bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Presocratic Theology
Authors: Robinson T. M.
Published: September 2009

If in the context of early and classical Greek thought, the term “theology” is taken to mean “of God/gods/the gods and his/their putative relationship, causal and directive, to the world and its operations, and to ourselves within that world,” or something of that order, the first ascription of such a notion to a Presocratic philosopher is to be found in Aristotle's comment that “Thales thought that all things are full of gods”. The Presocratic period ends with no neat causal sequence. If one train of thinking was moving in the direction of a divinely guided, teleologically explicable universe, another was moving in exactly the opposite direction. For the atomists Democritus and Leucippus, the ever-changing universe is an infinity of space in which, across eternity, chance agglomerations of ever-moving atoms produce and will forever go on producing those contents of the universe that we call realities, from gazelles to galaxies.
Aristotle's Account of the Origins of Philosophy
Authors: Frede Michael
Published: September 2009

This article sheds light on Aristotle's own understanding of philosophy. It tries to give an account of how Aristotle seeks to determine and to explain the origin of philosophy and to account for its early development. It focuses on his account of the history of philosophy from its beginnings down to his own time in Metaphysics 1.3–10, in particular 1.3–6. It derives a good deal of knowledge about early Greek philosophy directly from Aristotle. A great deal of the information provided by later ancient sources itself is derived from Aristotle and his students, like Theophrastus or Eudemus. The evidential value of this information is rather high. It also is clear that Aristotle had his own particular perspective on the history of early Greek philosophy, and that his students largely shared his general view of the early history of Greek philosophy.
New Religious Movements
Authors: Cowan Douglas E.
Published: September 2009

New religious movements (NRMs), which are often popularly and pejoratively labeled “cults,” frequently become the sites for a multitude of conflicting emotions; they are cultural lightning rods as much for anger, shame, and guilt as for joy, excitement, and a sense of release and relief. Throughout NRM narratives, however, whether primary sources or secondary, whether affirmative accounts of one's affiliation and conversion or post-affiliation critiques of the group in question, two principal affective aspects emerge: emotional fulfillment and emotional abuse. As a heuristic framework to consider these more specific aspects of emotion in NRMs, this article uses the trajectory of participation suggested by David Bromley's affiliation-disaffiliation model. In particular, it examines the roles played by emotion and affect in the recruitment processes of different groups, focusing on affective enticement, affective coercion, and affective bonding. It also explores the link between affect and religious practices, the confirmation of religious beliefs, disaffiliation, and post-affiliation.
Sexuality and the Erotic
Authors: Kripal Jeffrey J.
Published: September 2009

The biological, psychological, cultural, and ethical complexities of what we today call sexuality, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual trauma have been the focus of intense research for well over a century now. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this corporate knowledge for how we have come to see “religion,” and it is worth noting that both the modern categories of religion and sexuality as signs marking fields of rational discourse and critical study were born more or less together within the same time period (the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and within the same cultural institution (the Western university). This article examines the abstract categories of sexuality, gender, sexual orientation, the erotic, desire, and sexual trauma. It concludes with two individual fields of sexual-religious emotion and, in this case, two historical female bodies, one (apparently) heterosexual, the other homosexual or bisexual: Mother Ann Lee, the charismatic founder of the American Shaker community, and the contemporary Hollywood actress, Anne Heche.
Melancholy
Authors: Rubin Julius
Published: September 2009

Max Weber's concept of religious ethos proves important to the study of religion and emotion. Through the concept of religious ethos, Weber developed a structural phenomenology of religious experience, emotion, personality, and life-order. In the spirit of Max Weber, this article investigates a variety of religious ethics and their affinity with melancholy. These ethics include inner-worldly asceticism (Protestant evangelical pietism), other-worldly asceticism (Christian monasticism), and inner-worldly mysticism (apophaticism and quietism among Christian mystics, in Hasidism, and in Sufism). The discussion proceeds using Weber's concept of the ideal type, where each religious ethos is articulated with clarity and precision, in a logically consistent form that accentuates or exaggerates certain aspects of religious experience and expression. In this manner, ideal types create “logical utopias” that are not intended realistically to describe or to depict, photographically, the lived religion of peoples in concrete settings.
Augustine
Authors: Wetzel James
Published: September 2009

