http://hdl.handle.net/10197/2855 2017-10-31T09:14:15Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/9003 Quine, Naturalised Meaning and Empathy Baghramian, Maria Naturalism is the defining feature of the philosophy of Willard van Orman Quine. But there is little clarity in our understanding of naturalism and the role it plays in Quine's work. The current paper explores one strand of Quine's naturalist project, the strand that primarily deals with a naturalised account of language. I examine the role that Quine assigns to empathy as the starting point of the process of learning and translating a language and argue that empathy, when going beyond the automatic form of mirroring, has an irreducible normative character which does not sit well with Quinean naturalism.  2016-11-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8778 The Heuristic Conception of Inference to the Best Explanation Dellsén, Finnur An influential suggestion about the relationship between Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation (IBE) holds that IBE functions as a heuristic to approximate Bayesian reasoning. While this view promises to unify Bayesianism and IBE in a very attractive manner, important elements of the view have not yet been spelled out in detail. I present and argue for a heuristic conception of IBE on which IBE serves primarily to locate the most probable available explanatory hypothesis to serve as a working hypothesis in an agent’s further investigations. Along the way, I criticize what I consider to be an overly ambitious conception of the heuristic role of IBE, according to which IBE serves as a guide to absolute probability values. My own conception, by contrast, requires only that IBE can function as a guide to the comparative probability values of available hypotheses. This is shown to be a much more realistic role for IBE given the nature and limitations of the explanatory considerations with which IBE operates. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8628 Deductive Cogency, Understanding, and Acceptance Dellsén, Finnur Deductive Cogency holds that the set of propositions towards which one has, or is prepared to have, a given type of propositional attitude should be consistent and closed under logical consequence. While there are many propositional attitudes that are not subject to this requirement, e.g. hoping and imagining, it is at least prima facie plausible that Deductive Cogency applies to the doxastic attitude involved in propositional knowledge, viz. (outright) belief. However, this thought is undermined by the well-known preface paradox, leading a number of philosophers to conclude that Deductive Cogency has at best a very limited role to play in our epistemic lives. I argue here that Deductive Cogency is still an important epistemic requirement, albeit not as a requirement on belief. Instead, building on a distinction between belief and acceptance introduced by Jonathan Cohen and recent developments in the epistemology of understanding, I propose that Deductive Cogency applies to the attitude of treating propositions as given in the context of attempting to understand a given phenomenon. I then argue that this simultaneously accounts for the plausibility of the considerations in favor of Deductive Cogency and avoids the problematic consequences of the preface paradox. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8412 Abductively Robust Inference Dellsén, Finnur Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is widely criticized for being an unreliable form of ampliative inference – partly because the explanatory hypotheses we have considered at a given time may all be false, and partly because there is an asymmetry between the comparative judgment on which an IBE is based and the absolute verdict that IBE is meant to license. In this paper, I present a further reason to doubt the epistemic merits of IBE and argue that it motivates moving to an inferential pattern in which IBE emerges as a degenerate limiting case. Since this inferential pattern is structurally similar to an argumentative strategy known as Inferential Robustness Analysis (IRA), it effectively combines the most attractive features of IBE and IRA into a unified approach to non-deductive inference. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8409 When Expert Disagreement Supports the Consensus Dellsén, Finnur It is often suggested that disagreement among scientific experts is a reason not to trust those experts, even about matters on which they are in agreement. In direct opposition to this view, I argue here that the very fact that there is disagreement among experts on a given issue provides a positive reason for non-experts to trust that the experts really are justified in their attitudes towards consensus theories. I show how this line of thought can be spelled out in three distinct frameworks for non-deductive reasoning, viz. Bayesian Confirmation Theory, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Inferential Robustness Analysis. