Books on the topic 'McDowell, John. Mind and World'

I will begin this paper by sketching a view according to which perceptual phenomenal character is “extended”, in the sense of literally incorporating mind-independent entities in the subject’s environment (a view also known as Naïve Realism or the Relational View). I will then argue that this metaphysical thesis about perceptual phenomenal character affords a novel version of epistemological disjunctivism (a view that is elaborated and defended by John McDowell and Duncan Pritchard). I will conclude by comparing the resulting view with other versions of epistemological disjunctivism, and arguing that the version I have offered provides the most satisfying response to external world skepticism.

This article explains different views on concepts, which are among the most fundamental constructs in cognitive science. Michael Dummett argues that nonhuman animals are not capable of full-fledged conceptual thought but only a diminished form of thought, which he calls, proto-thought. Human beings can remove themselves from the moment and can rise above the confined world of current perceptions because of their linguistic abilities. Donald Davidson, a contemporary philosopher, denies that animals are capable of conceptual thought and claim that conceptual content requires a rich inferential network. Donald Davidson made an argument against animals having conceptual thought. Davidson's original formulation of the argument begins with the claim that having a belief requires having the concept of a belief but adds that having the concept of belief requires possession of a natural language. It follows, then, that to have a belief requires facility with natural language. The characterization of the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction that is implicit in Davidson's metacognitive argument is a complex one involving a capacity for belief about beliefs, a concept of belief, and concepts of truth and falsity. Both Robert Brandom and John McDowell argued that conceptual thought requires more than a capacity for detection. They claim that conceptual thought requires the ability to appreciate the reasons that would justify a given concept's application and use, and this, in turn, is inherently a social practice that is dependent on natural language

Anukul Chandra Mukerji (1888–1968) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Allahabad. His career reflects a preoccupation with the history of philosophy, and his systematic work is always situated both in the Western and Indian philosophical traditions. In the West his work focuses on the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. Mukerji approached Indian idealism through Advaita Vedānta. Mukerji, a specialist in the philosophy of mind and psychology, was a committed naturalist, in that he saw the deliverances of empirical psychology as foundational to an understanding of the mind. He paid close attention especially to the psychologists William James, John B. Watson, and James Ward. Mukerji wrote two substantial monographs: Self, Thought and Reality (1933) and The Nature of Self (1938). In each, Mukerji emphasizes the rational intelligibility of the world and the foundation role that consciousness and self-knowledge play in the edifice of knowledge more generally.

For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA. In this engaging and mind-stretching account, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. He explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. He describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour -- effects such as 'entanglement', which Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance', and explores cutting edge work on harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach into the macro world. Vedral finishes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers he considers are exhilarating, drawing upon the work of distinguished physicist John Wheeler. The ideas challenge our concept of the nature of particles, of time, of determinism, and of reality itself. This edition includes a new foreword from the author, reflecting on changes in the world of quantum information since first publication. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think.

This book demonstrates that Isaac’s eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. This cultural milieu includes ideas adapted from Syriac authors like Ephrem, John the Solitary, and Narsai, but also ideas adapted from the Syriac versions of texts originally written in Greek, like Evagrius’s Gnostic Chapters, Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, and the Pseudo-Macarian homilies. Isaac’s eschatological synthesis of this material is a sophisticated discourse on the psychological transformation that occurs when the mind has an experience of God. It begins with the premise that asceticism was part of God’s original plan for creation. Isaac says that God created human beings with infantile knowledge and that God intended from the beginning for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. Once outside the garden, human beings would have to pursue mature knowledge through bodily asceticism. Although perfect knowledge is promised in the future world, Isaac also believes that human beings can experience a proleptic taste of this future perfection. Isaac employs the concepts of wonder and astonishment in order to explain how an ecstatic experience of the future world is possible within the material structures of this world. According to Isaac, astonishment describes the moment when a person arrives at the threshold of eschatological perfection but is still unable to comprehend the heavenly mysteries, while wonder describes spiritual comprehension of heavenly knowledge through the intervention of divine grace.