The dazzling display of emotional intelligence that gives the Confessions, Augustine's most famous work, its resonance for students of the inner life is evident, albeit in more muted hues, in nearly everything that he wrote: sermons, letters, scriptural commentaries, polemical and apologetic works, and theological meditations. This essay examines Augustine's theology of the emotions. First, it takes a closer look at Stoicism in City of God and Augustine's eventual rejection of its theory and practice of emotion. Augustine's rejection of Stoicism is importantly symptomatic of a shift in his notion of will, from a facility for consent to a focus of internal conflict and incoherence. This essay also discusses the connection between sin and self-undoing by entering into Augustine's fascination with a first or original will to sin. The primary resources used are his psychological analysis in City of God of the Adam and Eve of Genesis and his parallel analysis of himself in Confessions, where he describes a fall of his own.
Medieval Mysticism
Authors: Largier Niklaus
Published: September 2009

An overview of the significance of emotions in mysticism during the medieval period would not be complete without an account of two other paradigms of affective arousal, namely, the suffering of Christ and the sacrifice of martyrdom. A mysticism of the passion of Christ, and of martyrdom as an imitation of the passion of Christ, emerged already in the early times of the church. In many ways, monastic asceticism follows this pattern, emphasizing acts of self-mortification, of spiritual martyrdom, and of mystical death, often invoking a psychomachy that includes the investment of the passions as well. The metamorphosis of the passions is based on practices that include the reading of the scriptures and mystical contemplation, but also liturgy and prayer. The practice of memory through reading, liturgy, and prayer that is at the center of the Christian life is for the most part also a practice of emotional stimulation. This article examines medieval mysticism, memory and prayer, spiritual sensation and emotion, negative theology and affective mysticism, and the link between the passion of Christ and the history of emotions.
Jonathan Edwards
Authors: McClymond Michael
Published: September 2009

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)—pastor, philosopher, theologian, and Calvinist saint—was a man of deep piety and a meticulous observer of others' spiritual experiences. He devoted much of his life to the analysis and interpretation of religious emotions, which he called “affections.” Today, most scholars regard Edwards as the greatest theologian in American history, and his writings have had vast influence in both church and academy. Edwards might be dubbed the patron saint of religious revival and revivalism. Like his Puritan predecessors, Edwards saw a dichotomy between true, God-given, and grace-filled religion on the one hand and false, counterfeit, hypocritical, and non-gracious religion on the other. This article examines Edwards's views on religious emotions such as understanding, inclination, affection, passion, and love. It also discusses his treatment of the “new sense,” also referred to as the “spiritual sense,” or “sense of the heart.” Moreover, Edwards's philosophy regarding enthusiasm, visions, and the ambiguous status of imagination is discussed. The article concludes by considering Edwards's legacy concerning religion and emotion.
Emile Durkheim
Authors: Pickering W. S. F.
Published: September 2009

Emile Durkheim founded his sociology enterprise on the equation that in order to understand social phenomena, the social must be explained in terms of the social. This becomes practically explicit in his study of suicide, where the tendency to suicide among particular groups is “explained” by other social facts, by reference to those who are unmarried, widowed, of a particular religious persuasion, and so on. The discomfiture in according a significant place to psychology within sociology is derived from Durkheim's acclaimed standpoint of being first and foremost a Cartesian. Durkheim held that all knowledge of experience is mentally mediated and is derived through the notion of representation. Peppered throughout much of Durkheim's study of religion are the terms “force” and “power.” This article examines the area of religion where, in Durkheim's thought, references to the emotional are assuredly to be found. It also discusses his views on delirium, religious experience, and effervescence.
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory: Its Structure and Its Mechanism
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: September 2009

This article starts when Charles Darwin published his great evolutionary work, “On the Origin of Species” which deals with artificial selection, i.e. the combination of traits and natural selection in which certain traits are attributed to improved survival ability. The ideal behind the book was the concept of laws being bound up deductively into a system. Population genetics does not deal directly with physical objects and their features. Rather, it casts everything in terms of the presumed underlying genes. It brings out the semantic aspects of the theory. Various methods are used for adaptation such as the comparative method. Darwin said that group selection might be an important factor in the evolution of morality. There is a theory of “punctuated equilibrium” which supposes that rapid evolution takes place in groups when they are first isolated from the parent body. Darwinian theory adds to our new understanding and at the same time draws strength from this understanding.
Evo‐Devo
Authors: Robert Jason Scott
Published: September 2009

This article deals with evolutionary developmental biology. Evolutionary developmental biology raises both traditional philosophy of science issues such as concerns about causation, reductionism, and the nature of explanation, and some more heterodox issues such as concerns about the structure of intra and interdisciplinary collaboration. This puts developmental biology in an evolutionary context that sees evolutionary changes in developmental mechanisms and evolutionary biology in a developmental context. Evo-Devo is here cited by various examples. It solves various problems by bringing evolutionary data in solving developmental problems and bringing developmental and evolutionary data to bear on problems within the domain of evolutionary developmental biology. It explores the dynamics of development and explains how it influences evolutionary change. The article thus explores extra genomic developmental resources in an environmental context for the future.
Philosophical Issues Arising from Genomics
Authors: Ernst Zachary
Published: September 2009

