Was John Stuart Mill a Pluralist?

In his Autobiography,John Stuart Mill,the 19th-century British political philosopher,portrayed his On Liberty as being "a kind of philosophic text-book" dedicated to a single truth,that is,"the importance,to man and society,of a large variety in types of character,and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions." The Mill of On Liberty may seem to be a pluralist who tends to prefer difference per se to goodness of a uniform pattern,many-sidedness to conformity,and eccentricity to mediocrity.This paper seeks to challenge this argument by paying close attention to the text.It argues that the Mill of On Liberty was far from a single-minded pluralist.Two divergent positions are found throughout his reasoning:one is a pluralist idea that an individual's own plan of life is the best,no matter how base or licentious it might be;the other is the belief that there exist a limited number of ideal ways of life which define what the good life is.The two positions are,if not mutually exclusive,at least in important aspects indicative of some profound tension at the center of Mill's thought.     

Was Helmholtz a Bayesian?

Modern developments in machine vision and object recognition have generated renewed interest in the proposal for drawing inferences put forward by the Rev. Thomas Bayes (1701-1759). In this connection the epistemological studies by Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894) are often cited as laying the foundation of the currently popular move to regard perception as Bayesian inference. Helmholtz in his mature writings tried to reconcile the German idealist notions of reality-as-hypothesis with scientists' quests for the laws of nature, and espoused the view that we "attain knowledge of the lawful order in the realm of the real, but only in so far as it is represented in the tokens within the system of sensory impressions". His propositions of inferring objects from internal sensory signals by what he called 'unconscious inferences' have made Helmholtz be regarded as a proto-Bayesian. But juxtaposing Bayes's original writings, the modern formulation of Bayesian inference, and Helmholtz's views of perception reveals only a tenuous relationship.     

Was Kant a nonconceptualist?

I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

Was Feyerabend a Postmodernist?

This article asks whether the philosophy of Paul K. Feyerabend can be reasonably classified as postmodernist, a label applied to him by friends and foes alike. After describing some superficial similarities between the style and content of both Feyerabend’s and postmodernist writings, I offer three more robust characterisations of postmodernism in terms of relativism, ‘incredulity to metanarratives’, and ‘depthlessness’. It emerges that none of these characterisations offers a strong justification for classifying Feyerabend as ‘postmodern’ in any significant sense. Indeed, what does emerge is that Feyerabend’s work was fundamentally informed by a humanitarian vision of the value of science that is, in fact, strikingly modern.     

Was Merleau-Ponty a ‘transcendental’ phenomenologist?

Whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s version of phenomenology should be considered a form of ‘transcendental’ philosophy is open to debate. Although the Phenomenology of Perception presents his position as a transcendental one, many of its features—such as its exploitation of empirical science—might lead to doubt that it can be. This paper considers whether Merleau-Ponty meets what I call the ‘transcendentalist challenge’ of defining and grounding claims of a distinctive transcendental kind. It begins by highlighting three features—the absolute ego, the pure phenomenal field, and the reduction—that Husserl had used to justify claims of a specifically transcendental kind within a phenomenological framework. It then examines how Merleau-Ponty modifies each of these features to focus on the lived body and a factically conditioned phenomenal field, while remaining ambivalent about the reduction. Finally, it assesses whether Merleau-Ponty’s modified position can still legitimately be considered transcendental. I argue that—despite his own rhetoric—this modified position shapes the modality of Merleau-Ponty’s claims in such a way that his phenomenology cannot meet the transcendentalist challenge and therefore should not be considered ‘transcendental.’     

Was Jekyll Hyde?

Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split-personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split-personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals.     

Data selection and responsible conduct: Was millikan a fraud?

This paper addresses a problem in reporting scientific research. The problem is how to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable data selection. Robert Millikan is notorious for an infamous remark that he used all his data when in fact he had used a selection. On this basis he has been accused of fraud. There is a tension here — historians and his defenders see his selection as understandable and legitimate, while current statements about the Responsible Conduct of Research imply his selection was illegitimate. This paper discusses two main issues that arise in assessing his conduct, whether he was intentionally misleading and whether he actually did mislead the scientific community about some facts of nature. It is argued that he was not intentionally misleading, and that it is unlikely that he misled the scientific community.     

Data selection and responsible conduct: Was millikan a fraud?

This paper addresses a problem in reporting scientific research. The problem is how to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable data selection. Robert Millikan is notorious for an infamous remark that he used all his data when in fact he had used a selection. On this basis he has been accused of fraud. There is a tension here — historians and his defenders see his selection as understandable and legitimate, while current statements about the Responsible Conduct of Research imply his selection was illegitimate. This paper discusses two main issues that arise in assessing his conduct, whether he was intentionally misleading and whether he actually did mislead the scientific community about some facts of nature. It is argued that he was not intentionally misleading, and that it is unlikely that he misled the scientific community.     

Was bringt ?GRAS��?

Autonomous groups in the sense of GRAS (group analysis seminars) are groups without leaders. The small groups come together for self-experience within the framework of GRAS (Gruppenanalyse-Seminare, founded by Michael Lukas Moeller in 1977). Their members are group analysts who continue to participate in long-standing small groups on self-experience after completing their educational training as group analysts in GRAS. Participants of these groups (14 women and 11 men, average age 57.7 years) were interviewed about their experiences within GRAS and the subjective effects on their life. The interviews were evaluated in a qualitative research design. The findings show that the effects of GRAS are estimated to be extensive and very positive for private and professional life. The main modus to be in the group is experienced as retentive, acceptive and inspiring. Autonomous groups in the sense of GRAS form an important background of experience for trained group analysts themselves and continuously stimulate personal advancement and mental health.     

Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Realist?

William Child has said that Wittgenstein is an anti-realist with respect to a person's dreams, recent thoughts that he has consciously entertained and other things. I discuss Wittgenstein's comments about these matters in order to show that they do not commit him to an anti-realist view or a realist view. He wished to discredit the idea that when a person reports his dream or his thoughts, or past intentions, the person is reading off the contents of his mind or memory. Reporting what one dreamt or recently thought is not like reporting what one has just read. The language is different, and the criterion of truth is different.
The anti-realist is able to explain why the reports of thoughts, for instance, are "guaranteed" to be true (PI II, 222) by stipulating that the character and existence of the past thought is constituted by an inclination to assert that one had that past thought so the assertion could not be false. This could not be Wittgenstein's view. What does "guarantee" the truth of such an assertion is the fact that the person himself is the principle authority on what he dreamt, thought, and intended, something which "stands fast" for us.
I next consider Crispin Wright's account of Wittgenstein's ideas about intentions and point out that his assumption that person always makes a judgement as to whether his action conforms to his intention is clearly false. And he is wrong in attributing to Wittgenstein the idea that an intention does not have a determinate content prior to its author's judgement about whether the action conforms to the intention, an idea that is obscure. If this were accurate, it would be a mystery why we do anything, or, at least, why our actions ever conform to our intentions.