Empiricism

The relations between metaphysics and physics in Cartesianism is a question of crucial importance for 19th century French histories of philosophy. Hence, in its institutionally dominant version, incarnated by Victor Cousin, this philosophy was understood as a spiritualism concerned with the founding of a psychology relying on a rationalist interpretation of the cogito. In order to achieve this, such a psychology must distinguish itself from the empirical method of psychology inherited from the so-called ideologues. And this required, in turn, that metaphysics must return to its place at the roots of the tree of knowledge, in opposition to a Baconian interpretation considering the history of the mind in prolongation of the natural sciences, and according to the same model. If this ambition proved to be both theoretically and objectively constraining for the « Cousinians », it was, however, not a unique enterprise in the 19th century. Other, alternative trees of knowledge were envisaged, defining other possible readings of the Cartesian philosophy, notably by opening up alleys toward empiricist interpretations. In this paper, I propose a typology of these alternative trees. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the complexity and the tensions between physics and metaphysics in Descartes on the one hand, and, on the other, to stress the decisive importance of 19th century French historiography for our current understanding of these relations.

KEYWORDS
Physics, Metaphysics, Psychology, Spiritualism, Empiricism, Materialism.

In Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and in his Reception. Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Sophie Roux (eds), Routledge, submitted.

Descartes’s belief in innate ideas still looms, in one form or another, over the history of philosophy today. In typical Early-Modern, Rationalist fashion, Descartes presents readers with main arguments for his belief in these pre-packaged ideas, via appeals to God and the application of logical thinking techniques. That is, Descartes asserts that the so-called inherent idea of God derives from God and that the mind can establish this notion as well as the surety of its supposed innate ideas of immortality and identity. However, such ideas may appear alien to some, and even unfounded upon critique. First, this essay will present Descartes’s philosophy of innate ideas by using his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Next, this piece will then describe the philosopher Hume’s Empiricist understanding of ideas and the problems of abstraction, and then challenge the Cartesian view that innate notions like God, immortality of the soul, and identity may not be so innate, or as precise as Descartes leads us to believe.

Translation evaluation is undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks facing a translator trainer. It is unlikely that there will ever be a ready-made formula that will transform this task into a simple one; however, this article suggests that the task can be made somewhat easier by using a specially designed Evaluation Corpus that can act as a benchmark against which translator trainers can compare student translations.

This article discusses the relation between empirical and normative approaches in bioethics. The issue of dwarf tossing, while admittedly unusual, is chosen as a point of departure because it challenges the reader to look with fresh eyes upon several central bioethical themes, including human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people. After an overview of current approaches to the integration of empirical and normative ethics, we consider five ways that the empirical and normative can be brought together to speak to the problem of dwarf tossing: prescriptive applied ethics, theoretical ethics, critical applied ethics, particularist ethics and integrated empirical ethics. We defend a position of critical applied ethics that allows for a two-way relation between empirical and normative theories. Against efforts fully to integrate the normative and the empirical into one synthesis, we propose that the two should stand in tension and relation to one another. The approach we endorse acknowledges that a social practice can and should be judged both by the gathering of empirical data and by normative ethics. Critical applied ethics uses a five stage process that includes: (a) determination of the problem, (b) description of the problem, (c) empirical study of effects and alternatives, (d) normative weighing and (e) evaluation of the effects of a decision. In each stage, we explore the perspective from both the empirical (sociological) and the normative ethical point of view. We conclude by applying our five-stage critical applied ethics to the example of dwarf tossing.

Chapter 6 in Voltaire's science fiction satire, Micromegas, is an illustration of the French Enlightenment's movement toward empirical scientific methods and intellectual skepticism, away from speculative metaphysics, organic systems known as the Summae, and recognition of the absolute.

This essay talks about the origins of mathematics. Is mathematics an innate skill people have always had? Did man create this discipline with the help of his senses?
This passage targets the folllowing debate. It offers a general overview about the topic.