This article discusses a few issues that are raised by genomics research. An important example which can be cited is the Human Genome Project. A current approach of genomic research is outlined which is divided into two categories: sequencing and annotation. This involves both the traditional and subsystem approach that accentuates the important differences between the actual practice of genomics and the portrayal that it has received from critics. Genomic research holds on to the concept of the gene and concludes that some functional sequences of DNA are acted upon by evolutionary mechanisms which constructs phylogenetic relationships among different species. The increased use of powerful computers in the special science provides a more expansive concept of scientific explanation. This reinvents the way in which research is carried out in many different fields. Genomics is the best example of a scientific research project that has been transformed by computer science.
Agriculture and Agricultural Biotechnology
Authors: Castle David
Published: September 2009

This article explores a number of issues in agriculture and agricultural biotechnology putting a special emphasis within the philosophy of biology which is a fruitful area of study. The ecological impact of agriculture and the potential for humans to make novel contributions to genetic diversity raises questions about biodiversity. Thousands of years of selective breeding and food production using microorganisms in wine, bread, and cheese qualify as agricultural biotechnology. There are various disputes regarding genetically modified food, between products of agricultural biotechnology, and their conventional counterparts. The agricultural revolution also raises many ethical issues including concerns about corporate control, intellectual property rights, and use of traditional biological knowledge. We are on the threshold of the life sciences revolution. Unrevealing these mysteries of science will increase our knowledge and provide understanding of the world around us. Thus, it should lead to a better quality of life.
The Rhetorical Dimension of Stephen Jay Gould's Work
Authors: Barahona Ana , Cachón Vladimir
Published: September 2009

This article throws light on an important topic of study that is rhetoric, which is debated as neutral tool for bringing about agreements, or an immoral activity that ends in manipulation. There are different versions of rhetoric given by various scientists. It has important social roles such as the testing of ideas, giving shape to knowledge, and deducing responses from someone having an opposing view. Gould's articles help us to understand the use of specific rhetorical strategies and tools, during the debate around the theory of punctuated-equilibria. This is done by using a philosophical approach which distrusts the interpretation of fossil records given by most paleontologists, by using specific visual representations that suggested that the competing theory was committed to the idea of slow evolution at a constant rate, and by presenting the theory of paleontology along with modern synthesis. Rhetorical communication is intimately involved in the assessment of claims and discoveries.
Epic
Authors: Nagy Gregory
Published: September 2009

This article examines the epic as a literary genre. It describes the works of Homer and Virgil and discusses the views of ancient philosophers on this genre including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. It suggests that the clearest way to view something as a genre is to keep looking at Homer synchronically as he is understood in the historical period of Plato and Aristotle. It also argues that without the genre of epic, the poet of epic can be emulated at will, without rules, since the poet seems to have no rules.
Pastoral
Authors: Payne Mark
Published: September 2009

This article looks at the history of pastoral literature. It examines some decisive moments in the growth and decline of pastoral in order to identify the characteristic attractions of a genre that was once a canonical element of the Western literary tradition and considers the reasons and circumstances under which a genre ceases to be viable. It describes Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, Virgil's Eclogues, and The Idylls of Theocritus.
The Novel
Authors: Cascardi Anthony J.
Published: September 2009

This article considers the history of the novel and its relation to philosophy. It suggests that though disagreements about the generic identity and historical origins of the novel may be unresolvable, they nonetheless register something important for an understanding of its relationship of this genre to philosophy. It argues that while novels may well concentrate on the reality of experience in the present, they are built around the realization that all experience is historically formed and that our consciousness of experience is inseparable from the forms through which it is told. It discusses several philosophers' thoughts about the novel including René Descartes, György Lukács and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Character
Authors: Bates Stanley
Published: September 2009

This article analyses literary characters. It considers the role of character and characterization in human fictional constructions and examines what makes possible both postmodernist theories about literature and postmodernist literature. It analyzes Aristotle' view on character and highlights the differences between ancient and modern mimesis. It also explores the possibility of literature without characters or without characterization.
Emotion, Memory, and Trauma
Authors: Most Glenn W.
Published: September 2009

