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    <title>Papers found on 2010-08-31</title>
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    <dc:date>2010-08-31T00:00+00:00</dc:date>
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<a href='http://www.protevi.com/john/research.html'>John Protevi</a>:
   <a href='http://www.protevi.com/john/NewTA.pdf'>Deleuze, Jonas, and Thompson Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Question of Panpsychism</a>    (pdf, 21 pages)<br />
<div>Both Deleuze in DR and Thompson / Jonas can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s pretty much what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are co-extensive: life = autopoiesis and cognition = sense-making. Thus Mind in Life = autopoietic sense-making = control of action of organism in environment. Sense-making here is three-fold: 1) sensibility as openness to environment; 2) signification as positive or negative valence of environmental features relative to the subjective norms of the organism; 3) direction or orientation the organism adopts in response to 1 and 2. (―Sense of the river‖ is archaic in English, but ―sens unique‖ for ―one-way street‖ is perfectly clear in French.)</div><br />
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  <item rdf:about="http://www.umsu.de/?d=2010-08-30">
    <title>Papers found on 2010-08-30</title>
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    <dc:date>2010-08-30T00:00+00:00</dc:date>
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<a href='http://www.msu.edu/~abbottb/vita.htm'>Barbara Abbott</a>:
   <a href='https://www.msu.edu/~abbottb/AttitudesTQ.pdf'>Attitudes toward quotation</a>    (pdf, 10 pages)<br />
<div>As is well known, Frege (1892) argued that the sentential complements of propositional attitude predicates refer to propositions.  W.V. Quine, who disdained intensional objects like propositions, briefly suggested instead an analysis of such complements crucially involving quotation (1956), and Donald Davidson took up and elaborated this suggestion in a number of papers (1969, 1975, 1979).  The main purpose of this paper is to argue against quotational analyses of propositional attitudes, although I’ll suggest at the end that the result may have consequences for the analysis of quotation itself.  In the second section below we will review Quine’s comments and Davidson’s development of them. In §3 we look at considerations involving proper names which seem at first to go in favor of this kind of analysis, but which ultimately probably do not.  In §4 we turn to an argument against quotational analyses – the fact that it seems to deny languageless creatures1 propositional attitudes.  The final section contains some concluding remarks.</div><br />
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  <item rdf:about="http://www.umsu.de/?d=2010-08-29">
    <title>Papers found on 2010-08-29</title>
    <link>http://www.umsu.de/?d=2010-08-29</link>
    <dc:date>2010-08-29T00:00+00:00</dc:date>
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<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/aug&amp;plat.pdf'>Augustine and the Platonists</a>    (pdf, 8 pages)<br />
<div>’m not really sure what they were after when they asked me to talk to you about Augustine and the Platonists.  Maybe they wanted me to talk about some specific Platonists, and the elements of Augustine’s views that he adopts or adapts.  And no doubt I should at least mention a couple of names.  There’s Plato himself, of course (428-348 BC).  The thing is, it’s pretty clear that Augustine had never read Plato directly, whether in Greek (which Augustine couldn’t actually handle very well) or in Latin translation.  The best he could do was to read what other people said about what Scotus said. Then there were two followers of Plato whose work Augustine did read in Latin translation: Plotinus (204-270) and his student Porphyry (233-305).  He probably read them in the translation of Marius Victorinus, who is discussed in Book 8 of the Confessions.  There’s a lot of debate, though, about exactly what he read and exactly how it influenced him. I have a somewhat non-standard view about this.  I call it the “Who cares what Augustine read?” view.  My view is that even though Augustine read Plotinus and Porphyry rather than Plato, his version of Platonism is actually much closer to Plato himself than it is to Plotinus and Porphyry. So knowing the details of Plotinus and Porphyry doesn’t really matter much for understanding Augustine, because Augustine’s kind of Platonism doesn’t really depend on those details.  In spirit, it’s much closer to the real Plato, because it adopts the overall outlook of Plato without a lot of the additions and complications of later Platonists. And that’s why I’m going to start with a story.  I’m going to use this story to get across what I think is the essence of this Platonic outlook.  Then I’ll show you how various Platonists put the insights that this story encapsulates to work in three different aspects of philosophy.  After I’ve laid all that out, I’ll talk about how Augustine transforms this Platonic picture in the light of his Christian faith...</div><br />
<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/Some%20reflections%20on%20method%20II.pdf'>Some reflections on method in the history of philosophy</a>    (pdf, 17 pages)<br />
<div>If my own experience is any sort of guide, there is an unfortunate irony – perhaps more accurately, there is an unseemly audacity – in my leading off today’s events by talking about historiographical method.  My impression is that historians of medieval philosophy are, by and large, the most prone to be completely unreflective about issues of method.  The scholars of ancient and early modern philosophy that I know, present company most definitely included, are all well aware of the different ways in which, and purposes for which, scholarship in the history of philosophy can be carried on.  They have their assessments of what makes for good scholarship and what makes for the other kind, and they can both articulate and defend those assessments at some length.  Pose such questions to a medievalist, however, and you’re likely to get a bit of stammering and then a quick change of subject. Worse yet, among these sinners I am perhaps the chief.  I have long practiced the history of philosophy in the same way in which I have played the organ.  I’m a decent enough organist, but I don’t have the slightest clue how an organ’s internal workings go.  That’s probably fine for service-playing purposes, since I can get the sounds I want without knowing how they’re produced.  Plus, those sounds are helpfully predetermined for me by Mr Bach.  In my scholarly life, of course, there’s no score from which I can decipher my desired results.  It helps to have a target at which to aim, as Aristotle said in a kindred context, and some notion of what the history of philosophy is all about would surely provide such a target, along with guidance about how best to ensure that one hits it. So I present myself this morning not as an expert with wisdom to impart, but as a  1  neophyte reflecting on his own practice with a view toward getting clearer on the vision of philosophical historiography that underlies it and thereby, perhaps, improving that practice.  The paper will fall into two tenuously connected parts...</div><br />