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8351 Reactionary Responses to the Bad Lot Objection Dellsén, Finnur As it is standardly conceived, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a form of ampliative inference in which one infers a hypothesis because it provides a better potential explanation of one’s evidence than any other available, competing explanatory hypothesis. Bas van Fraassen famously objected to IBE thus formulated that we may have no reason to think that any of the available, competing explanatory hypotheses are true. While revisionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection concede that IBE needs to be reformulated in light of this problem, reactionary responses argue that the Bad Lot Objection is fallacious, incoherent, or misguided. This paper shows that the most influential reactionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection do nothing to undermine the original objection. This strongly suggests that proponents of IBE should focus their efforts on revisionary responses, i.e. on finding a more sophisticated characterization of IBE for which the Bad Lot Objection loses its bite. 2017-02-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8349 Certainty and Explanation in Descartes' Philosophy of Science Dellsén, Finnur This paper presents a new approach to resolving an apparent tension in Descartes’ discussion of scientific theories and explanations in the Principles of Philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes repeatedly claims that any theories presented in science must be certain and indubitable. On the other hand, Descartes himself presents an astonishing number of speculative explanations of various scientific phenomena. In response to this tension, commentators have suggested that Descartes changed his mind about scientific theories having to be certain and indubitable, that he lacked the conceptual resources to describe the appropriate epistemic attitude towards speculative theories, or that the presence of geometrical principles in these explanations guarantee their certainty. I argue that none of these responses is satisfactory and suggest a different resolution to the tension by examining Descartes' notion of explanation. On Descartes’ view, providing an adequate explanation does not require being certain of the theories that constitute the explanans. Relatedly, the purpose of Cartesian explanations is not to discover the truth about the various underlying mechanisms that such explanations appeal to, but to support his general philosophical thesis that all natural phenomena can be explained by appealing to the extension of matter. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8301 Not suffering, not melancholy: Review of On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century, Edited by Camilla Nelson, Deborah Pike and Georgina Ledvinka, UWA Publishing Daly, Anya What is happiness? The word conjures sunshine, pleasure, expansiveness and possibility – and we all claim some knowledge and experience of happiness. Nonetheless, happiness, perhaps more than any other experience, is defined and delineated in the negative. Happiness is not suffering, not anguish, not absence or lack, not loneliness, not depression, not melancholy. That we do not in fact have grasp of a pure state, such as happiness, in isolation from its contraries illuminates something important about how our selves and our realities are structured. We are able to recognise it not only because it is already a part of our experiential repertoire but also because we are already familiar with its converse. This insight has direct implications for our experiences in general and for the experience of happiness in particular. 2016-06-24T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8300 Philosophy, psychiatry and avoiding 'real mischief': Review of Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, intersections, and new perspectives. Edited by Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala, Routledge 2015 Daly, Anya What can philosophy offer psychiatry? What can psychiatry offer philosophy? Simply, there is nothing as harmful as a bad theory put into practice and conversely the constraints of practice and the recalcitrance of the realities of anomalous experiences offer instructive challenges to theory. We know well that the history of medicine and psychiatry have many examples of bad theory having been put into practice often with tragic consequences. Equally the extremes of armchair philosophy and far-fetched thought experiments, while keeping some philosophers busy chasing zombies or possible worlds in which minds can be uploaded into a computer hard-drives, leave philosophy open to accusations of irrelevance and obfuscation. 2016-09-06T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8230 Introduction Daly, Anya This book draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty's unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics. In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Ponty's relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the 'top-down' ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Ponty’s ethics is a 'bottom-up' ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the 'I' within the 'we' and the 'we' within the 'I'; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Ponty’s texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8205 Primary Intersubjectivity: Empathy, Affective Reversibility, 'Self-affection' and the Primordial 'We' Daly, Anya The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, that just as Trevarthen's three subjective/intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations—pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc., and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the 'I' and 'we' perspectives and later 'solidified' through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed. 2014-04-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8204 Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau-Ponty Claims It Can? Daly, Anya Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis argues that self, other and world are inherently relational, interdependent