This article considers the role of emotion, memory, and trauma in literature. It analyzes the lead characters in Salman Rushdie's novel Fury and Homer's Iliad and suggests that the traumatic childhood experiences of Professor Malik Solanka and Achilles significantly influenced their anger and rage in their adult lives. It also discusses Sigmund Freud's thoughts about trauma and explains that his theory is based on the three basic concepts of repression, deferral, and overdetermination.
Literature and Knowledge
Authors: Gibson John
Published: September 2009

This article presents thoughts about the role of literature as a source of knowledge. It is common to claim that in works of literature we find some of the most powerful representations of reality our culture has to offer. According to this view, the literary perspective is the definitive human perspective and works of literature represent cognitive achievements and embody ways of knowing the world. This article attempts to give a sense of how powerful the arguments against the cognitivist view of literature are and to bring to light how the philosopher beholden to it might respond to them. It argues that we must accept that literature's particular manner of engaging with reality is sui generis because it constitutes its own form of cognitive insight and shows that literature's cognitive achievements are intimately bound up with its aesthetic achievements.
Introduction
Authors: Fine Gail
Published: September 2009

This article traces Plato's views on literary production, his relation with his mentor Socrates and the founding of the Academy. The article also traces the impact that politics and philosophy as subjects had on Plato's thoughts. The influence of the Sophists has also been included. The article provides various angles according to which the idea of the whole as given by Plato is perceived.
Plato on Love
Authors: Kraut Richard
Published: September 2009

Eros and Philia are the two Greek words, which can be translated as love in English. This article focuses on the idea that Plato weaves around the emotion of love. On the one hand, there is the verb philein and its cognates (philia is the noun, philos the adjective)—a word we use all the time when we talk about philanthropy, philosophy, philharmonic, and the like. On the other hand, “to love” is also the proper translation of the verb eran. Eros is the name of this psychological force, erastês designates a lover, and erômenos is the one who is loved. Erôs is characterized here as a desire. That does not mean that whenever someone wants something, he loves it. The relationship goes in the other direction: whenever someone loves, he wants. This thesis says nothing about what kind of desire one has, when one loves. It may be a desire that Plato would locate in the appetitive part of the soul, but it need not be. The word Plato most often uses for desire in the passage examined in this article, as so often, is epithumia. But an epithumia can be any sort of desire—it is not necessarily an “appetitive” desire for food, drink or sex.
Plato's Politics
Authors: Bobonich Christopher
Published: September 2009

The dialogues of Plato that are of the most obvious importance for his political philosophy include the Apology, the Crito, the Gorgias, the Laws, the Republic, and the Statesman. Further, there are many questions of political philosophy that Plato discusses in his dialogues. These topics include, among others: the ultimate ends of the city's laws and political institutions and who should rule, and the forms of constitution and their ranking. Plato draws upon Socrates' idea of Apology where the former stalwart compares himself to a gadfly, which is placed upon the great horse of Athens. What is especially worth noting here is that Socrates claims to benefit Athens by benefiting its citizens, and this benefit consists in getting them to examine themselves and their lives with regard to virtue. Since Plato, throughout his career, believed that virtue was by far the most important contributor to happiness, and that the ultimate end of all of a person's rational actions is that person's own greatest happiness, such encouragement to virtue seems a reasonable way to proceed for anyone seeking really to benefit his fellow citizens. The middle dialogues and the. late dialogues wind up Plato's idea of a perfect state. However, the major idea that Plato draws upon is citizen's happiness, which will result in an ideal state.
TheSophiston Statements, Predication, and Falsehood
Authors: Brown Lesley
Published: September 2009

Of the later dialogues of Plato, the Sophists stand out. This article highlights the concept of sophist as propounded by Plato. A didactic approach runs through the text. Socrates harps on the relation between sophist, philosopher and a statesman. Are they three different or they are the same. The basic idea that Plato wants to convey is, both features highlight some of the key enigmas of the dialogue: What is the relation between the outer and middle parts? How seriously are we to take the outer part? And is there a genuine, and successful, attempt to say what the sophist is? The article focuses on two key problems discussed and solved in the middle part: the late-learners' problem (the denial of predication), and the problem of false statement. The article also discusses communion of kinds and Plato's idea of the four quartets.
Cartesian Skepticism: Arguments and Antecedents
Authors: Bermúdez José Luis
Published: September 2009

This article examines the basis of Cartesian skepticism as contained in René Descartes' Meditation 1. It traces the complex argumentation of Meditation 1 and explores the differences between Cartesian skeptical arguments and the skeptical arguments discussed in the ancient world. It suggests that the radical nature of the doubts raised by Descartes is rooted in the radical error that Cartesian science posits in our everyday experience of the world and the hypothetical and morally certain nature of the scientific edifice that is proposed to replace the commonsense view of the world enshrined in Aristotelian science.
Live Skeptical Hypotheses
Authors: Frances Bryan
Published: September 2009

