bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Science, Publicity, and Consciousness
Authors: Goldman Alvin I. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
A traditional view is that scientific evidence requires methods to be public or intersubjective: they must be usable by different investigators and must produce agreement. The publicity constraint ostensibly precludes introspection. But the science of consciousness relies on the subjects’ introspective reports, so there is a tension between the publicity requirement and scientific practice. This chapter argues against the publicity requirement and in (provisional) support for reliance on introspection.
Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?
Authors: Goldman Alvin I. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractIn everyday life, novices often defer to the testimony of experts in deciding what to believe. But when putative experts disagree, how can a novice justifiably decide which expert to trust? Five methods are considered: listening to their arguments and counter‐arguments, determining who has more agreement from other experts, consulting the ratings of metaexperts, checking the biases of the contenders, and consulting their respective track records. Going with greater numbers seems promising but depends on problematic assumptions. Appealing to track records, though ostensibly beyond a novice's ken, is shown to be possible and sometimes quite helpful.
The Spirituality of the Subaltern
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
This first chapter summarizes the main arguments of the author's companion volume, The Economics of Ecstasy:‐ Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal. In doing this it places the Songs of Ecstasy of the Kartābhajās, a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta, in a historical and literary context. The different sections of the chapter look at the style and structure of the Bhāver Gīta (the main song text, which translates literally as Songs of Ecstasy), the mystical imagery and social ideals found within it, the ambivalent status of Tantra in colonial Bengal, and the decline into obscurity of the songs following a period of scandal, slander, corruption, and disrepute.
From the Songs of Ecstasy
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
A series of select translations is presented from the Bhāver Gīta, the main song text of the Kartābhajās, a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta, Bengal. The author has chosen the songs that he considers most significant and organized them under thematic headings: Company songs, Songs of the marketplace, Songs of mystical belief and esoteric practice, Songs of lust and love, and Other songs of faith and worship. Each set of songs is introduced by explanatory text.
The Language of the Mint
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
The collection of “Mint Sayings” (Ṭyāṅkśālī) for which translations are presented in this chapter was compiled in 1902 by Manulāl Miśra, a Kartābhajā author who tried to systematize this ortherwise wildly eclectic and confusing esoteric tradition of the Kartābhajās (a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta). The sayings are intentionally obscure, enigmatic, and in a deliberately confusing form, and are clearly designed to mislead and befuddle the uninitiated outsider. They have no written commentary of their own and are intended to be transmitted in the secret oral context of a master‐disciple relationship. The value of the sayings does not appear to lie in their meaning or content; indeed, they often appear quite intentionally meaningless and absurd, but rather in their form and the ways in which they are exchanged. Miśra explains that the sayings are called “mint” sayings precisely because this secret discourse operates much in the same way as a physical mint. Just as a mint transforms ordinary metals into legal currency, so too the Mint language transmutes ordinary words into highly valued commodities, which can be exchanged in the secret marketplace, which is the Kartābhajā sect itself.
Songs from the “Secret Marketplace”
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
In addition to the songs of the Bhāver Gīta (the main song text of the Kartābhajās, a Bengali sect devoted to Tantra in colonial Calcutta), there is also a large body of other Kartābhajā songs scattered over a wide range of sources. Most of these are quite different in form and structure from the songs of the Bhāver Gīta, and many are almost indistinguishable from more popular folk forms like the Bāul songs. These have been gathered together, and translations of them are presented in three groups under the titles: Popular songs of unknown origin; Songs from the works of Manulāl Miśra (the Kartābhajā theologian of the early twentieth century); and Songs of the “Wealthy Gentlemen” (Sāhebdhanī): Other Kartābhajās and related groups. The Sāhebdhanīs are most important of the related groups and are a closely related sister movement to the Kartābhajās; they spawned some of the most important folk songs of rural West Bengal. Each set of songs is introduced by explanatory text.
The Underworld of the Imperial City
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
This is the first of two chapters looking at the broader social and historical background of late‐eighteenth‐century Bengal and the basic religious and social ideals of the early Kartābhajā tradition. It examines the role of secrecy as a hermeneutic strategy, or as a means of appropriating the legitimating authority of traditional scriptures and sacred metanarratives while submitting them to a deeper, esoteric interpretation that undercuts or subverts them. The chapter argues that the rise of the Kartābhajā occurred at a pivotal historical moment and at a key geographic locus in early colonial Bengal, on the critical margins between the urban streets of Calcutta and the rural hinterland, amidst the economic transition from precapitalist to colonial capitalist forms, as power changed hands from indigenous Hindu and Muslim elites to the East India Company. After briefly describing the religious background and the social and economic context of early colonial Bengal, an account is given of the early history of the Kartābhajā sect (which appears to have been drawn particularly from men and women involved in the marketplace – traders), as it emerged within this critical period, hailing itself as a new “company” – a “Company of the Poor.”
The Language of the Mint
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
This chapter and the following two delve into the most esoteric and hidden dimensions of the Bengali Kartābhajā sect, as they explore the use of secret discourse and bodily practice. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the cryptic songs of the Kartābhajās and their own unique form of the Tantric sandhābhāṣā(intentional language with elaborate use of imagery, metaphors, and riddles), which they called the “Language of the Mint.” This is examined not so much in terms of its professed hidden content (the usual approach), but rather in terms of form and strategies. After briefly outlining the form and content of the Mint Sayings, the chapter delves into the hermeneutic problems involved in trying to make sense of these cryptic utterances, and offers the author's own reading, based on a modified version of Bourdieu's model of symbolic capital. Finally, it looks at the problem of secrecy as played out in contemporary field research from conversations with Kartābhajā gurus.
The Progressive “Exotericization” and “Institutionalization” Of an Esoteric Tradition
Authors: Urban Hugh B. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
This short chapter demonstrates that the esoteric elements of the tradition of the Bengali Kartābhajā sect would eventually become an increasing source of embarrassment. They were to be progressively institutionalized and marginalized as a later tradition evolved from the secretive obscure cult centring around the mysterious mad Fakir Bā into a largely innocuous, well‐organized, and rather, bureaucratic, and popular devotional faith centring around the miraculous healing powers of the Satī Mā, and the sacred hierarchy of the Mahāśays (regional gurus).
The Heart of Islamic Philosophy
Authors: Chittick William C. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Afdal al‐Dîn Kâshânî, better known as Bâbâ Afdal, died in the village of Maraq near Kashan in central Iran in the year 1210. Little is known of his life or his teachers, only that he taught in Maraq and had many students. His Persian philosophical prose is the most beautiful in the language. He mentions Aristotle and Hermes among previous philosophers, but only alludes to his Muslim predecessors. His views, like those of the Ikhwân al‐Safâ’ and many others, are strongly tinged with Neoplatonism. He explains with rare clarity that the goal of philosophy is to actualize intelligence and to achieve human perfection. His positions on ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, cosmology, and psychology are both original and traditional. In three chapters, the book introduces Bâbâ Afdal and his writings, describes the world view of Islamic philosophy, and analyzes significant terms of the philosophical vocabulary. In the main body of the book, more than half of Bâbâ Afdal's Persian writings are translated into English.
The Worldview of Islamic Philosophy
Authors: Chittick William C. 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Despite the opinions of those who would define the Islamic tradition in narrow terms, most of the Muslim practitioners of Hellenistic philosophy found it perfectly compatible with their religion. They looked upon the first principle of Islamic faith – tawhîd or the assertion of divine unity – as a universal truth that underlies every sound understanding of the nature of things. Those who want to grasp their outlook, however, need to put aside the scientism that governs modern thought and to look upon the universe as they saw it. They established their perspective first by conceptualizing the qualities that infuse the universe and the soul, but their purpose in doing so was to conform themselves to the First Real by perfecting their understanding and their character. They integrated the intellectual disciplines into one grand vision rooted in wujûd, a term that is commonly translated as “existence” but is explained correctly by Bâbâ Afdal to mean both “being” (bûd) and “finding” or “perception” (yâft). Drawing from both the understanding and the experience of wujûd, the philosophers engaged with both ontology and epistemology and drew appropriate conclusions for psychology (the knowledge of soul and intellect), cosmology (the descent of apparent reality from the First Real and its reintegration into its source), and ethics (the diversity of human souls and the normative principles that guide people to the actualization of virtue).
Frege's Conception of Logic
Authors: Goldfarb Warren 
Published: October 2003

