Diversity Reading List

Abstract: Intentionality is characteristic of many psychological phenomena. It is commonly held by philosophers that intentionality cannot be ascribed to purely physical systems. This view does not merely deny that psychological language can be reduced to physiological language. It also claims that the appropriateness of some psychological explanation excludes the possibility of any underlying physiological or causal account adequate to explain intentional behavior. This is a thesis which I do not accept. I shall argue that physical systems of a specific sort will show the characteristic features of intentionality. Psychological subjects are, under an alternative description, purely physical systems of a certain sort. The intentional description and the physical description are logically distinct, and are not intertranslatable. Nevertheless, the features of intentionality may be explained by a purely causal account, in the sense that they may be shown to be totally dependent upon physical processes.

Abstract: A thoughtful addition to the growing debate over public and private morality. Looks at lying and deception in law, family, medicine, government.

Publisher's Note: In Frege's Conception of Logic Patricia A. Blanchette explores the relationship between Gottlob Frege's understanding of conceptual analysis and his understanding of logic. She argues that the fruitfulness of Frege's conception of logic, and the illuminating differences between that conception and those more modern views that have largely supplanted it, are best understood against the backdrop of a clear account of the role of conceptual analysis in logical investigation. The first part of the book locates the role of conceptual analysis in Frege's logicist project. Blanchette argues that despite a number of difficulties, Frege's use of analysis in the service of logicism is a powerful and coherent tool. As a result of coming to grips with his use of that tool, we can see that there is, despite appearances, no conflict between Frege's intention to demonstrate the grounds of ordinary arithmetic and the fact that the numerals of his derived sentences fail to co-refer with ordinary numerals. In the second part of the book, Blanchette explores the resulting conception of logic itself, and some of the straightforward ways in which Frege's conception differs from its now-familiar descendants. In particular, Blanchette argues that consistency, as Frege understands it, differs significantly from the kind of consistency demonstrable via the construction of models. To appreciate this difference is to appreciate the extent to which Frege was right in his debate with Hilbert over consistency- and independence-proofs in geometry. For similar reasons, modern results such as the completeness of formal systems and the categoricity of theories do not have for Frege the same importance they are commonly taken to have by his post-Tarskian descendants. These differences, together with the coherence of Frege's position, provide reason for caution with respect to the appeal to formal systems and their properties in the treatment of fundamental logical properties and relations.

Abstract: Gottlob Frege's work in logic and the foundations of mathemat- ics centers on claims of logical entailment; most important among these is the claim that arithmetical truths are entailed by purely logical principles. Occupying a less central but nonetheless important role in Frege's work are claims about failures of entailment. Here, the clearest examples are his theses that the truths of geometry are not entailed by the truths of logic or of arithmetic, and that some of them are not entailed by each other. As he, and we, would put it: the truths of Eluclidean geometry are independent of the truths of logic, and some of them are independent of one another.' Frege's talk of independence and related notions sounds familiar to a modern ear: a proposition is independent of a collection of propositions just in case it is not a consequence of that collection, and a proposition or collection of propositions is consistent just in case no contradiction is a consequence of it. But some of Frege's views and procedures are decidedly tinmodern. Despite developing an extremely sophisticated apparattus for demonstrating that one claim is a consequience of others, Frege offers not a single demon- stration that one claim is not a conseqtuence of others. Thus, in par- tictular, he gives no proofs of independence or of consistency. This is no accident. Despite his firm commitment to the independence and consistency claims just mentioned, Frege holds that independence and consistency cannot systematically be demonstrated.2 Frege's view here is particularly striking in light of the fact that his contemporaries had a fruitful and systematic method for proving consistency and independence, a method which was well known to him. One of the clearest applications of this method in Frege's day came in David Hilbert's 1899 Foundations of Geometry,3 in which he es- tablishes via essentially our own modern method the consistency and independence of various axioms and axiom systems for Euclidean geometry. Frege's reaction to Hilbert's work was that it was simply a failure: that its central methods were incapable of demonstrating consistency and independence, and that its usefulness in the founda- tions of mathematics was highly questionable.4 Regarding the general usefulness of the method, it is clear that Frege was wrong; the last one hundred years of work in logic and mathemat- ics gives ample evidence of the fruitfulness of those techniques which grow directly from the Hilbert-style approach. The standard view today is that Frege was also wrong in his claim that Hilbert's methods fail to demonstrate consistency and independence. The view would seem to be that Frege largely missed Hilbert's point, and that a better under- standing of Hilbert's techniques would have revealed to Frege their success. Despite Frege's historic role as the founder of the methods we now use to demonstrate positive consequence-results, he simply failed, on this account, to understand the ways in which Hilbert's methods could be used to demonstrate negative consequence-results. The purpose of this paper is to question this account of the Frege- Hilbert disagreement. By 1899, Frege had a well-developed view of log- ical consequence, consistency, and independence, a view which was central to his foundational work in arithmetic and to the epistemologi- cal significance of that work. Given this understanding of the logical relations, I shall argue, Hilbert's demonstrations do fail. Successful as they were in demonstrating significant metatheoretic results, Hilbert's proofs do not establish the consistency and independence, in Frege's sense, of geometrical axioms. This point is important, I think, both for an understanding of the basis of Frege's epistemological claims about mathematics, and for an understanding of just how different Frege's conception of logic is from the modern model-theoretic conception that has grown out of the Hilbert-style approach to consistency.

