Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers, and welcome back after the Labor Day holiday weekend!

A short administrative update: I will be in tomorrow, as my plans have changed.

Now, for our main attraction: here are the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews from August 2008.  Should any of these be added to the Robbins collection?

Epistemology

• Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory, Reviewed by Sue Campbell, Dalhousie University
• Yujin Nagasawa, God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments, Reviewed by Uwe Meixner, University of Regensburg
• Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology, Reviewed by Hanseung Kim, University of Seoul
• Simone Gozzano, Francesco Orilia (eds.), Tropes, Universals and the Philosophy of Mind: Essays at the Boundary of Ontology and Philosophical Psychology, Reviewed by Keith Campbell, University of Sydney

History of Philosophy

• Christian Lotz, From Affectivity to Subjectivity: Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited, Reviewed by A. D. Smith, University of Warwick
• Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, Reviewed by Stewart Duncan, University of Florida
• Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, Reviewed by Ted Kinnaman, George Mason University
• Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, Reviewed by Eric Schliesser, Leiden University
• William F. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique, Reviewed by Paul Franks, University of Toronto
• Allen Speight, The Philosophy of Hegel, Reviewed by Mark Alznauer, Sweet Briar College
• James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, Reviewed by E. Jennifer Ashworth, University of Waterloo
• Keith Green, Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory, Reviewed by Bernard Linsky, University of Alberta
• Santiago Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, Reviewed by Robert Sokolowski, The Catholic University of America
• Francis J. Ambrosio, Dante and Derrida: Face to Face, Reviewed by Donald G. Marshall, Pepperdine University

Philosophy of Law

• Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford
• Douglas E. Edlin (ed.), Common Law Theory, Reviewed by W.J. Waluchow, McMaster University

Philosophy of Science

• Steve Fuller, Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution, Reviewed by Sahotra Sarkar, University of Texas at Austin
• Michael Ruse, Charles Darwin, Reviewed by Bruce Weber, California State University, Fullerton/Bennington College

Philosophy of Religion

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Reviewed by Michael L. Morgan, Indiana University

Metaphysics

• Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Persons: Human and Divine, Reviewed by William R. Carter, North Carolina State University
• Laird Addis, Ontology and Explanation: Collected Papers, Reviewed by Katalin Farkas, Central European University, Budapest

Historiography

• Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California, Santa Cruz

Moral & Political Philosophy

• Robert B. Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, Reviewed by David Hildebrand, University of Colorado Denver
• Larry May, Aggression and Crimes Against Peace, Reviewed by Douglas Lackey, Baruch College/Graduate Center, CUNY

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday!

A brief note: Monday is a holiday (Labor Day) and I won’t be posting.  Also, I will be out next Wednesday, 3 September, and won’t be posting then, either.

While browsing through Bookforum.com yesterday, I came across the Web site for Philosopher’s Annual. The aim of this site is as follows: “The papers on this website represent our effort to showcase ten of the best philosophy articles published in the past year.” There is a wide range of topics covered by the papers chosen for the annual, as can be seen from the offerings for 2007, though the majority of this year’s selections focus on epistemology and philosophy of mind:

• “Reflection and Disagreement,” Adam Elga, from Nous 41 (2007), 478-502
• “Why Nothing Mental is Just in the Head,” Justin Fisher, from Nous 41 (2007), 318-334
• “Socrates’ Profession of Ignorance,” Michael N. Forster, from Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 3 (2007), 1-36
• “When is a Brain Like a Planet?,” Clark Glymour, from Philosophy of Science 74 (2007), 330-347
• “But Mom, Crop Tops are Cute! Social Knowledge, Social Structure and Ideology Critique,” Sally Haslanger, from Philosophical Issues 17, The Metaphysics of Epistemology, pp. 70-91
• “Innocent Statements and their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts,” Thomas Hofweber, from Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (2007), 1-33
• “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” Nadeem Hussain from B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu, eds., Nietzsche and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 157-191
• “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions,” Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, from Nous 41 (2007), 663-668
• “Covenants and Reputations,” Peter Vanderschraaf, from Synthese 157 (2007), 167-195
• “Epistemic Modals,” Seth Yalcin, from Mind 16 (2007), 983-1026

You will be able to link directly to the full text of all of the articles, with the exception of Haslanger’s and Vanderschraaf’s articles, for which you will need to go through HOLLIS to access, and Hussain’s article, for which permission to include an online version has not been granted yet by the publisher.

The Tables of Contents for all previous volumes are available via the link in the upper right hand corner of the home page — “Past Volumes,” which has the same URL as the home page — and full-text of many articles for more recent years is as well, though I’m finding that not all of the links work at the present time.

I will add a link to the Philosopher’s Annual in the blogroll, and also on the Links page of the Philosophy Department’s Web site.

Have a great long holiday weekend, folks!

Good morning, readers, and happy Monday!

I haven’t done a humorous post in a while, so here is one, via David Chalmers, that may be amusing: “Zombies on the web.”  Chalmers discusses (mostly) philosophical zombies, but other categories (e.g., Hollywood) are mentioned.

