Group items tagged

"Contemporary philosophical discussions of the imagination have been primarily focused on three sets of topics. Work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has explored a cluster of issues concerning the phenomenology and cognitive architecture of imagination, examining the ways that imagination differs from and resembles other mental states both phenomenologically and functionally, and investigating the roles that imagination may play in the understanding of self and others, and in the representation of past, future and counterfactual scenarios. Work in aesthetics has focused on issues related to imaginative engagement with fictional characters and events, identifying and offering resolutions to a number of (apparent) paradoxes. And work in modal epistemology has focused on the extent to which imaginability-and its cousin conceivability-can serve as guides to possibility."

"But what, exactly, lies behind this amorphous phenomenon we call "intuition"? That's precisely what CUNY philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci explores in a chapter of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life (public library)."

"The guiding idea behind formalism is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an abstract sector of reality but is much more akin to a game, bringing with it no more commitment to an ontology of objects or properties than ludo or chess. This idea has some intuitive plausibility: consider the tyro toiling at multiplication tables or the student using a standard algorithm for differentiating or integrating a function. It also corresponds to some aspects of the practice of advanced mathematicians in some periods-for example, the treatment of imaginary numbers for some time after Bombelli's introduction of them, and perhaps the attitude of some contemporary mathematicians towards the higher flights of set theory. Finally, it is often the position to which philosophically naïve respondents will gesture towards, when pestered by questions as to the nature of mathematics."

" Life must matter; you must make sure it does. This is what Goldstein aptly calls the "ethos of the extraordinary," the need to carve your permanence in this life so that it survives after your death. Blending Plato and Dylan Thomas, the message would go like this: rage, rage against the ordinariness of sameness. "It is, in the end, the only kind of immortality for which we may hope," Goldstein writes."

"Descartes's Arguments for Universal Doubt and the "Cogito" Argument (An Outline of Meditations 1,2) The argument for universal doubt: A. The dream argument: 1. I often have perceptions very much like the ones I usually have in sensation while I am dreaming. 2. There are no definite signs to distinguish dream experience from waking experience. therefore,"

Intuition. Originally an alleged direct relation, analogous to visual seeing, between the mind and something abstract and so not accessible to the senses. What are intuited (which can be derivatively called 'intuitions') may be abstract objects, like numbers or properties, or certain truths regarded as not accessible to investigation through the senses or calculation; the mere short-circuiting of such processes in 'bank managers intuition' would not count as intuition for philosophy.

"Platonists believe that there is a universal truth underlying all of mathematics. Formalists believe all of mathematics can be defined by a set of predefined rules. Ever wonder about the deeper significance of these two critical mathematical philosophies? Using thought experiments like the Allegory of the Cave and the Barber's Paradox, the great mathematics popularizer and author of Is God a Mathematician?, Mario Livio, untangles these two didactic ways of viewing the world and the very nature of human knowledge."

"This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.""

"So, what sort of things should we be teaching if we wanted to foster "ethical literacy"? What would count as a decent grounding in moral philosophy for the average citizen of contemporary, pluralistic societies? What follows is in no way meant to be definitive. It's not based on any sort of serious empirical data around people's familiarity with ethical issues. It's a just tentative stab (wait, can you stab tentatively?) at a list of things people should ideally know about ethics, and based, on what I see in the classroom and, online, often don't."

This entry addresses the nature and epistemological role of intuition by considering the following questions: (1) What are intuitions?, (2) What roles do they serve in philosophical (and other "armchair") inquiry?, (3) Ought they serve such roles?, (4) What are the implications of the empirical investigation of intuitions for their proper roles?, and (in the supplement document titled The Logical Structure of the Method of Cases) (5) What is the content of intuitions prompted by the consideration of hypothetical cases?

"Epistemology is the study of the nature, source, limits, and validity of knowledge.  It is especially interested in developing criteria for evaluating claims people make that they "know" something.  In particular, it considers questions such as: What is knowledge?  What is the difference between knowledge and opinion or belief?  If you know something, does that mean that you are certain about it?  Is knowledge really possible?"

Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these - sensation - tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other - reflection - tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.