at the level of ontology. What is at stake in the reversibility thesis is whether it overcomes skeptical objections in both assuring real communication and avoiding solipsism in assuring real difference; the Other must be a genuine, irreducible Other. It is objected that across the domains of reversibility, symmetry and reciprocity are not guaranteed. I argue that this is a non-problem; rather the potentialities for asymmetry and non reciprocity in fact guarantee the irreducibility of the Other; reversibility needs to be appreciated as dialectical or aesthetic, not as a literal or 'mechanistic' reversal. A further criticism targets the viability of ontology itself, whether alterity is ever compatible with ontology. This paper considers these objections from two of Merleau-Ponty's contemporaries—Claude Lefort and Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas developed a philosophy which while intersecting with Merleau-Ponty's at important junctures, nonetheless arrived at an entirely different destination. I argue alongside Martin Dillon against the objections of Lefort, and alongside Dan Zahavi against the objections of Levinas. Both of these interpreters, I propose remain faithful to the core directions and spirit of Merleau-Ponty's endeavours without becoming diverted by the less significant inconsistencies. 2014-03-25T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8203 Meleau-Ponty's Aesthetic Interworld: From Primordial Percipience to Wild Logos Daly, Anya The overall aim of this paper is to defend the value of the arts as uniquely instructive regarding philosophical questions. Specifically, I aim to achieve two things: firstly, to show that through the phenomenological challenge to dualist and monist ontologies the key debate in aesthetics regarding subjective response and objective judgment is reconfigured and resolved. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analyses complement and complete Kant’s project. Secondly, I propose that through his phenomenological interrogations of the creative process the issue of the viability of his relational non-dualist ontology is defended against accusations that it has not gone beyond dualism or that it has collapsed into a monism. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8175 Explanatory Rivals and the Ultimate Argument Dellsén, Finnur Although many aspects of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) have been extensively discussed, very little has so far been said about what it takes for a hypothesis to count as a rival explanatory hypothesis in the context of IBE. The primary aim of this article is to rectify this situation by arguing for a specific account of explanatory rivalry. On this account, explanatory rivals are (roughly speaking) complete explanations of a given explanandum. When explanatory rivals are conceived of in this way, I argue that IBE is a more plausible and defensible rule of inference than it would otherwise be. The secondary aim of the article is to demonstrate the importance of accounts of explanatory rivalry by examining a prominent philosophical argument in which IBE is employed, viz. the so-called Ultimate Argument for scientific realism. In short, I argue that a well-known objection to the Ultimate Argument due to Arthur Fine fails in virtue of tacitly assuming an account of explanatory rivalry that we have independent reasons to reject. 2016-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8174 Reconstructed Empiricism Dellsén, Finnur According to Bas van Fraassen, scientific realists and anti-realists disagree about whether accepting a scientific theory involves believing that the theory is true. On van Fraassen's own anti-realist empiricist position, accepting a theory involves believing only that the theory is correct in its claims about observable aspects of the world. However, a number of philosophers have argued that acceptance and belief cannot be distinguished and thus that the debate is either confused or trivially settled in favor of the realist. In addition, another set of philosophers have argued that van Fraassen’s empiricist position appeals to an unmotivated distinction between observable and unobservable aspects of the world. This paper aims to reconstruct a van Fraassen-style empiricism about scientific acceptance that avoids these two objections – reconstructed empiricism. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8173 Scientific progress: Knowledge versus understanding Dellsén, Finnur What is scientific progress? On Alexander Bird's epistemic account of scientific progress, an episode in science is progressive precisely when there is more scientific knowledge at the end of the episode than at the beginning. Using Bird's epistemic account as a foil, this paper develops an alternative understanding-based account on which an episode in science is progressive precisely when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world at the end of the episode than at the beginning. This account is shown to be superior to the epistemic account by examining cases in which knowledge and understanding come apart. In these cases, it is argued that scientific progress matches increases in scientific understanding rather than accumulations of knowledge. In addition, considerations having to do with minimalist idealizations, pragmatic virtues, and epistemic value all favor this understanding-based account over its epistemic counterpart. 