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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"Does Beethoven Have To Roll Over? Not If We Flip Him!” Paper For Session: “Who’S Afraid Of High Culture?”, David B. Dennis
"Does Beethoven Have To Roll Over? Not If We Flip Him!” Paper For Session: “Who’S Afraid Of High Culture?”, David B. Dennis
David B. Dennis
No abstract provided.
Beethoven At Large: Reception In Literature, The Arts, Philosophy, And Politics, David B. Dennis
Beethoven At Large: Reception In Literature, The Arts, Philosophy, And Politics, David B. Dennis
David B. Dennis
A detailed analysis of Beethoven's influence on global culture.
The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan
The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan
Stuart Glennan
The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of …
Willful Understanding: Avicenna’S Philosophy Of Action And Theory Of The Will, Jon Mcginnis, Anthony Ruffus
Willful Understanding: Avicenna’S Philosophy Of Action And Theory Of The Will, Jon Mcginnis, Anthony Ruffus
Jon McGinnis
In this study, we look at two interpretive puzzles associated with the thought of Avicenna that are still of intrinsic philosophical interest today. The first concerns to what extent, if at all, Avicenna’s deity can be said to act freely. The second concerns to what extent, if at all, humans within Avicenna’s philosophical system can be said to act freely. It is our contention that only through a careful analysis of Avicenna’s theory of action can one begin to assess his position concerning the status of the will and so provide a satisfactory response to these two interpretative issues. We …
A Small Discovery: Avicenna's Theory Of Minima Naturalia, Jon Mcginnis
A Small Discovery: Avicenna's Theory Of Minima Naturalia, Jon Mcginnis
Jon McGinnis
There has been a long-held misconception among historians of philosophy and science that apart from brief comments in Aristotle and Averroes, the theory of minima naturalia had to await Latin Schoolmen for its full articulation. Recently scholars have shown that far from sporadic comments on minima naturalia, Averroes in fact had a fully developed and well-integrated theory of them. In this study, I complement these scholars’ important work by considering Avicenna’s place in the history and development of the doctrine of the minima naturalia. There is no study to date that mentions Avicenna in connection with this doctrine despite the …
Scientific Methodologies In Medieval Islam, Jon Mcginnis
Scientific Methodologies In Medieval Islam, Jon Mcginnis
Jon McGinnis
The present study considers Ibn Sînâ's (Lat. Avicenna) account of induction (istiqra') and experimentation (tajriba). For Ibn Sînâ induction purportedly provided the absolute, necessary and certain first principles of a science. Ibn Sînâ criticized induction, arguing that it can neither guarantee the necessity nor provide the primitiveness required of first principles. In it place, Ibn Sînâ developed a theory of experimentation, which avoids the pitfalls of induction by not providing absolute, but conditional, necessary and certain first principles. The theory of experimentation that emerges though not modern, does have elements that are similar to a modern conception of scientific method.
Splitting Concepts, Gualtiero Piccinini, Sam Scott
Splitting Concepts, Gualtiero Piccinini, Sam Scott
Gualtiero Piccinini
A common presupposition in the concepts literature is that concepts constitute a singular natural kind. If, on the contrary, concepts split into more than one kind, this literature needs to be recast in terms of other kinds of mental representation. We offer two new arguments that concepts, in fact, divide into different kinds: (a) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain different sets of relevant phenomena; (b) concepts split because different kinds of mental representation, processed independently, must be posited to explain responses to different kinds of category. Whether these arguments are …
The Resilience Of Computationalism, Gualtiero Piccinini
The Resilience Of Computationalism, Gualtiero Piccinini
Gualtiero Piccinini
Computationalism—the view that cognition is computation—has always been controversial. It faces two types of objection. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, cognitive processes are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y, and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) computations. In this article, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a better account of computation.
Computing Mechanisms, Gualtiero Piccinini
Computing Mechanisms, Gualtiero Piccinini
Gualtiero Piccinini
This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of computing, namely, doing justice to the practices of computer scientists and computability theorists. It is also an application of recent literature on …
Is There Less Bullshit In For Marx Than In Reading Capital?, William S. Lewis
Is There Less Bullshit In For Marx Than In Reading Capital?, William S. Lewis
William Lewis
This paper explores G. A. Cohen’s claim that Althusser’s Marxist philosophy is bullshit. This exploration is important because, if we are persuaded by Cohen’s assertion that there are only three types of Marxism: analytic, pre-analytic, and bullshit and, further, that only analytic Marxism is concerned with truth and therefore “uniquely legitimate” then, as political philosophers interested in Marxism’s potential philosophical resources, we may wish to privilege its analytic form. However, if Cohen’s attribution is misplaced, then we may wish to explore why Cohen was so insistent in this ascription and what this insistence reveals about his own political philosophy. The …
Editorial Introduction To Louis Althusser's 'Letter To The Central Committee Of The Pcf, 18 March 1966', William S. Lewis
Editorial Introduction To Louis Althusser's 'Letter To The Central Committee Of The Pcf, 18 March 1966', William S. Lewis
William Lewis
As an accompaniment to the translation into English of Louis Althusser's 'Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, March 18th, 1966', this note provides the historical and theoretical context necessary to understand Althusser's 'anti-humanist' interventions into French Communist Party policy decisions during the mid-1960s. Because nowhere else in Althusser's published writings do we see as clearly the political stakes involved in his philosophical project, nor the way in which this project evolved from a 'theoreticist' pursuit into a more practical one, the note also argues that the letter is of importance to Althusser scholars, to historians of Marxist thought, …