论本质主义

本质主义是由古希腊哲学家亚里士多德创立的一种哲学理论：在２０世纪模态逻辑兴起之后,本质主义成为模态逻辑哲学中的一个争论热点。本文试图在总结几种有代表性的本质主义学说的基础上,作一些补充和发展,同时驳斥几个对本质主义的重要诘难,为本质主义的科学性辩护。一、亚里士多德的本质主义（一）四谓词理论亚里士多德的本质主义集中表现在他的四谓词理论之中。他说：“所有命题和所有问题所表示的或是某个属,或是一特性,或是一偶性;因为种差具有类的属性,应与属处于相同序列。但是,既然在事物的特性中,有的表现本质,有的并不…     

终结本质主义时代的努力--对波普反本质主义思想的一种解读

本质主义代表着一种寻求确定真理的古老科学理想。翻开人类认识史 ,几乎在每一个历史时段都可以看到这一原则的印迹。虽然随着其追求绝对、确定、终极所导致的现实弊端的不断暴露 ,越来越多的学者开始对此原则提出各种各样的质疑 ,但这种反思主要是在后现代主义阵营进行的。波普则立足于现代性理论对此原则作了深刻的终结性的批判。本文试图从本质主义的角度对哲学史作一梳理 ,并以此确立波普反本质主义思想在哲学史上的重要地位 ,进而得出有益于我们实践的启示     

本质主义与模态逻辑

谈论事物的方式决定了模态逻辑承诺了本质主义。回避本质妨碍了量化模态逻辑的发展。本文提出了必然的一种本质主义解释。这种解释为亚里士多德的混合模态三段论提供了一个漂亮的语义模型。     

白天不知夜的黑:两种文化及其科学观——关于科学与无神论宣传的对话之二

申:关于科学与神秘主义的有趣与无趣,你的说法很有道理,我基本能够接受。可是我还觉得,你所说的只偏重于事情的一个方面,而并没有真的说清那些悟性很高的人——包括     

论两种上帝观

基督教演变到今天,它的上帝观日益多元化了,所以在这里讨论的是中国古代先民的上帝观,和基督教正统的“三位一体”的上帝观之间根本差异。 现代中国人听到上帝这个称呼,容易直接理解成基督教唯一真神耶和华。实际上,上帝这个称呼中国古已有之,而非舶来品;把《圣经》中的耶和     

超人类主义:人的完善化与非政治化

超人类主义通过新技术尤其是生物技术改善或增强人的体能、智力、情感以及道德等方面,代表了一种将人完善化的新方案。在理论上,超人类主义往往被解释为启蒙思想的遗产。但是,如果我们回溯到启蒙关于人的完善化的语境,就会发现这种通过新技术完善人的方案的狭隘性。它仅仅将人理解为自然性和生物性的存在,排除了人的完善化的社会和政治条件,甚至将人变成了技术处理的"材料"。超人类主义对人的完善化,在本质上属于技术控制与主宰自然、否定生命的虚无主义。要摆脱这种虚无主义,我们仍然需要从启蒙对人的完善的理解中借鉴思想资源,将人的完善化理解为一个有厚度的概念。     

运气均等主义的两种形式

基于原生运气与选项运气的区分,运气均等主义承诺了一种控制性责任观,因而面临着所谓的"抛弃性反驳"。全运气均等主义主张将所有的运气都予以中立化,从而避免抛弃性反驳,但却犯了扩大化的错误。标准运气均等主义主张将那些不能合理期望能够避免的运气予以中立化,给个人责任预留了足够的空间,从而成为一种真正能够得到伦理辩护的运气均等主义形式。     

两种康德式的后果主义

探讨康德伦理学与后果主义的关系,乃至探讨是否存在一种康德式的后果主义,是当代英语世界康德伦理学研究的一个热点问题。卡米斯基和帕菲特提出的康德式后果主义都产生了较大的争论和影响。卡米斯基通过把康德伦理学划分为基础理论和规范理论两个层面,指出从康德义务论的基础理论可以发展出一种规范的后果主义。帕菲特通过改造康德的普遍法则公式,并结合契约论和规则后果主义的相关要素,建构了一种康德式的契约论后果主义。这两种理论虽然都以不同的方式偏离了康德伦理学的原初立场,但对于我们全面认识当代康德伦理学研究的现状及其与后果主义的关系具有重要意义。     

人的科学:潘光旦的科学观

潘光旦提倡的人的科学,既是对西方自然科学过于重视知识与技术、忽视对于人生价值的反思,也是对五四运动以来唯科学主义思潮、科玄论战的回应。在潘光旦看来,科学是一门学问而非技术,强调理性与客观事实。只有用这样的科学研究作为社会基本单位的人,了解并合理地解决人的心理与情感等问题,才能从根本上发挥科学对于人类社会的价值。潘光旦对于优生学与性科学的研究,正是他试图推动人的科学的努力。这一努力在其学术生涯的后期被整合进他的新人文思想理论体系中,这既接续了中国传统儒学思想中的人本主义,又借鉴了西方生物学理论中重视人的文明资源,并在根本上构成了潘光旦反思现代科学发展、重塑科学与人文互动的重要成果。     

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.     

Two Kinds of Time-Consciousness and Three Kinds of Content

This paper explores the distinction between perceiving an object as extended in time, and experiencing a sequence of perceptions. I argue that this distinction cannot be adequately described by any present theory of time-consciousness and that in order to solve the puzzle, we need to consider perceptual content as having three distinct constituents: Explicit content, which has a particular phenomenal character, modal content, or the kind of content that is contributed by the psychological mode, and implicit content, which lacks phenomenal character. These notions are then further clarified and related to each other.     

Two Kinds of Commitments (And Two Kinds of Social Groups)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.     

Two Kinds of Unknowing

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non‐dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.     

Two Kinds of Stakes

I distinguish two different kinds of practical stakes associated with propositions. The W‐stakes (world) track what is at stake with respect to whether the proposition is true or false. The A‐stakes (attitude) track what is at stake with respect to whether an agent believes (or relies on) the proposition. This poses a dilemma for those who claim that whether a proposition is known can depend on the stakes associated with it. Only the W‐stakes reading of this view preserves intuitions about knowledge‐attributions, but only the A‐stakes reading preserves the putative link between knowledge and practical reasoning that has motivated it.     

Two Kinds of Learning

Episodic analysis is the separation of a novel into its component episodes —i.e., into short stories each of which has a unitary theme—in order to provide equivalent units for content analysis. Independent coders show two types of disagreement. Neither is serious for content analysis, and both may be minimized by some suggested ground rules. In a study of 13 stylistically different books, intercoder reliability ranged from 76% to 94%. Variations in accuracy were clearly related to literary style. Relevant information on the coding process and reliability, as well as data on the number and length of episodes in the 13 books, are given in tabular form. Problems connected with reliable coding are discussed and some solutions are suggested.     

Two Kinds of Self-Knowledge

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance.