw in a vast range of ontological arguments. Third, there are independent reasons for thinking that Millican’s generalised objection is unpersuasive.     

Hegel's Critique of Fichte in the 1802/3 Essay on Natural Right

This paper provides a reconstruction and critical assessment of Hegel's critique of Fichte's political philosophy in his 1802/3 essay On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right. I argue that Hegel's critique, while not entirely successful, raises a serious problem for Fichte's political philosophy as presented in the 1796/7 Foundations of Natural Right.     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: The Person and the Human Mind, Christopher Gill (ed.) The Element of Fire: Science, Art and the Human World, by Anthony O'Hears     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of‘Abd al-Jabbar. By George F. Hourani . De l'absence et de l'inconnaissance de Dieu d'après les écrits aréopagites et Martin Heidegger. By Christos Yannaras . Translated by Jaques Touraille . Jean-Paul Sartre: His Philosophy. By René Lafarge . Translated by Marina Smyth -Kok . Freedom of Choice Affirmed. By Corliss Lamont . Structuralism. By Jean Piaget . Translated and edited by Chaninah Meschler . Roles and Values. An Introduction to Social Ethics. By R. S. Downie . Morality and Religion. By W. W. Bartley , III. Resurrection de Jésus et Message Pascal. By Xavier Léon -Dufour . The Acts of the Apostles. By E. Haenchen . The Gospel of John. By Rudolf Bultmann . The Future of our Religious Past: Essays in Honour of Rudolf Bultmann. Edited by James M. Robinson . Translated by C. E. Carlston and R. P. Scharlemann . Augustus to Constantine. By Robert M. Grant . Sacramentum Unitatis: Ein Beitrag zum Verstndnäis der Kirche bei Cyprian. By Ulrich Wickert . Egeria's Travels. By John Wilkinson . Judaism and the Early Christian Mind. By Robert L. Wilken . The Trial of Luther. By James Atkinson . The Poetry of Grace, Reformation Themes and Structures in English Seventeenth-Century Poetry. By William H. Halewood . Conflicts in French Society. Anticlericalism, Education and Morals in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Theodore Zeldin . Infallible? An Enquiry. By Hans Küung . Translated by Eric Mosbacher . Theology and Meaning. A Critique of Metatheological Scepticism. By Raeburne S. Heimbeck . God and Rationality. By Thomas F. Torrance . Foundations of Theology. By Gerald O'Collins , S. J. Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. Edited by Philip Mc Shane , S. J. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas. By Bernard J. F. Lonergan , S. J., edited by J. Patout Burns , S. J. with an introduction by Frederick E. Crowe , S. J. A Catholic Dictionary of Theology. Volume III: Hegel to Paradise. World and Church. By Edward Schillebeeckx . Christian Celebration: The Mass. By J. D. Crichtron . The Priest and God's People at Prayer—The Priest in a Flexible Liturgy. By Joseph M. Champlin . China and the West: Mankind Evolving. Edited by A. Dyson and B. Towers . Jamaa. A Charismatic Movement in Katanga. By Johannes Fabian .     

Searle on rediscovering the mind

John R. Searle,The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 270 pp. $22.50. I would like to thank my colleagues Bernard Dauenhauer and Beth Preston for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.     

The politics of communities: a review of H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.'s The Foundations of Bioethics

This review essay examines H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s The Foundations of Bioethics, a contemporary nonfeminist text in mainstream biomedical ethics. it fo-cuses upon a central concept, Engelhardt's idea of the moral community and argues that the most serious problem in the book is its failure to take account of the political and social structures of moral communities, structures which deeply affect issues in biomedical ethics.     

Free will and mystery: looking past the Mind Argument

Among challenges to libertarians, the Mind Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the Mind Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the Mind Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument serves to renew the challenge. The Assimilation Argument challenges libertarians to explain how ostensible exercises of free will are relevantly different from other causally undetermined outcomes, outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. In particular, libertarians must explain how agents can have the power to settle which of two causally possible futures becomes the actual future. This will require them to distinguish cases where this power is supposedly present from similar cases where it’s clearly absent.     

Analytic philosophy, 1925–69: emergence,management and nature

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that during the first half of the 1960s The Journal of Philosophy quickly moved from publishing work in diverse philosophical traditions to, essentially, only publishing analytic philosophy. Further, the changes at the journal are shown, with the help of previous work on the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review, to be part of a pattern involving generalist philosophy journals in Britain and America during the period 1925–69. The pattern is one in which journals controlled by analytic philosophers systematically promote a form of critical philosophy and marginalize rival approaches to philosophy. This pattern, it is argued, helps to explain the growing dominance of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and allows characterizing this form of philosophy as, at least during 1925–69, a sectarian form of critical philosophy.     

Four components that sustain teachers’ commitment to students – a relational and temporal model

Teacher commitment is a key factor for explaining how and why teachers care about their students’ learning and well-being, and it is a well-known fact that teachers invest emotionally in their work and their students. The purpose of the article is to contribute to the conceptual underpinning of commitment in relation to the teacher-student relationship and to suggest a conceptual model based on empirical material. Eight teachers were selected for interview, all of whom had been in the profession since 1993 and had reported high commitment throughout their careers. The content of the teachers’ accounts were analysed, with attention to how commitment to students manifested itself in their stories. The analysis resulted in a model consisting of four temporally related components of teacher commitment to students: moral, action/motivational, knowledge/self-confidence and reward/self-esteem. Understanding teacher commitment is important for preventing teacher attrition. Rather than applying general measures to boost commitment, this model provides conceptual bases for addressing deficits in particular components of teacher commitment.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Metontology</Emphasis>, moral particularism,and the “art of existing:” a dialogue between Heidegger,Aristotle, and Bernard Williams

