NON‐CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE

The paper is an investigation into the prospects of an epistemology of non‐conceptual knowledge. According to the orthodox view, knowledge requires concepts and belief. I present several arguments to the effect that there is non‐conceptual, non‐doxastic knowledge, the obvious candidate for such knowledge being non‐conceptual perception. Non‐conceptual perception seems to be allowed for by cognitive scientists and it exhibits the central role features of knowledge—it plays the knowledge role: it respects an anti‐luck condition, it is an achievement, it enables one to act for a reason, and it provides justification. Furthermore, it makes a straightforward and elegant explanation of (doxastic) perceptual knowledge possible: doxastic perceptual knowledge builds on non‐conceptual perception as non‐conceptual knowledge. Three objections that might naturally arise will be discussed and answered. Thus, the prospects of an epistemology without belief seem to be much better than the orthodoxy wants to have it. We can extend knowledge into the non‐conceptual realm.     

Mirror Self‐Recognition and Self‐Identification

That great apes are the only primates to recognise their reflections is often taken to show that they are self‐aware—however, there has been much recent debate about whether the self‐awareness in question is psychological or bodily self‐awareness. This paper argues that whilst self‐recognition does not require psychological self‐awareness, to claim that it requires only bodily self‐awareness would leave something out. That is that self‐recognition requires ‘objective self‐awareness’—the capacity for first person thoughts like ‘that's me’, which involve self‐identification and so are vulnerable to error through misidentification. This objective self‐awareness is distinct from bodily or psychological self‐awareness, requires cognitive sophistication and provides the beginnings of a more conceptual self‐representation which might play a role in planning, mental time travel and theory of mind.     

Consciousness and Self in Animals: Some Reflections

In this essay I argue that many nonhuman animal beings are conscious and have some sense of self. Rather than ask whether they are conscious, I adopt an evolutionary perspective and ask why consciousness and a sense of self evolved—what are they good for? Comparative studies of animal cognition, ethological investigations that explore what it is like to be a certain animal, are useful for answering this question. Charles Darwin argued that the differences in cognitive abilities and emotions among animals are differences in degree rather than differences in kind, and his view cautions against the unyielding claim that humans, and perhaps other great apes and cetaceans, are the only species in which a sense of self‐awareness has evolved. I conclude that there are degrees of consciousness and self among animals and that it is likely that no animal has the same highly developed sense of self as that displayed by most humans. Many animals have a sense of “body‐ness” or “mine‐ness” but not a sense of “I‐ness.” Darwin's ideas about evolutionary continuity, together with empirical data (“science sense”) and common sense, will help us learn more about consciousness and self in animals. Answers to challenging questions about animal self‐awareness have wide‐ranging significance, because they are often used as the litmus test for determining and defending the sorts of treatments to which animals can be morally subjected.     

The Contents of Perception and the Contents of Emotion

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object‐like. I shall argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition‐like and contents which are object‐like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition‐like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non‐conceptual.     

Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience,Guided by James and Tillich

The nature of mystical experience has been hotly debated. Essentialists divide into two camps: 1) immediate identity beyond any subject-object structure 2) the mystical object maintaining some distinctness at the point of contact. Paul Tillich’s mystical a priori has some affinities with the former, while William James’ model of religious experience coheres only with the latter. Opposing the essentialists are constructivists. After noting some ironies of the constructivist position, this article elaborates difficulties with 1) the traditional model of pure identity with the divine by certain mystics, 2) the Tillichian universal mystical awareness, and 3) the Jamesian direct perceptual model. Finally, it proposes that the human body and brain mediate mystical experience, which consists of a distinctive sense of bodily harmony conjoined with openness to the potentialities of an integrated environment, involving distinctive neurological processes.     

God and givenness: towards a phenomenology of mysticism

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin.     

BEYOND RELATIVISM AND FOUNDATIONALISM: A PROLEGOMENON TO FUTURE RESEARCH IN ETHICS

Abstract. This article examines the similarities between notions about the nature of reality held by some Christian mystics (Thomas Merton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing) and those proposed by physicists David Bohm and Henry Margenau. My aim is to consider how the implications of certain metaphysical interpretations of modern physics may: (1) hold similarities with Christian mystical notions about reality, and (2) be important for guiding future research in ethics. I further look into the traditional approaches to ethical theory that come out of the foundationalist, relativist, and skeptical realist camps and argue that while skeptical realists such as Timothy Jackson are moving in the right direction, further consideration of what is meant by reality is necessary if we are to traverse the gap between foundationalists and relativists. It is here that Christian ethicists in particular have the opportunity to pick up the metaphysical batons carried by physicists like Margenau and Bohm and mystics like Merton and the author of The Cloud and begin investigating the possibility that ethical theory can be approached from a nondualistic perspective.     