This article examines some examples of live forms of skeptical hypotheses. It highlights some objections to the live skeptic's argument. These objections fall into two classes. First, there are reasons for thinking that we do not have to be able to rule out the error theories in order to know truths obviously inconsistent with them, and second, one can admit the ruling-out requirement but argue that it is actually pretty easy to do the ruling out. This article also discusses the liveness-mortality premise, the nature of live skepticism, and the real and academic threats of skepticism.
Berkeley's Treatment of Skepticism
Authors: Pappas George
Published: September 2009

This article examines Bishop Berkeley's view and treatment of skepticism based on the content of his books Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. It explains that the Principles of Human Knowledge was not well received when it was published in 1710 because readers and reviewers understood his denial of the existence of material substance as supporting skepticism. In his second book, Berkeley showed how he was opposed to skepticism. He also showed that there were some common principles of philosophers, and that these principles, either individually or jointly, lead to skepticism of some form.
Ascriber Contextualism
Authors: Cohen Stewart
Published: September 2009

This article describes the concept of ascriber contextualism in relation to skepticism. It explains that ascriber contextualism in epistemology is the view that the truth conditions for sentences containing “know” and its cognates are context sensitive. It discusses the motivations for contextualism, skeptical paradoxes, the mechanism of context shifting, and sensitive moderate invariantism (SMI). It also comments on objections to ascriber contextualism and SMI.
Disjunctivism and Skepticism
Authors: Millar Alan
Published: September 2009

This article considers the epistemological significance of disjunctivism and its bearing on philosophical skepticism. It explains that disjunctivism is a way of thinking about perceptual experience and perceptual knowledge and it is also the view that judgments that characterize how experience appears to a subject is as if things have disjunctive truth conditions. It discusses the relation of disjunctivism with the tradition of the conception of experience and the concept of recognitional abilities.
Laws, Causation, and Economic Methodology
Authors: Hausman Daniel M.
Published: September 2009

This article focuses on the relations between the work of its author on methodology, developments in philosophy of science, and the contributions of other methodologists. It explains how its work derives from philosophy of science, as the subject was understood in the 1970s. It is autobiographical, as its story may help readers to understand the outpouring of writing on economic methodology beginning in the 1970s. It sketches a view of philosophical methodology that articulates the roles that reflection, analysis and study of economics ought to play. It summarizes the views on economic methodology that are developed in the principal contributions of its author. It also relates that work to the contributions of other writers on economic methodology, particularly Uskali Mäki and Alexander Rosenberg.
Why There Is (as Yet) No Such Thing as an Economics of Knowledge
Authors: Mirowski Philip
Published: September 2009

Once upon a time, say around the era of David Ricardo and Karl Marx, political economy was primarily concerned with the production of national wealth. This “classical” notion tended to hang on long into the twentieth century, well after the invention of neoclassical economics in the 1870s. Nevertheless, there was no denying that within neoclassical economics, exchange had displaced production as the primary topic of interest. But subsequently, something rather extraordinary happened around the middle of the twentieth century, gaining momentum as the century waned. More and more, economics at the cutting edge became relatively cavalier about treating trade as static allocation. This article endeavors to point out that all major existing modern traditions of the Economics of Knowledge have encountered their comeuppance solely from within, leading various economists to concede that their own constructions of the epistemology of the agent were structurally incoherent.
Rationality and Indeterminacy
Authors: Bicchieri Cristina
Published: September 2009

Much of the history of game theory has been dominated by the problem of indeterminacy. The very search for better versions of rationality, as well as the long list of attempts to refine Nash equilibrium, can be seen as answers to the indeterminacy that has accompanied game theory through its history. More recently, the experimental approach to game theory has attempted a more radical solution: by directly generating a stream of behavioral observations, one hopes that behavioral hypotheses will be sharper, and predictions more accurate. This article looks at several attempts to address indeterminacy, including the shift to evolutionary models. However, because its goal is to establish whether rational choice models are inescapably doomed to produce indeterminate outcomes, it pays much more attention to the experimental turn in game theory, the difficulty it encounters, and the promising results obtained by more realistic models of rationality that include a social component.
Experimental Investigations of Social Preferences
Authors: Woodward James F.
Published: September 2009