"Understanding Scientific Progress constitutes a potentially enormous and revolutionary advancement in philosophy of science. It deserves to be read and studied by everyone with any interest in or connection with physics or the theory of science. Maxwell cites the work of Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Ludwig Bolzmann, Pierre Duhem, Einstein, Henri Poincaré, C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, Russell, Carnap, A.J. Ayer, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Bas van Fraassen, and numerous others. He lauds Popper for advancing beyond verificationism and Hume’s problem of induction, but faults both Kuhn and Popper for being unable to show that and how their work could lead nearer to the truth." —Dr. Lloyd Eby teaches philosophy at The George Washington University and The Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC

The aim of this study is to introduce in detail the model of descriptive definition of Stephen C. Pepper. After an outline of his analysis of nominal definitions, Pepper’s own conception of descriptive definition is presented. Further on, the study seeks to reveal deeper connections of this model to Pepper’s account of cognitive situation based on the dynamic and reciprocal relation between uncritical knowledge (common sense) and critical knowledge. Finally, the potentially dangerous consequences of ignoring the proper nature and status of definition are discussed.

Table of contents:

Remerciements
Avant-propos
Introduction. Réfléchir (sur) la sensation (Lucie Lagardère, Anne-Laure de Meyer, Marina Poisson)
PREMIÈRE PARTIE : PHILOSOPHIE ET ART
Chapitre 1.
La couleur : de la sensation à la création. Turner et Locke. (Maxime Chapuis)
Chapitre 2.
Regards croisés entre Hume et Bramante : la sensation humienne face au Christ à la colonne. (Florence D'Aupias d'Alcochète)
DEUXIÈME PARTIE : HISTOIRE ET REPRÉSENTATION
Chapitre 3.
La sensation comme outil politique : les représentations anglaises de l'exécution de Charles Ier au XVIIe siècle (Anne-Laure de Meyer)
TROISIÈME PARTIE : LITTÉRATURE ET CRÉATION
Chapitre 4.
Feeling et construction imaginative chez S.T. Coleridge. (Lucie Lagardère)
Chapitre 5.
La sensation dans The Scarlet Letter : de l'oppression du sujet à la création libératrice. (Marina Poisson)
Chapitre 6.
Le dérèglement des sens dans Naked Lunch de William S. Burroughs. (Edouard Marsoin)

In modern history, no event has more profoundly symbolized suffering than the Holocaust. This novel "Husserlian-realist" phenomenological dissertation elucidates the meaning of existential trauma through an interdisciplinary and psychologically integrative vantage point. I use the testimony of a select group of Holocaust witnesses who committed suicide decades after that event as a lens to examine what their despair may reveal about an unprecedented existential, moral, and spiritual crisis of humanity that threatens to undermine our faith in human history and reality itself. By distinguishing what they actually saw about our

Nuova edizione italiana a cura di Filippo Domenicali. Postfazione di Ubaldo Fadini.
"Empirismo e soggettività. Saggio sulla natura umana secondo Hume", è apparso in Francia nel 1953 e rappresenta l'esordio filosofico del giovane Deleuze. Si tratta di un testo di sfolgorante bellezza e attualità, in cui l'autore riesce a tracciare un'inedito ritratto di David Hume facendone un intercessore di primo piano, imprescindibile per la definizione di un empirismo superiore adeguato alla logica delle molteplicità. Hume, riletto e interpretato al di là dei consueti canoni storiografici, risuona nuovamente in tutta la sua freschezza, e aiuta Deleuze a delineare le coordinate per una nuova immagine del pensiero introducendoci in un mondo artefatto, dominato dall'artificiale, che si situa al di là dei dualismi tradizionali, a un pluralismo aperto alla contingenza degli incontri e delle relazioni. Hume, insomma, ha saputo porre in modo nuovo il problema della soggettività, ma di una soggettività finalmente concreta, incarnata, affettiva e passionale, «pratica». A diretto contatto con la vita.