AbstractGoldfarb depicts salient differences between Frege’s and the contemporary philosophical conceptions of logic. On the contemporary conception, logical properties such as validity and consequence are metalinguistic properties of schemata determined by the truth values that result from interpretations of their placeholders. They thus require a truth predicate for their expression, and, moreover, apply only indirectly to actual statements, through the use of Tarskian semantic disquotational facts. On Frege’s universalist conception, in contrast, logical laws are maximally general truths, differing from other truths only in generality. Goldfarb argues that Frege was precluded from adopting the schematic conception by two central aspects of his views. First, Frege doubted that truth is a genuine property, and that the use of a truth predicate expresses genuine claims. Second, logic for Frege constitutes the ultimate standards of justification, and must be applicable to any subject matter without presupposing other truths, in particular independently of semantic facts. The latter point shows that for Frege what counts as a law of logic is not explicable by appeal to any more fundamental facts. Goldfarb argues also that Frege’s conception of the role of logic in justification shows that he is not vulnerable to the type of regress objections against logicism first presented by Poincaré. Finally, Goldfarb argues that although Frege in the end must within his conception of logic take our grasp of inference rules to be non-propositional, deductive justification under the schematic conception involves a regress of assumptions of stronger set theories that Frege’s conception can avoid.
Ernst Mach at the Crossroads of Twentieth‐Century Philosophy
Authors: Hintikka Jaakko 
Published: October 2003