This article surveys some of the philosophical issues raised by recent experimental work on so-called social preferences. More broadly, its focus is on experimental explorations of the conditions under which people behave co-operatively or in a prosocial way or, alternatively, fail to do so. These experiments raise a number of fascinating methodological and interpretive issues that are of central importance both to economics and to social and political philosophy. It is commonly claimed that the experiments demonstrate that (at least some) people not only have selfish preferences concerning their own material payoffs, but that they also have preferences concerning the well-being of others—that is, social preferences. Moreover, the contention is not just that some subjects have such social preferences, but that these can have large and systematic effects on behavior, both in the experiments under discussion and in real life contexts outside the laboratory.
Competing Conceptions of the Individual in Recent Economics
Authors: Davis John B.
Published: September 2009

This article characterizes the Homo economicus conception in terms of three linked properties that are central to it as an atomist conception. On the standard view, individuals: have exogenous preferences; interact only (or almost only) in an indirect manner with one another through the price mechanism; and are unaffected in these two respects by the aggregate effects of their interaction with one another. The new research programs differ in how objectionable they find each of these properties, as befits their different commitments to synchronic or diachronic forms of explanation. Furthermore, this article reviews the role of synchronic and diachronic types of explanations in the possible emergence of a new general research program, discusses embedded individual microfoundations for that general program, and closes with speculations regarding the role of thinking about individuals in a future synthesis of the new research programs.
Advancing Evolutionary Explanations in Economics: The Limited Usefulness of Tinbergen's Four‐Question Classification
Authors: Vromen Jack
Published: September 2009

In this article, it is argued that Niko Tinbergen's (1963) four-question classification might be an even better antidote than Mayr's distinction against misunderstandings that hamper making headway with evolutionary theorizing in economics. Tinbergen's four-question classification, it is argued, can be seen as a further refinement of Mayr's distinction. Tinbergen's classification is used here as a sorting device. It is used not only to dispel misunderstandings of evolutionary theorizing, but also to warn against sketching all too simple evolutionary scenarios in evolutionary explanations. Tinbergen's classification might also help in understanding what evolutionary explanations can and cannot explain. It might be instrumental in sorting out different sorts of questions that might legitimately be asked about behavior and that might call for different answers.
Computational Economics
Authors: Humphreys Paul
Published: September 2009

Computational economics is a relatively new research technique in economics, but it is inexorably taking its place alongside the more traditional methods of general theory, abstract modeling, data analysis, and the more recent experimental economics. Perhaps because of its relative newness, the term computational economics currently has no determinate meaning. In contemporary use, it refers to a heterogeneous cluster of techniques implemented on concrete digital computers ranging from the numerical solution of the Black-Scholes partial differential equation for pricing options through automated trading strategies to agent-based computer simulations of the evolution of cooperation. Because of this heterogeneity, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive coverage of the topic in this article. Another reason for this restricted scope is that many of the methods used in computational economics have considerable technical interest but no particular philosophical relevance.
Explaining Growth
Authors: Kincaid Harold
Published: September 2009

The aim of this article is to make explicit the kinds of arguments provided for evidence and explanations of the causes of growth, while paying some attention to the complexities and differences in interpretation of the models and data at issue. While its examples focus on growth, the practices described here are common and not peculiar to work on growth. Along the way, this article discusses such deep issues as the probability foundations of econometrics, the place of non-statistical evidence, conceptions of economics as a separate science, and complex kinds of causality. The issues are big and hard ones, thus they are not assessed completely. However, at the end this article tries to give a clearer understanding of two important research traditions in economics and their relation to issues in the philosophy of science.
What Is Welfare and How Can We Measure It?
Authors: Dowding Keith
Published: September 2009

This article steps back from the traditional route of discussing the philosophical issues of welfare economics. The problem with that general approach is that the account and problems inherent in seeing welfare in terms of choice-based utility (whether ordinal or cardinal) or experiential utility are discussed prior to discussing other ways of examining human welfare. Problems with welfarism and utilitarianism, then, lead to the discussion of other approaches as though they avoid such problems when, in reality, their proponents rarely even stand them up to the issues. Any welfare economics or political philosophy that does not tell how to address public policy issues is not worth the name, and that means there must be a way of comparing the welfare of different people in some manner in order to make judgments about where to spend public money. All approaches suffer from interpersonal comparability problems.
Interpersonal Comparison of Utility
Authors: Binmore Ken
Published: September 2009

There are at least as many views on how the welfare of individuals should be compared as there are authors who write on the subject. An indication of the bewildering range of issues considered relevant in the literature is provided by the book Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being (Elster & Roemer 1991). However, this article plans to interpret the interpersonal comparison of utility narrowly. Although it reviews some traditional approaches along the way, its focus is on what the modern economists mean when they talk about units of utility and how can such utils be compared. It is widely thought that utils assigned to different individuals cannot sensibly be compared at all.
Epistemological Duties
Authors: Feldman Richard
Published: September 2009