2016-04-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8172 Realism and the absence of rivals Dellsén, Finnur Among the most serious challenges to scientific realism are arguments for the underdetermination of theory by evidence. This paper defends a version of scientific realism against what is perhaps the most influential recent argument of this sort, viz. Kyle Stanford’s New Induction over the History of Science. An essential part of the defense consists in a probabilistic analysis of the slogan 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. On this basis it is argued that the likelihood of a theory being underdetermined depends crucially on social and historical factors, such as the structure of scientific communities and the time that has passed since the theory first became accepted. This is then shown to serve as the epistemological foundation for a version of scientific realism which avoids Stanford’s New Induction in a principled and non-question-begging way. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8171 Understanding without Justification or Belief Dellsén, Finnur In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest among epistemologists in the nature of understanding, with some authors arguing that understanding should replace knowledge as the primary focus of epistemology. But what is understanding? According to what is often called the standard view, understanding is a species of knowledge. Although this view has recently been challenged in various ways, even the critics of the standard view have assumed that understanding requires justification and belief. I argue that it requires neither. If sound, these arguments have important upshots not only for the nature of understanding, but also for its distinctive epistemic value and its role in contemporary epistemology. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/8169 There May Yet Be Non-Causal Explanations (of Particular Events) Dellsén, Finnur There are many putative counterexamples to the view that all scientific explanations are causal explanations. Using a new theory of what it is to be a causal explanation, Bradford Skow has recently argued that several of the putative counterexamples fail to be non-causal. This paper defends some of the counterexamples by showing how Skow’s argument relies on an overly permissive theory of causal explanations. 2016-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/7051 Ryle's conceptions of emotional behaviour Stout, Rowland I will proceed by describing the significance of Ryle’s distinction between dispositions and occurrences and then by explaining his account of how emotions fit into this distinction. I will try to show how unsatisfactory this account is and defend briefly the alternative view that agitated emotions are motives for emotionally expressive behaviour. 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6879 Adopting Roles: Generosity and Presumptuousness Stout, Rowland An understanding of generosity must be central to an understanding of our moral nature, yet there is no good philosophical account of generosity. This is exemplified in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where interesting accounts of liberality (using your wealth well) and magnificence (spending large amounts of money well) are provided in Book IV, but none of generosity. Hutcheson and Hume were interested in benevolence, but benevolence is not the same thing as generosity either. For Hume, benevolence is ‘desire of the happiness of the person belov’d, and an aversion to his misery.’ (Treatise, 2.2.9.3) So, acting benevolently, for Hume, is acting from this sentiment for the sake of someone else’s wellbeing. Picking up litter that somebody else has dropped is not benevolent on this account, but I think it may count as generous behaviour. And conversely, I will argue later that benevolent actions that are presumptuous and intrusive are not generous. 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6878 The Category of Occurrent Continuants Stout, Rowland Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants. These are things that were, are or will be happening – like someone reading or my writing this paper for instance. The prevailing philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns. This has mistakenly encouraged the view that the only way to think of process is as the stuff of events and has obscured the possibility of thinking of processes as continuants. 2016-10-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6114 Meister Eckhart in 20th-Century Philosophy Moran, Dermot The manner in which Meister Eckhart has been viewed by scholars has changed considerably over the centuries. Nevertheless, the Bull In agro dominico of 27th March 1329 already points towards the future directions that Eckhart research would subsequently take. There Eckhart is described in three-­‐fold manner as 'from Germany, a doctor of sacred theology (as it is said) and a professor of the Order of Preachers'. These characterisations of Eckhart continue to frame the debate – in other words, his connection with the German philosophical and mystical tradition, his status as a University of Paris master and Scriptural exegete, and his role as a theologian and vernacular preacher for the Dominican Order. 