Seeking the Pathos of God in a Secular Age: Theological Reflections on Mystical Experience in the Twentieth Century

Our current context is a “moving” and unstable one. We are facing not only a time of change, but what Pope Benedict XVI terms “an epochal change.” The impact of this transformation upon religion is unmistakable. In this article I reflect on one aspect of this impact: the one that affects and transforms the experience of God, also called mystical experience. I explore the concept of experience, trying to give a more precise idea of what we understand by mystical experience. I then reflect on the importance of mystical biographies and narratives to theology, including the particular characteristics that emerge when this narrative is about the mystical experiences of twentieth‐century people of faith. I present the specific “case” of Dorothy Day as an exemplification of mystical experience. I conclude with several reflections about how human beings find the way towards God in our secular.     

Substitution by Image: The Very Idea

The aim of this article is to provide a plausible conceptual model of a specific use of images described as substitution in recent art‐historical literature. I bring to light the largely implicit shared commitments of the art historians’ discussion of substitution, each working as they do in a different idiom, and I draw consequences from these commitments for the concept of substitution by image—the major being the distinction between nonportraying substitution and substitution by portrayal. I then develop an argument that substitution by image in the desired, nonportraying sense needs to be thought of in terms of a figurative representation of an image's subject as a generic object, what I will call its figurative instantiation.     

An Aesthetics of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein and John Cage

Comparisons of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Cage typically focus on the “later Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations. However, in this article I focus on the deep intellectual sympathy between the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus—with its evocative and controversial invocation of silence at the end, the famous proposition 7: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”—and Cage's equally evocative and controversial work on the same theme—his “silent piece,” 4′33″. This sympathy expresses itself not only in the common aim of the two works (a mystical appreciation for the ordinary, everyday world that surrounds us) but also in a shared methodology for bringing about this aim (tracing the limits of language from within in order to transcend those very limits). In this sense, I argue that Cage's work gives a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein's early conception of language as well as the mystical revelation that lies behind it.     

Indirect Realism with a Human Face

Epistemic Indirect Realism (EIR) is the position that justification for contingent propositions about the extra‐mental world requires an inference based on a subjective, experiential mental state. One objection against EIR is that it runs contrary to common sense and practice; in essence, ordinary people do not form beliefs about things in the external world on the basis of experiential mental states. This objection implies EIR is contrary to ordinary experience, impractical, and leads to scepticism. In this paper, I will defend EIR against this objection by distinguishing EIR based on conceptual awareness and non‐conceptual awareness. In particular, I will argue that direct acquaintance provides sufficient (non‐conceptual) awareness that can explain how ordinary folks are capable of forming justified beliefs about the external world in a way consistent with EIR. Overall, I present a framework for showing that EIR can satisfy ordinary epistemic practices without betraying human nature or over‐intellectualizing the required epistemic standards for possessing a justified belief.     

Minima sensibilia: Against the dynamic snapshot model of temporal experience

In our wakeful conscious lives, the experience of time and dynamic temporal phenomena—such as continuous motion and change—appears to be ubiquitous. How is it that temporality is woven into our conscious experience? Is it through perceptual experience presenting a series of instantaneous states of the world, which combine together—in a sense which would need to be specified—to give us experience of dynamic temporal phenomena? In this paper, I argue that this is not the case. Several authors have recently proposed dynamic snapshot models of temporal experience—such as Prosser and Arstila, building upon Le Poidevin—according to which, perceptual experience has no temporal content of a non‐zero extent. I argue that there is an absence of motivation for such a view; I develop and defend the claim that perceptual experience minimally presents something of some non‐zero temporal extent as such.     

Can Western Monotheism Avoid Substance Dualism?