The missing shade of blue is an alleged counter-example to Hume’s theory of “perceptions”
raised by Hume himself (Hume, [1748] 2011: §2.16). This essay proceeds as follows; firstly, a
brief summary of Hume’s ([1748] 2011) conceptual distinctions regarding perceptions and the
empiricist principle; secondly, the problem of the missing shade of blue counter-example;
responses to the missing shade of blue; assessing these responses and addressing other issues
with Humean empiricism; finally, assessing the viability of a Humean empiricism. As a result,
this essay will argue that Hume is correct in his assessment of the missing shade of blue and
that, furthermore, the correct solution to this issue (and the correct account of the empiricist
principle) is as a purely empirical claim that does not require any significant revision to Hume’s
core position.

Four female heads-and a phantom of a profile lurking underneath its fully fleshed version in the lower right-emerge from the void of the page. The drawing, Five Studies of a Woman's Head, now in the British Museum, was produced in a single sitting with the model assuming different poses while the artist drew her. He, too, must have changed his position in order to cast a precipitously downward glance at his model's head, as the two radically foreshortened views of it at the top of the page, and three similar, if less abbreviated, ones on another sheet executed during the same posing session, suggest. 1 Notwithstanding the specificity of the model's poses, the drawings are not faithful records of a sitting, nor do they strictly correspond to its time span, as the two different hats worn by the model in the lower register of the second drawing-implying the woman took a short break in order to change-indicate. They are, rather, deliberate arrangements of carefully selected views. The successive positioning of the motifs on the page-a descending sequence of slowly rotating "takes"-creates a quasi-cinematic effect of movement that begins in the upper right corner of each sheet and ends in the lower right. 2 Anachronistic as it may be, the analogy to the cinematic image helps us to appreciate the arbitrary dimension of Watteau's drawings in that it evokes the idea of montage rather than composition, a technique of putting together disparate

The trilogy Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition investigates how Aristotle and his ancient and medieval successors understood the relation between the external world and the human mind. It gives an equal footing to the three most influential linguistic traditions – Greek, Latin, and Arabic – and offers insightful interpretations of historical theories of perception, dreaming, and thinking. This final volume focuses on intellectual operations and analyses some of the most exciting issues pertaining to the conceptual representation of the external world. The contributions cover the historical traditions and their impact on contemporary philosophy of mind.

This paper explores two related issues concerning Locke's account of epistemic justification for empirical knowledge. One issue concerns the degree of justification needed for empirical knowledge. Commentators almost universally take Locke to hold a fallibilist account of justification, whereas I argue that Locke accepts infallibilism. A second issue concerns the nature of justification. Many (though not all) commentators take Locke to have a thoroughly internalist conception of justification for empirical knowledge, whereas I argue that he has an externalist conception of justification: it is the fact that sensation is caused by an external object that justifies our belief in the corresponding object. So, while most commentators take Locke to be a fallibilist with an internalist conception of justification for empirical knowledge, I argue he is actually an infallibilist with an externalist conception of justification.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused to talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

This paper is a critical response to Hylarie Kochiras' ''Gravity and Newton's substance counting problem,'' Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40 (2009) 267-280. First, the paper argues that Kochiras conflates substances and beings; it proceeds to show that Newton is a substance monist. The paper argues that on methodological grounds Newton has adequate resources to respond to the metaphysical problems diagnosed by Kochiras. Second, the paper argues against the claim that Newton is committed to two speculative doctrines attributed to him by Kochiras and earlier Andrew Janiak: i) the passivity of matter and ii) the principle of local causation. Third, the paper argues that while Kochiras' (and Janiak's) arguments about Newton's metaphysical commitments are mistaken, it qualifies the characterization of Newton as an extreme empiricist as defended by Howard Stein and Rob DiSalle. In particular, the paper shows that Newton's empiricism was an intellectual and developmental achievement that built on non trivial speculative commitments about the nature of matter and space.