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

Here are the July reviews from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Are any of these books candidates for inclusion in the Robbins collection?

Philosophy of Language

Frederik Stjernfelt
Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics
Reviewed by Valeria Giardino, Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-EHESS-ENS), Paris

François Recanati
Perspectival Thought: A Plea for (Moderate) Relativism
Reviewed by Kepa Korta, University of the Basque Country

 Epistemology

Mark Okrent
Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality
Reviewed by Matthew Ratcliffe, Durham University

Michael N. Forster
Kant and Skepticism
Reviewed by Anthony Brueckner, University of California, Santa Barbara

Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World
Reviewed by Christopher S. Hill, Brown University

Jennifer Lackey
Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge
Reviewed by Aaron Z. Zimmerman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Philosophy of Religion

Alvin Plantinga, Michael Tooley
Knowledge of God
Reviewed by William L. Rowe, Purdue University

J. L. Schellenberg
The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism
Reviewed by Stephen Wykstra, Calvin College and Timothy Perrine, Calvin College

Erik J. Wielenberg
God and the Reach of Reason: C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell
Reviewed by Bruce Russell, Wayne State University

Metaphysics

Robin Le Poidevin
The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation
Reviewed by Craig Callender, University of California, San Diego

John Leslie
Immortality Defended
Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro, St. Olaf College

Max Kistler, Bruno Gnassounou (eds.)
Dispositions and Causal Powers
Reviewed by Jennifer McKitrick, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Lynne Rudder Baker
The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism
Reviewed by Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire

History of Philosophy

Terence Irwin
The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study; Volume I: From Socrates to the Reformation
Reviewed by Dimitrios Dentsoras, University of Manitoba

Iain Macdonald, Krzysztof Ziarek (eds.)
Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions
Reviewed by David Pettigrew, Southern Connecticut State University

Larry A. Hickman
Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey
Reviewed by Dennis M. Senchuk, Indiana University

P. J. E. Kail
Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy
Reviewed by Angela Coventry, Portland State University

Christopher Shields
Aristotle
Reviewed by Barbara Sattler, Yale University

Andrew Haas
The Irony of Heidegger
Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University

Quentin Skinner
Hobbes and Republican Liberty
Reviewed by Bernard Gert, Dartmouth College

Paul Russell
The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion
Reviewed by Rico Vitz, University of North Florida

Charlie Huenemann (ed.)
Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays
Reviewed by Steven Barbone, San Diego State University

Philosophical Practice

Rupert Read, Laura Cook (ed.)
Applying Wittgenstein
Reviewed by Colin Johnston, Institute of Philosophy, University of London

Steve Fuller
The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy
Reviewed by Val Dusek, University of New Hampshire

Ethics/Moral Philosophy/Political Philosophy

Jerome Neu
Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults
Reviewed by Macalester Bell, Columbia University

J. McKenzie Alexander
The Structural Evolution of Morality
Reviewed by Herbert Gintis, University of Massachusetts

Francisco J. Benzoni
Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul: Aquinas, Whitehead, and the Metaphysics of Value
Reviewed by Christopher M. Brown, University of Tennessee at Martin

Aesthetics

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature
Reviewed by K. Gover, Bennington College

Elisabeth Schellekens
Aesthetics and Morality
Reviewed by James Harold, Mount Holyoke College

Jane Kneller
Kant and the Power of Imagination
Reviewed by James Schmidt, Boston University

James O. Young
Cultural Appropriation and the Arts
Reviewed by John Rapko, San Francisco Art Institute

Stephen Davies
Philosophical Perspectives on Art
Reviewed by Christian Helmut Wenzel, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan

Philosophy of Mathematics

Marcus Giaquinto
Visual Thinking in Mathematics: An Epistemological Study
Reviewed by Sun-Joo Shin, Yale University

Good morning, readers!

Recently, I came across two fascinating articles about research which explores how some recent empirical research on magic illuminates the workings of human perception.  Both of these articles may be of great interest to those who study epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and perception.

The first, “Magicians Know More Than Scientists,” by Jeanna Bryner, begins by stating:

Magicians are way ahead of psychologists when it comes to understanding and exploiting the human mind and our perceptual quirks.

A new study, detailed in the current online issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, reveals how elements of human cognition, such as awareness and perception, could be explained by the success of some techniques commonly used by magicians….

“Although a few attempts have been made in the past to draw links between magic and human cognition, the knowledge obtained by magicians has been largely ignored by modern psychology,” said researcher Ronald Rensink, who specializes in vision and cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The remainder of the article discusses how empirical studies of magic and what magicians do is opening up insights into human perception and how it works.

The second article, “How magicians control your mind,” by Drake Bennett, covers similar ground, though Bennett includes information studies not referenced in the first article.  (A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.)  Bennett writes:

At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body’s defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.

“I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.”

As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is a jury-rigged apparatus, full of gaps and easily manipulated. The collaboration between science and magic is still young, and the findings preliminary, but interest among scholars is only growing: the New York Academy of Science has invited the magician Apollo Robbins to give a presentation in January on the science of vision, and a team of magicians is scheduled to speak at next year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the world’s largest organization of brain researchers.