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6104 De Generatione et Corruptione 2.3: Does Aristotle Identify the Contraries as Elements? Crowley, Timothy J. It might seem quite commonplace to say that Aristotle identifies fire, air, water and earth as the στοιχεῖα, or ‘elements’ – or, to be more precise, as the elements of bodies that are subject to generation and corruption. Yet there is a tradition of interpretation, already evident in the work of the sixth-century commentator John Philoponus and widespread, indeed prevalent, today, according to which Aristotle does not really believe that fire, air, water and earth are truly elemental. The basic premise of this interpretation is that Aristotle takes fire, air, water and earth to be, in some sense, composite bodies and, as such, analysable into simpler constituents. But, of course, an element of bodies is defined by Aristotle himself as something into which bodies can be analysed, and which does not admit further analysis (Metaph. 5.3, 1014a26–1014b15; Cael. 3.3, 302a14–21). So if fire, air, water and earth can be analysed into simpler or more basic constituents, then it would seem to follow that the latter ought to be considered Aristotle's true elements. These are usually identified as the primary contraries hot and cold, dry and wet; many, perhaps most, commentators would insist also upon prime matter as the subject upon which these contraries act. 2013-05-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5966 Relativism and Religious Diversity Baghramian, Maria Cultural diversity creates not only sociopolitical but also philosophical headaches. The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that there are about ten thousand distinct religions, of which 150 have at least one million followers. According to other methods of individuation, there are nineteen major world religions subdivided into 270 large religious groups, and many smaller ones. These religions often profess conflicting articles of faith, metaphysical outlooks, ethical beliefs, and injunctions for religious practices. Logically speaking, not all religious doctrines could be true, but the difficulty is to decide which one(s), if any, are. Given seemingly incompatible and competing religious beliefs, there are at least five options available. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5699 John Scottus Eriugena Moran, Dermot 2009-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5696 On the Use of Stoicheion in the Sense of 'Element' Crowley, Timothy J. 2005-09-22T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5679 The Early Heidegger Moran, Dermot 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5678 Edmund Husserl Moran, Dermot 2011-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5667 The Phenomenological Approach: An Introduction Moran, Dermot 2008-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5662 Relativism about Science Baghramian, Maria 2008-01-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5626 Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy: Four Confrontations Moran, Dermot 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5621 The Puzzle of Self-Deception Baghramian, Maria; Nicholson, Anna It is commonly accepted that people can, and regularly do, deceive themselves. Yet closer examination reveals a set of conceptual puzzles that make self-deception difficult to explain. Applying the conditions for other-deception to self-deception generates what are known as the 'paradoxes' of belief and intention. Simply put, the central problem is how it is possible for me to believe one thing, and yet intentionally cause myself to believe its contradiction. There are two general approaches taken by philosophers to account for these puzzles about the self-deceptive state and the process of self-deception. 'Partitioning' strategies try to resolve the paradoxes by proposing that the mind is divided in some way that allows self-deception to occur. 'Reformulation' strategies suggest that the conditions we use to define self-deception should be modified so that the paradoxes do not arise at all. Both approaches are subject to criticism about the consequences of the strategies philosophers use, but recent cross-disciplinary analyses of self-deception may help shed light on the puzzles that underlie this phenomenon. 2013-11-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5618 Revisiting Sartre's Ontology of Embodiment in Being and Nothingness Moran, Dermot In Being and Nothingness (1943) Sartre includes a groundbreaking chapter on 'the body' which treats of the body under three headings: 'the body as being for-itself: facticity', 'the body-for-others', and 'the third ontological dimension of the body'. Sartre's phenomenology of the body has, in general, been neglected. In this essay, I want to revisit Sartre's conception of embodiment. I shall argue that Sartre, even more than Merleau-Ponty, is the phenomenologist par excellence of the flesh (la chair) and of intersubjective intercorporeity while emphasising that touching oneself is a merely contingent feature and not 'the foundation for a study of corporeality'. 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5610 Three Pragmatisms: Putnam, Rorty and Brandom Baghramian, Maria Over the last several decades an increasing number of philosophers have announced their sympathies for or have become affiliated with what has become known as neo-pragmatism. The connection between the various strands of pragmatism, new and old, however, remains quite unclear. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by focusing on a debate between Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom on classical and contemporary pragmatisms. Using the Brandom-Putnam debate as my starting point, I examine the relationship between the pragmatisms of Putnam and Rorty, two of the most influential neopragmatists, and argue that differing conceptions of the normative are at the heart of their disagreement. I further argue that this disagreement has similarities to, and can be illuminated by, two differing conceptions of norms in Wittgenstein’s work. I conclude that Brandom does not delineate the differences between various strands of pragmatism convincingly. 