This article uses three main questions to illuminate the topic of epistemological duties. First, it asks what the epistemological duties are. After suggesting that epistemological duties pertain to the development of appropriate cognitive attitudes, it asks the second question which argues about making a duty epistemological. Some of the quotations given in this article suggest that certain duties or obligations are epistemological (or epistemic) duties or obligations. Epistemological duties apparently differ from other sorts of duties, such as moral duties. This raises a question about what makes a particular duty an epistemological duty. This article suggests that a duty is epistemological if it is carried out with the goal in mind of being a rational believer. The third question in this article asks how these epistemological duties interact with other kinds of duties.
Formal Problems About Knowledge
Authors: Sorensen Roy A.
Published: September 2009

This article examines epistemological issues that have logical aspects. It considers the epistemology of proof with the help of the knower's paradox. One solution to this paradox is that knowledge is not closed under deduction. This article reviews the broader history of this maneuver along with the relevant-alternatives model of knowledge. This model assumes that “know” is an absolute term like “flat.” This article also argues that epistemic absolute terms differ from extensional absolute terms by virtue of their sensitivity to the completeness of the alternatives. This asymmetry undermines recent claims that there is a structural parallel between the supervaluational and epistemicist theories of vagueness. Finally, this article suggests that the ability of logical demonstration to produce knowledge has been overestimated.
Lessons for Cognitive Science from Neurogenomics
Authors: Rosenberg Alex
Published: September 2009

This article discusses the lessons from neurogenomics that are applicable to cognitive science. It argues that the work of some leading cognitive scientists who employed the resources of neurogenomics has already provided strong grounds to be pessimistic about the representations to which a computational theory of mind is committed, and to be optimistic about the syntactic character of processes of thinking and reasoning in the brain. It also discusses research findings concerning how the brain recalls memories and the storage of explicit memories.
The Embedded Neuron, the Enactive Field?
Authors: Chirimuuta Mazviita , Gold Ian
Published: September 2009

This article examines the concept of the receptive field (RF) of visual neurons. It introduces the concept of visual RFs by discussing the classical picture of primary visual cortex (V1) physiology and discusses the psychophysics and computational vision of contrast discrimination to place the visual neurophysiology in context. It evaluates some recent data which questioned the classical conception of the RF and considers some options available for absorbing these data into visual theory.
Neurocomputational Models: Theory, Application, Philosophical Consequences
Authors: Eliasmith Chris
Published: September 2009

This article describes the neural engineering framework (NEF), a systematic approach to studying neural systems that has collected and extended a set of consistent methods that are highly general. The NEF draws heavily on past work in theoretical neuroscience, integrating work on neural coding, population representation, and neural dynamics to enable the construction of large-scale biologically plausible neural simulations. It is based on the principles that neural representations defined by a combination of nonlinear encoding and optimal linear decoding and that neural dynamics are characterized by considering neural representations as control theoretic state variables.
Inference to the Best Decision
Authors: Churchland Patricia Smith
Published: September 2009

This article examines the concept of the so-called inference to the best decision in relation to neurobiology. It explains that the idea of inference to the best decision, often referred to by philosophers as abduction, is also known as in experimental psychology as case-based reasoning. The article discusses the tension that has developed between the sanctity of the “ought/is” dogma and what is known about the neurobiology of social behavior and suggests that the cognitive process that we loosely call inference to the best decision is a solution to this tension. It also expresses optimism that psychology and neuroscience will eventually uncover at least the general principles concerning how neural networks perform these functions and that the two domains of explaining and deciding will have much in common.
Philosophy of Mathematics and Its Logic: Introduction
Authors: Shapiro Stewart
Published: September 2009

Mathematics plays an important role in virtually every scientific effort, no matter what part of the world it is aimed at. There is scarcely a natural or a social science that does not have substantial mathematics prerequisites. The burden on any complete philosophy of mathematics is to show how mathematics is applied to the material world, and to show how the methodology of mathematics (whatever it may be) fits into the methodology of the sciences (whatever it may be). In addition to its role in science, mathematics itself seems to be a knowledge-gathering activity. The philosophy of mathematics is, at least in part, a branch of epistemology. However, mathematics is at least prima facie different from other epistemic endeavors.
A Priority and Application: Philosophy of Mathematics in the Modern Period
Authors: Shabel Lisa
Published: September 2009