And in a world where concentration is a scarce resource, a better understanding of how to channel it would have myriad uses, from safer dashboard displays to more alluring advertisements - and even, perhaps, to better magic.

What do you think, readers?

And now, to complete our magic theme and entertain you, here is the band, America, singing “Magic”:

I was sent this link to a short piece of fiction, “Engineers’ Dreams,” which is a fascinating look at Google, artificial intelligence, and concepts like the Turing machine.  It really makes you think about Google and search engines, among other things, in a whole new light.

I include it on this blog because it is much in the same vein as using Batman and other pop culture figures to discuss philosophy and philosophical questions.

What do you think, readers?

Good morning, readers, and happy Friday!

Yesterday, we received the latest issue of Philosophical Review and Ethics.  Here are the Tables of Contents for both journals:

Philosophical Review 117(3) July 2008

• The Egg and I: Conception, Identity, and Abortion, Eugene Mills
• Saying Good-bye to the Direct Argument the Right Way, Michael McKenna
• On Specifying Truth-Conditions, Agustín Rayo

Ethics 118(3) April 2008 — Symposium on Agency

• Introduction, Christian B. Miller
• Practical Knowledge, Kieran Setiya
• A Theory of Value, J. David Velleman
• Why Be Disposed to Be Coherent?, Niko Kolodny
• A Defense of the Traditional War Convention, Yitzhak Benbaji
• Is Goodness a Homeostatic Property Cluster?, Michael Rubin

Discussion

• Hare on De Dicto Betterness and Prospective Parents, David Wasserman

Please note that the Philosophical Review issue is not currently available electronically.

Enjoy your weekend!

A recent series of Dilbert cartoons finds Dilbert with a broken moral compass, the result of a traumatic head injury.  With the part of his brain responsible for morality damaged, Dilbert acts in heinous ways, and is quickly promoted to senior management…that is, until his moral compass heals… at which time he faces defenestration.

All humor aside, there are some interesting philosophical questions here, about the nature of morality — is it purely a social construct, or are there parts of the brain set up for morality?  How should one act ethically in work environments? There are no quick answers to these and related questions, but some of the research and thought that do exist on these topics is fascinating.

Happy Monday, readers!

Just arrived in Robbins last Friday: the latest issues of Inquiry and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.  Here are the Tables of Contents for the respective journals:

Inquiry 51(3) June 2008

• “Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty,” Nigel Pleasants
• “Fichte’s Fictions Revisited,” Benjamin D. Crowe
• “Personal Identity as a Task,” Sophia Vasalou
• “The Myth of the Metaphysical Circle: An Analysis of the Contemporary Crisis of the Critique of Metaphysics,” Herbert De Vriese

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77(1) July 2008

Articles

• “The Virtue of Practical Rationality,” Sigrún Svavarsdóttir
• “Internalist Foundationalism and the Problem of the Epistemic Regress,” José L. Zalabardo
• “A Functionalist Theory of Properties,” Ann Whittle
• “Is Locke’s Theory of Knowledge Inconsistent?,” Samuel C. Rickless
• “Why Be an Anti-Individualist?,” Laura Schroeter

Discussions

• “A Hard-line Reply to Pereboom’s Four-Case Manipulation Argument,” Michael McKenna
• “A Hard-line Reply to the Multiple-Case Manipulation Argument,” Derk Pereboom

• “Comments on Woodward, Making Things Happen,” Michael Strevens
• “Response to Strevens,” Jim Woodward

Book Symposium
The Evolution of Morality

• “Preçis of The Evolution of Morality,” Richard Joyce
• “Acquired Moral Truths,” Jesse Prinz
• “Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality,” Stephen Stich
• “Evolution and the Possibility of Moral Realism,” Peter Carruthers, Scott M. James
• “Replies,” Richard Joyce

Review Essay

• “Review Essay on Sami Pihlström’s Solipsism: History, Critique, and Relevance,” Richard Schantz

Critical Notices

• Epistemic Luck, reviewed by Jonathan Kvanvig
• The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche On Overcoming Nihilism, reviewed by Robert Pippin
• Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification, reviewed by Tomoji Shogenji

At left: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Coming from a Continental philosophy background, Edmund Husserl loomed large in my training, especially at the graduate level.  And even in the analytic tradition, there is a great deal of interest in Husserl, mainly in his phenomenological and mathematical writings.

Husserl’s work is not always easy to understand, and many worthy philosophers have struggled to comprehend him.*   Thus, readers might find this very interesting article outlining Edmund Husserl’s project — Caitlin Smith’s “Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe” — to be of interest.

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this link.

*One of the interesting items in the Robbins collection is Josiah Royce’s copy of Husserl’s first phenomenological work, Logical Investigations.  In the interleaved note pages, Royce’s comments indicate a growing confusion with Husserl’s arguments, until, about halfway through the first volume, he writes that he cannot understand the book and is putting it aside.