2008-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5609 Constructed Worlds, Contested Truths Baghramian, Maria 2011-08-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5563 Gadamer and Husserl on horizon, intersubjectivity, and the life-world Moran, Dermot 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5560 Natural reason : A Study of the Notions of Inference, Assent, Intuition, and First Principles in the Philosophy of John Henry Cardinal Newman Casey, Gerard Natural Reason is an examination of the religious epistemology of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Although his epistemology was developed primarily to defend the rationality of religious belief, it is, nevertheless, pertinent to problems of belief in general. The theme of the work is that Newman’s central epistemological notions conceal crucial ambiguities. These are the result of his inheriting an inadequate philosophical tradition whose limitations make it exceedingly difficult for him to give systematic expression to this thought. The clarification of these ambiguities will allow Newman’s thought to reveal itself in all its brilliance. 1984-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5546 Born alive: the legal status of the unborn child in England and the U.S.A. Casey, Gerard This work ex­plores the philosophical underpinnings of the law of homicide via an historical, thematic, logical and philosophical analysis of the anomalous legal status of the unborn child in the two major common-law jurisdictions, England & Wales and the USA. The book describes a trajectory from a consideration of the history and social embodiment of a particular rule of the criminal law to a broader and more reflective philosophical and jurisprudential discussion of the questions that it raises for the law and for society as a whole. 2005-05-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5541 Choosing a hero: Heidegger's conception of authentic life in relation to early christianity Moran, Dermot 2010-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5534 An explication of Boethius's De Hebdomadibus in the light of St Thomas's commentary Casey, Gerard 1987-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5533 A Problem of Unity in St. Thomas’s Account of Human Action Casey, Gerard 1987-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5532 Artificial Intelligence and Wittgenstein Casey, Gerard The association of Wittgenstein’s name with the notion of artificial intelligence is bound to cause some surprise both to Wittgensteinians and to people interested in artificial intelligence. After all, Wittgenstein died in 1951 and the term artificial intelligence didn’t come into use until 1956 so that it seems unlikely that one could have anything to do with the other. However, establishing a connection between Wittgenstein and artificial intelligence is not as insuperable a problem as it might appear at first glance. While it is true that artificial intelligence as a quasi-distinct discipline is of recent vintage, some of its concerns, especially those of a philosophical nature, have been around for quite some time. At the birth of modern philosophy we find Descartes wondering whether it would be possible to create a machine that would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from man. 1988-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5531 Angelic Interiority Casey, Gerard 1989-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5530 The Computational Metaphor and Cognitive Psychology Casey, Gerard; Moran, Aidan P. The past three decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of research interest in the mind. This trend has been acclaimed as the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology. At the heart of this revolution lies the claim that the mind is a computational system. The purpose of this paper is both to elucidate this claim and to evaluate its implications for cognitive psychology. The nature and scope of cognitive psychology and cognitive science are outlined, the principal assumptions underlying the information processing approach to cognition are summarised and the nature of artificial intelligence and its relationship to cognitive science are explored. The ‘computational metaphor’ of mind is examined and both the theoretical and methodological issues which it raises for cognitive psychology are considered. Finally, the nature and significance of ‘connectionism’— the latest paradigm in cognitive science—are briefly reviewed. 1989-10-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5528 Immateriality and intentionality Casey, Gerard 1992-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5527 Wittgenstein: world, reality and states of affairs Casey, Gerard 1992-06-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5507 Meddling in other men's affairs : the case for anarchy Casey, Gerard The foundational myth of political theory, the myth of the necessity of the state, is outlined and the question of its moral status raised. The anarchic counterposition is then briefly sketched before some central anti - anarchic arguments are considered and rejected. 2007-12-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5506 Edmund Husserl's letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl : Introduction Moran, Dermot; Steinacher, Lukas 2008-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5473 Metaphysics, mathematics and metaphor Casey, Gerard 2008-12-01T00:00:00Z