The article describes to what extent the structures and contents of the mind are innate, and to what extent they are learned or otherwise acquired from the environment. Aristotle argued that all ideas are derived from experience by a causal process in which forms (or properties of things) in the external world are transmitted into the mind. John Locke insisted that the simple ideas are derived from sensation, and all other ideas are constructed from the simple ones by the mental operations of compounding, comparing, and abstracting. Sober emphasized that there is no common currency with which to compare the relative contributions of genes and environment and suggested that biological determinants do not in general decompose into amounts of genetic versus nongenetic force. Sober suggested that there might not be a single specification of relevant environments and one might need to fix the range pragmatically as it varies with explanatory interests. Ariew suggested that what matters for innateness is whether a trait's emergence is sensitive to certain specific kinds of environmental factors, where the relevant factors can vary with the trait in question and indeed with one's explanatory interest. Fodor's initial agument for the innateness of concepts was quite simple. He pointed out that standard accounts of learning a trait it as a process of hypothesis confirmation.

Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. Intentionality is simply aboutness or directedness. “Proposition” is more difficult, but the essential idea is this: every intentional state has a content. Sometimes it seems that the content just enables a state to refer to an object. So if John loves Sally, then it appears that the content of his love is simply “Sally”. But if John believes that it is raining, then the specification of the content requires an entire “that” clause. “Are there non-propositional intentional states?” amounts to the question, “Are there intentional states whose content does not require specification with a ‘that’ clause?” This chapter explores whether there are any non-propositional states, and suggest that a very limited class, such as boredom, is in fact non-propositional.

This chapter examines how travellers to the New World and to India made sense of their encounters by framing them specifically in reference to the performance techniques and even the architecture of the theatre, in ways both positive and negative. It first considers John Smith’s description of what he calls a ‘Virginia Maske’ in hisGenerall History of Virginia(1624), a reminder of how the specific textures of early modern theatricality rather than a generalized, abstract notion of performance shaped travellers’ understandings of ‘all the world’s a stage’. It then looks at the case of Thomas Coryate, England’s first travel writer, to show how theatrical performance became a means of self-transformation in both mind and body, an act of imaginative self-incorporation that blurred subject with object and dissolved the boundaries of cultural identities. It also discusses the theatricality of the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, as described in 1616 by Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe.

Early in the nineteenth century, British Quakers broke through a century-long hedge of Quietism which had gripped their Religious Society since the death of their founding prophet, George Fox. After 1800, the majority of Friends in England and Ireland gradually embraced the evangelical revival, based on the biblical principle of Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the effective source of salvation. This evangelical vision contradicted early Quakerism’s central religious principle, the saving quality of the Light of Christ Within (Inward Light) which led human beings from sinful darkness into saving Light. The subsequent, sometimes bitter struggles among British Quakers turned on the question of whether the infallible Bible or leadings from the Light should be the primary means for guiding Friends to eternal salvation. Three of the most significant upheavals originated in Manchester. In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a weighty Manchester Friend, published A Beacon to the Society of Friends which questioned the authority of the Inward Light and the entire content of traditional Quaker ministry as devoid of biblical truth. The ensuing row ended with Crewdson and his followers separating from the Friends. Following this Beacon Separation, however, British Quakerism was increasingly dominated by evangelical principles. Although influenced by J.S. Rowntree’s Quakerism, Past and Present, Friends agreed to modify their Discipline, a cautious compromise with the modern world. During the 1860s a new encounter with modernity brought a second upheaval in Manchester. An influential thinker as well as a Friend by marriage, David Duncan embraced, among other advanced ideas, higher criticism of biblical texts. Evangelical Friends were not pleased and Duncan was disowned by a special committee investigating his views. Duncan died suddenly before he could take his fight to London Yearly Meeting, but his message had been heard by younger British Friends. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of British Quakerism, presided over by evangelical leader J.B. Braithwaite, seemed to be steering Friends towards mainstream Protestantism. This tendency was challenged in a widely read tract entitled A Reasonable Faith, which replaced the angry God of the atonement with a kinder, gentler, more loving Deity. A clear sign of changing sentiments among British Friends was London Yearly Meeting’s rejection of the Richmond Declaration (1887), an American evangelical manifesto mainly written by J.B. Braithwaite. But the decisive blow against evangelical dominance among Friends was the Manchester Conference of 1895 during which John Wilhelm Rowntree emerged as leader of a Quaker Renaissance emphasizing the centrality of the Inward Light, the value of social action, and the revival of long-dormant Friends’ Peace Testimony. Before his premature death in 1905, J.W. Rowntree and his associates began a transformation of British Quakerism, opening its collective mind to modern religious, social, and scientific thought as the means of fulfilling Friends’ historic mission to work for the Kingdom of God on earth. During the course of the nineteenth century, British Quakerism was gradually transformed from a tiny, self-isolated body of peculiar people into a spiritually riven, socially active community of believers. This still Dissenting Society entered the twentieth century strongly liberal in its religious practices and passionately confident of its mission ‘to make all humanity a society of Friends’.