An important shift occurs in Martin Heidegger’s thinking one year after the publication of Being and Time, in the Appendix to the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. The shift is from his project of fundamental ontology—which provides an existential analysis of human existence on an ontological level—to metontology. Metontology is a neologism that refers to the ontic sphere of human experience and to the regional ontologies that were excluded from Being and Time. It is within metontology, Heidegger states, that “the question of ethics may be raised for the first time.” This paper makes explicit both Heidegger’s argument for metontology, and the relation between metontology and ethics. In examining what he means by “the art of existing,” the paper argues that there is an ethical dimension to Heidegger’s thinking that corresponds to a moderate form of moral particularism. In order to justify this position, a comparative analysis is made between Heidegger, Aristotle, and Bernard Williams.     

Sociological aspects of Heidegger's being and time

Heidegger's phenomenological approach, as exhibited in Being and Time, provides a conceptual background to discussions in role‐theory. His work was not meant as an empirical contribution to sociology, nor does he assimilate sociology to conceptual inquiry. Heidegger's contention is, rather, that if we understand the way in which human beings exist (the nature of Dasein) we shall understand why empirical role‐theoretical inquiries are possible. Without experience, without paying attention to the facts of human life, there could be no phenomenological enterprise. But by eliciting the fundamental structure of Dasein Heidegger has pointed to what makes the empirical data ultimately intelligible. The enterprise is a transcendental one, in the Kantian sense.     

The indeterminacy of color vision

A critical survey of recent work on the ontological status of colors supports the conclusion that, while some accounts of color can plausibly be dismissed, no single account can yet be endorsed. Among the remaining options are certain forms of color realism according which familiar colors are instantiated by objects in our extra-cranial visual environment. Also still an option is color anti-realism, the view that familiar colors are, at best, biologically adaptive fictions, instantiated nowhere.I argue that there is simply no fact of the matter as to which of these remaining options is correct. I blame this indeterminacy on the fact that color vision exhibits several of the hallmarks of a modular input system, as described by Jerry Fodor in The Modularity of Mind.Finally, I speculate that the range of live options falling within the scope of the indeterminacy may be even broader than initially indicated.     

Toward a Philosophy of Blockchain: A Symposium: Introduction

This article introduces the symposium “Toward a Philosophy of Blockchain,” which provides a philosophical contemplation of blockchain technology, the digital ledger software underlying cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, for the secure transfer of money, assets, and information via the Internet without needing a third‐party intermediary. The symposium offers philosophical scholarship on a new topic, blockchain technology, from a variety of perspectives. The philosophical themes discussed include mathematical models of reality, signification, and the sociopolitical institutions that structure human life and interaction. The symposium also investigates the metaphilosophical theme of how to create a philosophy of anything, specifically a new topic such as blockchain technology. Repeated themes are identified, in all areas of philosophical inquiry (ontology, epistemology, and axiology), and conceptual resources are elaborated to contribute to a philosophical understanding of blockchain technology. Thus, philosophy as a metaphilosophical approach is shown to be able to provide an understanding of the conceptual, theoretical, and foundational dimensions of novelty and emergence in the world, with a particular focus on blockchain technology.     

The Problem of Other Minds

This paper reimagines the traditional problem of other minds. On a Cartesian view, the problem involves humans’ inability to perceive other persons’ minds. Similarly, Gilbert Ryle claims that we cannot directly access another’s mind. The paper’s rethinking of the problem of other minds moves beyond these questions of perceptibility and accessibility. It asks whether there are certain groups of people whose minds are systematically misinterpreted, or even denied mentality. It argues that there are. This claim builds off recent work in philosophy and social psychology on epistemic injustice and the role of social categories in mental state attribution. The paper proposes the Problem of the Other’s Mind: the phenomenon of a (relatively) socially privileged person’s inability or lack of desire to understand the mind of a (relatively) socially underprivileged person.     

BOOK REVIEW

The Evolving Mind BEN GOERTZEL, Gordon and Breach, 1993, cloth. ISBN 2–88124–587–0, pp. 260, index

From Power to Partnership: Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community ALFONSO MONTUORI AND ISABELLA CONTI San Francisco: HarperSanFrisco. 1993, paper. ISBN 0–06–250548–3, $13.00 USD pp. 281 includes index

Applied Chaos Theory: A Paradigm For Complexity A. B. CAMBEL, Academic Press, 1993, cloth; pp. 260, index; 38 USD     

Understanding adolescent type 1 diabetes self-management as an adaptive process: A grounded theory approach

Objective: To develop a conceptual understanding of the process of adapting to the self-management of type 1 diabetes during adolescence.

Design: Participants were recruited from a National Health Service paediatric diabetes service within the south-west of England which runs six countywide diabetes clinics. Thirteen interviews were conducted using a social constructivist grounded theory approach.

Results: The findings illustrate how self-management can be understood in terms of a continuum-based framework, ranging from difficulties with, to successful self-management. Adaptation within the continuum can further be understood by specific transitional phases and process mechanisms, providing further depth to individuals’ experiences of adaptation.

Conclusion: This investigation provides a conceptual understanding of the complex issues adolescents encounter while adapting to and integrating a diabetes self-management regime into their lives. It provides an invaluable framework for exploring psychological mechanisms and contextualising them within a self-management continuum. Implications for healthcare professionals are discussed and further research proposes whether the model could be applicable to other chronic illnesses.