As the result of 7 years of teaching seminars of Modern European Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of Athens University, the author publishes her notes together with extracts of original texts by Locke, Berkeley & Voltaire. The purpose of the publication is to assist students and researchers with bibliography and basic access to the issues of Lockean philosophy of human understanding in a historical perspective. Volume II will be dedicated to further parts of Locke's Essay translated to Greek by the author and an introduction to the contemporary impact of the philosopher's views on perception, self and personal identity. Index of terms in Greek and English, bibliography, links and a series of questions for the students are also included.

"Um grande filósofo é aquele que cria novos conceitos: esses conceitos ultrapassam as dualidades do pensamento ordinário e, ao mesmo tempo, dão às coisas uma verdade nova, uma distribuição nova, um recorte extraordinário." (Deleuze, Bergsonismo, trad. Luiz B. L. Orlandi, São Paulo, Ed. 34, 1999, p. 125). No começo da década de 1970, o professor e historiador da filosofia François Châtelet convidou alguns colegas para ajudá-lo a compor sua Histoire de la philosophie, uma coleção de pequenos ensaios sobre os cânones da filosofia, que abrangeria o período longo desde a Grécia clássica até a contemporaneidade. Gilles Deleuze foi o responsável pelo o capítulo sobre David Hume, como parte do volume dedicado ao século das luzes 1 . Châtelet obviamente não o escolheu ao acaso. Deleuze havia publicado, duas décadas antes, Empirismo e Subjetividade, seu ensaio sobre a natureza humana segundo

In the last ten years there has been a significant amount of research in Machine Translation within a "new" paradigm of empirical approaches, often labelled collectively as "Example-based" approaches. The first manifestation of this approach caused some surprise and hostility among observers more used to different ways of working, but the techniques were quickly adopted and adapted by many researchers, often creating hybrid systems. This paper reviews the various research efforts within this paradigm reported to date, and attempts a categorisation of different manifestations of the general approach.

Mi objetivo en esta investigación es revisar si el planteamiento de Jesse Prinz corresponde efectivamente a una forma de empirismo -considerando como piedra angular del mismo la premisa de que los conceptos no son innatos: todo lo que está en la mente, estuvo primero en los sentidos-, dadas las concesiones que hace a algunas formas de nativismo, en su intento de solucionar las problemáticas identificadas por la ciencia cognitiva contemporánea en las teorías clásicas del empirismo. Para ello, me baso en un modelo estándar de empirismo que extraigo de la filosofía de David Hume. Mi tarea aquí consiste en revisar si los elementos esenciales del empirismo clásico están presentes, sin haber sido socavados por los nuevos elementos integrados desde a la ciencia cognitiva contemporánea, en la propuesta de Prinz. Primero reviso la teoría clásica de la mente y las ideas de Hume, para luego mostrar el análisis del cientista cognitivo Jerry Fodor de ésta y abordar las problemáticas que él indica, lo cual nos lleva al debate nativismo-antinativismo de conceptos. En el capítulo dedicado a este debate, se incorpora, además, la teoría nativista de Susan Carey. Finalmente, me centro en la teoría de conceptos de Jessy Prinz, que supone una alternativa empirista viable, contra las formas de nativismo de conceptos antes expuestas, para luego examinar qué elementos del empirismo clásico perviven y si acaso son compatibles con los elementos que Prinz rescata de las propuestas de Fodor y Carey.

Criticisms of Karl Popper’s critical rationalist epistemology are often confused and misleading. In part that is due to Popper’s somewhat lax use of language, in which technical terms are used in more than one sense. I attempt to clarify Popper’s views by regimenting his terminology. The result is offered as a clear and concise exposition of the main points of Popper’s epistemology.

Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’).  To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet others: nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.  And often one is left guessing.