AbstractHintikka questions the principled division between analytic and continental philosophy by arguing that Mach should be considered the century’s most influential philosopher, a giant on whose shoulders thinkers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Heidegger subsequently stood. Hintikka notes that Frege’s direct influence on philosophy proper outside of logic and the foundations of mathematics was for a very long time quite minimal. Mach’s wider impact is measured in the great importance to much 20th-century philosophy of the question whether knowledge may be given to us apart from what is conceptualized in thought (in, e.g., pure sense perception, intuition, or the sensory given). Mach’s phenomenalism (or phenomenology) set the agenda, according to Hintikka, for future discussion of this question in philosophy and in physics. Mach’s disputes with Bolzmann about the reducibility to knowledge of sensation affected Einstein. Hintikka argues that both Husserl and the early Wittgenstein embraced phenomenological conceptions of experience and knowledge that were indebted to Mach’s ideas. Heidegger was therefore wrong to insist that phenomenology and phenomenalism are distinct philosophical traditions.
Truth and Propositional Unity in Early Russell
Authors: Ricketts Thomas 
Published: October 2003

AbstractRicketts treats shifts in Russell’s views about truth and judgment between 1905 and 1910, a period during which Russell attempted to articulate an atomistic, pluralist, and realist metaphysical alternative to the Idealistic Monism of Bradley in which reality is constituted by a plurality of mind-independent entities standing in relations external to them. Russell did not simply dismiss Idealism; significant aspects of the development of his alternative stem from his attempt to answer Bradley’s criticisms. Ricketts focuses on three elements of Russell’s early metaphysics: propositions not facts are metaphysically fundamental; a proposition is not a mere list of its components; and propositions are not representational, so that truth of propositions is not analyzed in terms of relations to truth-makers. Russell’s problem was to explain the unity of the proposition in face of Bradley’s challenge such that unity cannot be accounted for by external relations. Since for Russell truth is not explained by relation to fact, he was driven to a view in which truth and falsity are two irreducible ways in which propositional constituents are related by a relation that is itself one of these constituents. Unfortunately this position is self-thwarting; any attempt to state that truth is a quality of the relation holding the proposition together will, on Russell’s view, express a proposition in which truth is a constituent independent of that relation. This incoherence, on Ricketts’s reading, is what motivates Russell to a metaphysics in which facts are fundamental, in order to serve the role of truth-makers of propositions.
Hausserl and the Linguistic Turn
Authors: Parsons Charles 
Published: October 2003

AbstractParsons criticizes Dummett’s recent argument that Husserl was not an analytic philosopher because Husserl did not accept that a philosophical account of thought can be attained only through a philosophical account of language, the thesis which Dummett takes to define the analytic tradition. Dummett locates the beginning of the conceptual break between the analytic and the continental traditions in Husserl’s transcendental turn of 1905–1907, after which Husserl came to subscribe to a essentially non-linguistic general conception of intentionality. Parsons agrees with Dummett that Husserl did not view the philosophy of language as basic to the philosophy of thought, but argues that Husserl was quite aware of the need for an account of the linguistic expression of thought. The problem that led Husserl away from accepting the fundamental status of philosophy of language was whether particular perceptual experiences must have a propositional or language-like structure in order to be said to have genuine content. In concluding that not all perceptual experience is propositional in structure, Husserl’s position is relevant to contemporary debates about thought and consciousness, especially the notion of non-conceptual mental. Through this critique of Dummett’s interpretation, Parsons suggests that the distinction between the analytic and continental traditions is neither as sharp nor as philosophically principled as many have supposed.
Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist
Authors: Quine W. V. 
Published: October 2003