Alcohol has been used for thousands of years and, indeed, in very different ways. Two thousand years ago, the occupying Romans sipped wine regularly but reasonably moderately, and marvelled at the local English serfs who celebrated bringing in their crops with brief episodes of unrivalled drunkenness. The use of alcohol was not only tolerated but sometimes encouraged by the ruling classes as a way of subjugating the population and dulling their awareness of the conditions in which they had to live and work. The adverse impact of gin consumption was famously recorded by Hogarth’s painting of ‘Gin Lane’ but, at the same time, beer was reckoned a safer alternative to water for fluid intake and was linked to happiness and prosperity in the sister painting of ‘Beer Street’. It was against the ‘pernicious use of strong liquors’ and not beer that the president of the Royal College of Physicians, John Friend, petitioned Parliament in 1726. Some desultory attempts were made by Parliament in the eighteenth century to introduce legislation in order to tax and control alcohol production but they were eventually repealed. It was really the onset of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century England that brought into sharp relief the wasted productivity and lost opportunity from excess consumption. England moved from a rural, relatively disorganized workforce to an urban, more closely scrutinized and supervised one—for instance, in factories, where men needed their wits about them to work heavy machinery, workers that were absent (in body or mind) were noticed. And, in Victorian Britain, there arose a greater social conscience—an awareness, for example, of the harm, through neglect, inflicted on the children of those who spent their wages and their days in an alcoholic stupor. Nonetheless, the per capita consumption of alcohol in the UK at the end of the nineteenth century was greater than it is today. It fell progressively through the first half of the twentieth century, with two marked dips. The first coincided with the introduction of licensing hours restrictions during the First World War, and the second with the economic depression of the 1930s. Following the Second World War, there was a doubling of alcohol consumption between 1950 and the present day, to about 10 l of pure alcohol per capita. There has been a small fall of 9% in the last 5 years; this may be, in part, related to the changing ethnic mix and increasing number of non-drinkers. There has always been a mismatch between the self-reported consumption in lifestyle questionnaires, and the data from customs and excise, with the latter being 40% greater. From the latter, it can be estimated that the average consumption of non-teetotal adults in England is 25 units (0.25 l of pure alcohol) per week, which is well above the recommended limits of 14 units for women, and 21 units for men. Of course, average figures hide population differences, and it is estimated that the heaviest-consuming 10% of the population account for 40% of that drunk. While men continue to drink, on average, about twice the amount that women do, the rate of rise of consumption in women has been steeper. Average consumption is comparable across socio-economic groups but there is evidence of both more teetotallers and more drinking in a harmful way in the poorest group. In 2007, 13% of those aged 11–15 admitted that they had drunk alcohol during the previous week. This figure is falling, but those who do drink are drinking more. The average weekly consumption of pupils who drink is 13 units/week. Binge drinking estimates are unreliable, as they depend on self-reporting in questionnaires. In the UK, they are taken as drinking twice the daily recommended limits of 4 units for men, and 3 units for women, on the heaviest drinking day in the previous week. In 2010, 19% of men, and 12% of women, admitted to binge drinking, with the figures being 24% and 17%, respectively, for those aged 16–24. The preferred venue for drinking in the UK has changed markedly, mainly in response to the availability of cheap supermarket drink. Thirty years ago, the vast majority of alcohol was consumed in pubs and restaurants, whereas, in 2009, the market share of off-licence outlets was 65%. However, drinkers under 24 years of age still drink predominantly away from home. The UK per capita consumption is close to the European average, but consumption has been falling in Mediterranean countries and rising in northern and eastern Europe. Europe has the highest consumption of all continents, but there is undoubtedly massive under-reporting in many countries, particularly because of local unregulated production and consumption. It is estimated that less than 10% of consumption is captured in statistics in parts of Africa.