Abstract: Concerns about 'mental causation' are concerns about how it is possible for mental states to cause anything to happen. How does what we believe, want, see, feel, hope, or dread manage to cause us to act? Certain positions on the mind-body problem - including some forms of physicalism - make such causation look highly problematic. This entry sketches several of the main reasons to worry, and raises some questions for further investigation.

Abstract: The mainstream view in philosophy of language is that sentence meaning determines truth-conditions. A corollary is that the truth or falsity of an utterance depends only on what words mean and how the world is arranged. Although several prominent philosophers (Searle, Travis, Recanati, Moravcsik) have challenged this view, it has proven hard to dislodge. The alternative view holds that meaning underdetermines truth-conditions. What is expressed by the utterance of a sentence in a context goes beyond what is encoded in the sentence itself. Truth-conditional content depends on an indefinite number of unstated background assumptions, not all of which can be made explicit. A change in background assumptions can change truth-conditions, even bracketing disambiguation and reference assignment. That is, even after disambiguating any ambiguous words in a sentence and assigning semantic values to any indexical expressions in the sentence, truth-conditions may vary with variations in the background.

Publisher's Note: During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, women were blamed for having too much passion, imagination and sexual appetite. By the late eighteenth century, however, these qualities had been revalued and appropriated for male artists. The virtues attributed to the Romantic"genius" made him like a woman but not a woman. He belonged to a third, supermale sex. As new and old concepts of woman and genius clashed, there evolved a rhetoric of sexual apartheid which today still affects our perceptions of cultural achievement. Genius from the time of the Greeks has been defined as male. In this study, Christine Battersby traces the history of the concept of genius from ancient Rome to the present day, showing how pagan myths linking divinity with male procreativity have survived into our own time. The author explores the dilemma faced by female creators who have resisted the idea that Art requires "feminine" qualities of mind but male sexual energies. GENDER AND GENIUS argues, against those currently seeking to establish an aesthetics of the "feminine," that a feminist aesthetics must look to the achievements of women artists in the past as well as in the present.

Abstract: I argue for the claim in the title. Along the way, I also address an independently interesting question: what is metaphysics, anyway? I think that the typical characterizations of metaphysics are inadequate, that a better one is available, and that the better one helps explain why metaphysics is no more problematic than the rest of philosophy

Publisher's Note: The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet sympathetic assessment.

Abstract: The project of explaining intentional phenomena in terms of nonintentional phenomena has become a central task in the philosophy of mind.' Since intentional phenomena like believing, desiring, intending have content essentially, the project is one of showing how semantic properties like content can be reconciled with nonsemantic properties like cause. As Jerry A. Fodor put it, The worry about representation is above all that the semantic (and/or the intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order; for example that the semantic/intentional properties of things will fail to supervene upon their physical properties.