The state of modern mathematical practice called for a modern philosopher of mathematics to answer two interrelated questions. Given that mathematical ontology includes quantifiable empirical objects, how to explain the paradigmatic features of pure mathematical reasoning: universality, certainty, necessity. And, without giving up the special status of pure mathematical reasoning, how to explain the ability of pure mathematics to come into contact with and describe the empirically accessible natural world. The first question comes to a demand for apriority: a viable philosophical account of early modern mathematics must explain the apriority of mathematical reasoning. The second question comes to a demand for applicability: a viable philosophical account of early modern mathematics must explain the applicability of mathematical reasoning. This article begins by providing a brief account of a relevant aspect of early modern mathematical practice, in order to situate philosophers in their historical and mathematical context.
Later Empiricism and Logical Positivism
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: September 2009

The empiricist approaches to mathematics discussed in this article belong to an era of philosophy which we can begin to see as a whole. It stretches from Kant's Critiques of the 1780s to the twentieth-century analytic movements which ended, broadly speaking, in the 1950s—in and largely as a result of the work of Quine. Seeing this period historically is by no means saying that its ideas are dead; it just helps in understanding the ideas. That applies to the two versions of empiricism that were most prominent in this late modern period: the radical empiricism of Mill and the “logical” empiricism associated with the Vienna Circle positivism of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mill and the logical positivists shared the empiricist doctrine that no informative proposition is a priori.
Wittgenstein on Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics
Authors: Floyd Juliet
Published: September 2009

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) wrote as much on the philosophy of mathematics and logic as he did on any other topic, leaving at his death thousands of pages of manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, and correspondence containing remarks on (among others) Brouwer, Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Skolem, Ramsey, Russell, Gödel, and Turing. He published in his lifetime only a short review (1913) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), a work whose impact on subsequent analytic philosophy's preoccupation with characterizing the nature of logic was formative. Wittgenstein's reactions to the empiricistic reception of his early work in the Vienna Circle and in work of Russell and Ramsey led to further efforts to clarify and adapt his perspective, stimulated in significant part by developments in the foundations of mathematics of the 1920s and 1930s; these never issued in a second work, though he drafted and redrafted writings more or less continuously for the rest of his life.
The Logicism of Frege, Dedekind, and Russell
Authors: Demopoulos William , Clark Peter
Published: September 2009

This article is organized around logicism's answers to the following questions: What is the basis for our knowledge of the infinity of the numbers? How is arithmetic applicable to reality? Why is reasoning by induction justified? Although there are, as is seen in this article, important differences, the common thread that runs through all three of the authors discussed in this article their opposition to the Kantian thesis that reflection on reasoning with mere concepts (i.e., without attention to intuitions formed a priori) can never succeed in providing satisfactory answers to these three questions. This description of the core of the view differs from more usual formulations which represent the opposition to Kant as an opposition to the contention that mathematics in general, and arithmetic in particular, are synthetic a priori rather than analytic.
Intuitionism in Mathematics
Authors: McCarty D. C.
Published: September 2009

The extent to which practicing mathematicians of a conventional tendency are already intuitionists is reassuring. Today's mathematicians treat mathematical claims much as Brouwer once did: as independently meaningful efforts to record mathematical facts which are, when true, demonstrable from proofs rooted in basic assumptions or principles. Until they are proven, those assumptions rest upon intuitions: illuminating, at times fallible, insights into the dynamical behaviors of numbers, sets, functions, and operations on them.
Three Forms of Naturalism
Authors: Maddy Penelope
Published: September 2009

This article plans to sketch the outlines of the Quinean point of departure, then to describe how Burgess and this article differ from this, and from each other, especially on logic and mathematics. Though this discussion touches on the work of only these three among the many recent “naturalists,” the moral of the story must be that “naturalism,” even restricted to its Quinean and post-Quinean incarnations, is a more complex position, with more subtle variants, than is sometimes supposed.
Structuralism
Authors: Hellman Geoffrey
Published: September 2009

The main types of mathematical structuralism that have been proposed and developed to the point of permitting systematic and instructive comparison are four: structuralism based on model theory, carried out formally in set theory (e.g., first- or second-order Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory), referred to as STS (for set-theoretic structuralism); the approach of philosophers such as Shapiro and Resnik of taking structures to be sui generis universals, patterns, or structures in an ante rem sense (explained in this article), referred to as SGS (for sui generis structuralism); an approach based on category and topos theory, proposed as an alternative to set theory as an overarching mathematical framework, referred to as CTS (for category-theoretic structuralism); and a kind of eliminative, quasi-nominalist structuralism employing modal logic, referred to as MS (for modal-structuralism). This article takes these up in turn, guided by few questions, with the aim of understanding their relative merits and the choices they present.