The problem of divine agency and action is analogous to the problem of human agency and action: How is such agency possible in the absence of a dualistic causal interaction between disparate orders of being? This paper explores nondualistic accounts of divine agency that assert the following: (1) physical monism, (2) antireductionism, (3) physical realization, and (4) divine causal realism. I conclude that a robustly causal deity is incompatible with nonddualism's affirmation of physical monism. Specifically, I argue the incoherence of nondualistic strategies that advocate divine information transfer without energy transfer or the divine downward causation of physical events. Furthermore, I claim that the principle of explanatory exclusion makes any nondualistic, noninterventionist account of divine agency highly dubious. Finally, I suggest that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can avoid a causally inert deity only if they are willing to deny the current presumption of the causal closure of the physical.     

Geographies of Meaningful Living

Because it is significantly unclear what ‘meaningful’ does or should pick out when applied to a life, any account of meaningful living will be constructive and not merely clarificatory. Where in our conceptual geography is ‘meaningful’ best located? What conceptual work do we want the concept to do? What I call agent‐independent and agent‐independent‐plus conceptions of meaningfulness locate ‘meaningful’ within the conceptual geography of agent‐independent evaluative standards and assign ‘meaningful’ the work of commending lives. I argue that the not wholly welcome implications of these more dominant approaches to meaningfulness make it plausible to locate ‘meaningful’ on an alternative conceptual geography — that of agents as end‐setters and of agent‐dependent value assessments — and to assign it the work of picking out lives whose time‐expenditures are intelligible to the agent. I respond to the challenge confronting any subjectivist conception of meaningfulness that it is overly permissive.     

MAPPING ONE WORLD: RELIGION AND SCIENCE FROM AN EAST ASIAN PERSPECTIVE

This article aims to delineate a model of religion‐science relationship from an East Asian perspective. The East Asian way of thinking is depicted as nondualistic, relational, and inclusive. From this point of view, most current Western discourses on the religion‐science relationship, including the interconnected models of Pannenberg and Haught, are hierarchical, intellectually centered, and have dualistic tendencies. Taking religion and science as mapping activities, “a multi‐map model” presents nonhierarchical, historical, social, multidimensional, communal, and intimate dimensions of the religion‐science relationship.     

PANENTHEISM AND THE UNDOING OF DISENCHANTMENT

In this article, I draw on historical and conceptual arguments to show, first, that disenchantment and the influential view of the relationship between science and religion to which disenchantment gives rise are rooted in the metaphysics of theism. I then introduce the alternative metaphysical position of panentheism and identify Jungian psychology as an important, if implicit, mid‐twentieth‐century instance of panentheistic thought. Using the example of Jungian psychology, I demonstrate how the viewpoint of panentheism undoes the implications of disenchantment for the relationship between science and religion, promoting greater opportunities for dialogue and reconciliation between science and religion. I note, however, that these closer relations may depend on understanding science and religion differently from how they are understood under disenchantment. While the original tension between science and religion is eased, another tension—between panentheistic and disenchanted understandings of science and religion—is exposed. I conclude by reflecting on some implications of this discussion for sociology.     

Practical Perception and Intelligent Action

Perceiving things to be a certain way may in some cases lead directly to action that is intelligent (e.g., skillful, wise, clever, astute). This phenomenon has not often been discussed, though it is of broad philosophical interest. It also raises a difficult question: how can perception produce intelligent action? After clarifying the question—which I call the question of “practical perception”—and explaining what is required for an adequate answer, I critically examine two candidate answers drawn from work on related topics: the first, inspired by Hubert Dreyfus's phenomenological analysis of absorbed coping (and of a piece with James Gibson's theory of affordances), focuses on awareness of situational features; the other, suggested by Gilbert Ryle's classic treatment of knowledge‐how, focuses on possession of behavioral dispositions. I argue that neither approach is adequate. Subsequently, I develop and defend an alternative answer that emphasizes the agent's conceptual understanding.     

An Introduction to the Horizon Model: An Alternative to Universalist Frameworks of Mystical Development

Critics have pointed out that the content and sequence of mystical development reported by different traditions do not seem very congruous with the contention that there is a universal path of mystical development. I propose a model of mystical development that is more subtle than traditional ‘invariant hierarchical’ models, and which explains how the apparently differing accounts of mystical development between traditions and thinkers can be reconciled with each other in a more convincing fashion, and brought together under one umbrella. The model preserves both the objective core of perennialism and the culturally subjective element of mystical ‘specialization’ that is undeniably evidenced in the mystical literature, and which hierarchical and invariant ‘universalist’ accounts struggle to integrate.