AbstractIn this essay, Quine reflects on his philosophical development, taking a steadfast adherence to extensionalism as a unifying principle of his whole philosophy starting as far back as the 1930s. Quine calls two sentences coextensive if they have the same truth value, two general terms or predicates coextensive if they are true of just the same objects, and two singular terms coextensive if they designate the same object. Extensionalism is the general doctrine that no distinction is clear and philosophical significant if it cannot be captured by differences in extensions. Intensionalism, by contrast, takes distinctions of meaning as irreducible and prior to distinctions of extension. The philosophical origin his extensionalism Quine takes to be his seeing that the intensional ontology of propositional functions not only does no mathematical work in Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, but, in addition, had no clear criteria of individuation. Quine’s doctoral dissertation was thus concerned with reinterpreting the Principia extensionally. Much of the rest of his career consisted of meeting other philosophically significant challenges to extensionalism. The most important challenges discussed in this essay are the idiom of logical implication, predicates of irreferential singular terms, and propositional attitude ascriptions. The two most important strategies for meeting these challenges are the elimination of singular terms via Russell’s theory of descriptions and semantic ascent.
Hans Reichenbach: Realist and Verificationist
Authors: Putnam Hilary 
Published: October 2003

AbstractBy focusing on Reichenbach’s 1938 Experience and Prediction, Putnam argues against the claim that logical positivism represented a unified ideological viewpoint. It is a vast oversimplification, Putnam shows, to suppose that every logical positivist held that all meaningful statements are either empirically verifiable statements about sense data or else purely formal stipulations. Reichenbach, in particular, defended a form of commonsense realism, while at the same time criticizing foundational or metaphysical Realism. Thus for Putnam the most crucial philosophical questions about logical positivism concern, not a unique theory of meaning, but the particular assumptions about rationality, meaning and objectivity which each positivist brought to bear in arguing against metaphysical doctrines.
Sure Path of a Science: Kant in the Analytic Tradition
Authors: Neiman Susan 
Published: October 2003

AbstractThis essay is an investigation and critique of 20th-century interpretations of Kant in the analytic tradition, arguing that a clear sign of progress in recent analytic philosophy is its newly historical self-conception. Approaches to Kant by Russell, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, Strawson, and Rorty are compared and contrasted, exploring their various and shared assumptions about Kant’s announced idea to place philosophy “on the sure path of a science”; a critique of Rorty’s epistemological paradigm of the history of modern philosophy is given. Twentieth-century readings of Kant, including Rorty’s, truncated Kant’s philosophy by projecting Cartesianism onto Kant and cutting away discussion of the moral, religious, and ethical content of his work. Given Kant’s conception of the unity of reason, in which theoretical and practical philosophy are inevitably implicated by one another, such readings are not defensible but can be exposed through proper reading of the text.
Language as Social Software
Authors: Parikh Rohit 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Parikh discusses recent developments in computer science, especially in the areas of program correctness, dynamic logic, and temporal logic. He then develops a meaning theory for a natural language versus the actual linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior of the members of a speech community, exploring three arguments concerned with the social character of language: Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, Kripke’s skeptical paradox (derived from Wittgenstein) concerning the notion of following a rule, and John Searle’s Chinese room puzzle. Parikh argues that each of these apparently skeptical arguments is concretely realized in the programmer’s efforts to devise and apply a programming language. In thinking through the relation between high-level programming languages and the machine languages into which they must be translated in order to be implemented, computer scientists can offer significant insights into philosophical issues. A pragmatic approach to meaning theory in which uniformity in individual speakers’ usage of a communal language is not assumed, and in which there is no common underlying notion of truth—in which, ultimately, large portions of language are admitted which are not informational at all—is defended, with suggestions of applications to problems of vagueness.
Meaning, Rigidity, and Modality
Authors: Shieh Sanford 
Published: October 2003

Abstract
Saul Kripke’s “modal argument” against the description theory of proper names turns on a distinction between reference-fixing and meaning-giving. In this essay Shieh argues first that without further explanation of meaning-giving, it is unclear how this argument shows that the meanings of names cannot be given by descriptions. Second, Shieh shows that an explanation of meaning-giving sufficient to sustain the modal argument requires a notion of modal properties of meaning. This notion, in turn, yields a notion of rigidity of names that can be explained in terms of Gareth Evans’s notion of deep necessity. Shieh concludes that Kripke’s modal argument is not based simply on untutored linguistic intuitions or facts of ordinary language use but presupposes substantial metaphysical commitments.
Epistemology and Science in the Image of Modern Philosophy: Rorty on Descartes and Locke
Authors: Hatfield Gary 
Published: October 2003

AbstractIn Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty locates the perceived ills of modern philosophy in the “epistemological turn” of Descartes and Locke. Hatfield argues that Rorty’s accounts of Descartes’s and Locke’s philosophical work are seriously flawed. Rorty misunderstood the participation of early modern philosophers in the rise of modern science, and he misdescribed their examination of cognition as psychological rather than epistemological. His diagnostic efforts were thereby undermined, and he missed Descartes’s original conception of a general physics and Locke’s probabilist analysis of the grounds for rational belief.