Philosophy Research Collection

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.

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.

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.

The emergence of electronic computers in the last thirty years has given rise to many interesting questions. Many of these questions are technical, relating to a machine’s ability to perform complex operations in a variety of circumstances. While some of these questions are not without philosophical interest, the one question which above all others has stimulated philosophical interest is explicitly non-technical and it can be expressed crudely as follows: Can a machine be said to think and, if so, in what sense? The issue has received much attention in the scholarly journals with articles and arguments appearing in great profusion, some resolutely answering this question in the affirmative, some, equally resolutely, answering this question in the negative, and others manifesting modified rapture. While the ramifications of the question are enormous I believe that the issue at the heart of the matter has gradually emerged from the forest of complications

I am going to begin, as all philosophers do, by going back to the ancient Greeks, and then taking a quick tour of the present day, before returning to the ancient Greeks again. Let us begin with the so-called quarrel between philosophy and poetry–what was the reason for this? Well, philosophy was invented at a particular point in time, and in relation to poetry, it was a newcomer. When philosophy was invented it found another intellectual enterprise already in possession of the field, and that enterprise was poetry, primarily Homer and Hesiod. Plato, in trying to make intellectual space for philosophy, made so much space that he risked pushing poetry out of the field altogether as an intellectual enterprise. Plato assumes that poetry and philosophy are competitors in the same business; he can then be seen as attempting to make a hostile take-over bid.

Given its centrality to the intellectual thought processes through which the great structures of logic, nature, and spirit are unfolded it is clear that mediation is vital to the very possibility of Hegel's encyclopaedic philosophy. Yet Hegel gives little specific explanation of the concept of mediation. Surprisingly, it has been the subject of even less attention by scholars of Hegel. Nevertheless it is casually used in discussions of Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophy as though its meaning were simple and straightforward. In these discussions mediation is the thesis that meanings are not atomic in that the independence of something is inseparable from its relation to something else. Hence being is mediated by nothing, the particular by the universal, the individual by society. But does Hegel ever explain mediation in a way which justifies such use of the concept? The same easy employment of mediation is found in Theodor Adorno whose works are replete with the use of this concept and, indeed, acknowledgements of its Hegelian origin. But the concept of mediation in Adorno's negative dialectic is operative in an entirely different context from that of Hegel. How, it might be asked, can a concept be so adaptable? I want to argue that mediation is, in fact, an equivocal term which in both Hegel and Adomo covers a variety of entirely different conceptual relations. Furthermore, as propounded by both Hegel and Adorno it lacks the rigour which could allow the particular conclusions which the concept allegedly facilitates.

In the first book of the Physics, Artistotle is concerned with the principles of natural philosophy, or more specifically, with the principles of change; for this is the common characteristic of natural phenomena, viz, that they are in a constant state of change or alteration. Having customarily begun with a discussion of the views of his predecessors - the Prescoratics Parmenides, Melissus, Anazimander, Empedocles, and Anazagoras, as well as Plato - in Chapter 5 Artistotle concludes that they all share the view that the principles must be contraries (188a19).

In this paper, I argue that the way to understand causal notions is in terms of how something is caused rather than by what. To characterize how something is caused is to describe the way it is caused and this is to describe it as belonging to a certain process.

I suppose that most people think their minds are inside their heads, and not spread around in the environment outside. Now that we are not able to make sense of the old Cartesian doctrine that minds exist in some non-material realm this looks like the only option; our minds are lodged in our brains. Perhaps we have learnt enough from Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) attack on the very meaningfulness of this way of talking about minds that we might modify our way of putting this. What we would say instead is that facts about the mental depend on facts about the brain. To put it more technically, the mental supervenes on the neurophysiological. This means roughly that if any of the facts about your mind were different then some neurophysiological fact about your brain would have to be different too; facts about the mind do not float free from facts about the brain.

In the debate on the relationship between conceptions of human nature and ethics/politics there are those who view any attempt to ground ethics/politics upon a reasonably 'thick' conception of human nature as illegitimate. On the other side of the argument are those who accept the necessity of a theory of human nature for an adequate grounding of ethics and politics, although there may be deep divisions among supporters of this basic position as to what kind of theory best fulfills this grounding role. In this paper the claim is made that an understanding of the concept of human nature is central to the enterprises of ethics and politics because it indicates the effective limits of political and ethical debate and that, despite its centrality in ethics and politics (or perhaps because of it) the notion of human nature is essentially contentious

From the age of about fourteen my religious faith was marked by increasing intensity, a common enough teenage experience. At the same time, however, I was coming to have doubts, doubts that I found difficult to express since I didn’t possess the requisite vocabulary or ideas, nor did I have those around me with whom I could discuss such matters. When I was sixteen I discovered Bertrand Russell’s Why I’m not a Christian. On reading this book all the inchoate questions I had suddenly became clear. Russell’s book acted like sulphuric acid on the grounds of my faith; I found that they could not stand up to rational criticism so I abandoned my faith and, for the next 14 years or so, I was a convinced atheist—an atheist, note, not an agnostic for I subscribed to the principle that if there was no evidence for a belief system then that constituted evidence for its negation.