Husein Đozo je jedan od najuticajnijih naših savremenih muslimanskih mislilaca. Istovremeno, on je izuzetno značajan predstavnik islamskog reformizma kod nas. Mi ćemo u ovom radu pokušati da analiziramo osnovne spoznajne principe njegovog reformističkog razumevanja islama i Kur’ana. Služeći se metodom detaljne analize najvažnijih spisa Huseina Đoze, uočićemo da se on znatno udaljava od tradicionalnog spoznajnog stadijuma islama u različitim sferama svojih ontoloških, antropoloških i epistemoloških razmišljanja. Njegova definicija odnosa između nauke i objave potpuno je zasnovana na empirističkim metodološkim principima. Zbog toga, Đozo će na temeljima empirizma i istoricizma tumačiti pojam idžtihad a i značaj predanja Verovesnika islama. U njegovim stavovima, na tom polju, jasno se prepoznaju glavne orijentacije neoselefizma i uticaj slavnih predstavnika škole al-Manar.

Ključne reči: Husein Đozo, islamski reformizam, empirizam, škola al-Manar, moderna nauka, objava, idžtihad, neoselefizam

John Henry Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent seeks to explain why it is that when the mind’s eye strains to pick out one among the world’s furnishings, its gaze passes only per speculum in aenigmate. Within the Grammar, this explanation unfolds as a diptych, first addressing how assent can outpace understanding (Part One), and then, how merely probable grounds can yield absolute assent (Part Two). Central to the argument of both “panels,” however, is the opposition between “notions” and “things,” which is woven throughout Newman’s successive accounts of apprehension, assent, and inference. At a glance, Newman’s distinction between notion and thing can seem to imply a parsimonious or even “nominalist” ontology, committed to the unreality of abstract objects such as kinds, classes, or propositions. By contrast, this paper argues that such a reading of Newman’s distinction fundamentally mistakes the aim for and register in which he writes; Newman principally distinguishes notions from things, not in order to attach appropriate metaphysical qualifiers to items in the world’s inventory, but rather to pick out distinct modes of the mind’s relation to the world. In other words, the opposition of notion to thing is not adjectival, but adverbial, or even, “grammatical.”

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.

Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

"Does education have any relation to theology? How do the educator's worldview commitments speak to his or her practice of education? James Michael Lee brought a definite answer to these questions -- a firm no to the relations question, and an advocacy for empirical findings over and against any speculative or theoretical positions in reply to the question. Lee claimed to have a universal, neutral metatheory for all religious education, a theory that would apply to all religious educators in any and every religion. But in proposing his theory he overlooked the way that empirical facts express worldviews. This book is a detective story, tracing commitments that lay underneath empirical neutrality. In the process the reader will see avenues that unmistakably link education to theology. Education turns out to be a thoroughly
worldview-conditioned process. This new work is essential reading for professors and students inboth religious and general education.

Authentic Source, New York, Grand Rapids, Facilitating Growth, Living Light, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Forging the Future, Gregory Baum, James Michael Lee, New Testament, New Era, Behavioral Objectives, Ellis Nelson, Holy Spirit, John Milbank, Robin Gill, Ian Knox, Karl Mannheim, Mary Boys, Max Weber, North America, Notre Dame, Teilhard de Chardin, Biblical Interpretation, Don Browning"

Victor Frankenstein fails in his profession because he consistently contravenes three basic tenets of scientific community: observation, repetition, and transparency. Critics of Frankenstein have generally failed to recognize the socially responsible scientific values that Shelley attempts to define through the character of the creature. This article argues that Shelley's novel puts forward the idea of socially responsible science: cooperative forms of experimentation that reimagine the scientist's materials and instruments as agents, involve multiple points of view, and pursue mutually beneficial discoveries. Shelley depicts the creature's trial-and-error tests as the natural and instinctual antithesis of Victor's unnatural and artificial laboratory work; the creature's empiricism satisfies needs and solves specific human problems. Shelley's farsighted fiction promotes this vision in an age when the scientific revolution had made science truly popular. Her fictional experiments with the idea of socially responsible science enable us to read Frankenstein as a work of science fiction that offers both a utopian ethic of intellectual partnership and a critique of singular science. If Shelley's vision of a more open and reflective scientific community aspired to a potentially impossible ideal, it is one toward which she thought her age should aspire.