<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/ctmpt2.pdf'>Book Reviews</a>    (pdf, 40K)<br />
<div>The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts are meant to be companions to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy,1 which appeared in 1982. They have been slow in coming, however: the first volume, Logic and the Philosophy of Language,2 appeared in 1988, and this second volume, Ethics and Political Philosophy, in 2001. The connection between the History and the Trans- lations is somewhat loose in any case. For example, a volume on Philosophical Theology is planned for the Translations series even though the History notoriously avoided philosophical theology altogether.3 And the volume now under review provides texts on such topics as self-sacrifice (in translations 5–8) and resistance to authority (in translations 9–11), which were not treated in detail in the History. Even so, the History is not entirely forgotten. For example, the History’s coverage of the reception of Aristotle’s Ethics and especially the debate about the ultimate end can be profitably studied in connection with this volume’s two extended treatments of book 10 of the Ethics (Albert the Great in translation 1 and Jean Buridan in translation 16); and the History’s discussion of conscience is fleshed out in translation 2, which presents Bonaventure’s analysis of conscience and synderesis. It would have been useful, I think, to have another text on conscience for purposes of comparison, although as McGrade points out, Bonaventure’s “conclusion that one ought (in conscience) to comply more with the command of a superior than with one’s own conscience … is implicitly contested by Ockham in Translation 15” (170), which asks whether an errant individual is bound to recant at the rebuke of a superior. My wish for another text on conscience and synderesis illustrates a general problem facing the editors. Despite the salutary rise in mainstream Anglo- American philosophical interest in medieval philosophy throughout the last half-century, coverage of medieval philosophy in English translation is dismayingly spotty...</div><br />
<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/abelard.htm'>Sin, Grace, and Redemption in Abelard</a>    (html, 54K)<br />
<div>twentieth. Yet the word is in the Bible.&quot; (1) Farrer is referring to Romans 5:11 in the Authorized Version: &quot;we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.&quot; Here the word 'atonement' -literally, the state of being &quot;at one&quot; -translates the Greek katallagê, which means &quot;reconciliation.&quot; The doctrine of the Atonement, then, is in its essentials the claim that the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ effects a reconciliation between God and human beings, who had been -and apart from Christ's gracious action would have remained -estranged on account of human sin. And that doctrine, far from being a twelfth century innovation, is a prominent theme of the Pauline epistles and a matter of theological consensus from the earliest days of Christian thought.</div><br />
<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/Aquinas%20and%20the%20Ethics%20of%20Virtue.pdf'>Aquinas and the Ethics of Virtue</a>    (pdf, 29 pages)<br />
<div>The basic procedure was simple.  The topic would be announced in advance so that everyone could prepare an arsenal of clever arguments.  When the faculty and students had gathered, the professor would offer a brief introduction and state his thesis.  All morning long an appointed graduate student would take objections from the audience and defend the professor’s thesis against those objections.  (And if the graduate student began to flounder, the professor was allowed to help him out.)  A secretary would take shorthand notes.  The next day the group would reassemble.  This time it would be the professor’s job to summarise the arguments on both sides and give his own response to the question at issue.  The whole thing would be written up, either in a rough-and-tumble version deriving from the secretary’s notes or in a more carefully crafted and edited version prepared by the professor himself.  Records of such academic exercises have come down to us under the title ‘disputed questions’. The present text offers translations of some disputed questions on ethical topics presided over by Thomas Aquinas (1224/6-1274), probably during the period of 1271-72, when he was for the second time the Dominican regent master in theology at the University of Paris. They examine the nature of virtues in general; the fundamental or “cardinal” virtues of  1  practical wisdom, justice, courage, and temperateness; the divinely bestowed virtues of hope and charity; and the practical question of how, when, and why one should rebuke a “brother” for wrongdoing.  Whether these were formal public disputations of the sort I have described, or a more low-key version adapted for use in Aquinas’s own classroom, is not altogether clear. What is certainly undeniable is that they show Aquinas using the disputed-question format with characteristic brilliance, as we can see by contrasting the Disputed Questions on the Virtues with discussions of the same topics in the second part of the Summa theologiae, which dates from roughly the same period of Aquinas’s career...</div><br />
<a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~twilliam/papers.html'>Thomas Williams, Sandra Visser</a>:
   <a href='http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~thomasw/quid.pdf'>Anselm’s Account of Freedom</a>    (pdf, 26 pages)<br />
<div>rectitude of will for the sake of that rectitude itself.”   From the point of view of contemporary metaphysics, this is one of the most unhelpful definitions imaginable.  Does such freedom require alternative possibilities, for example?  Is it compatible with causal determination?  Is the exercise of such freedom a necessary and sufficient condition for moral responsibility?  The definition sheds no light on these questions. And so we need to move on from Anselm’s definition to Anselm’s account of freedom. Here, though, we encounter the opposite problem.  Where Anselm’s definition seems not to answer these questions at all, Anselm’s account seems to answer all these questions sometimes with a yes and sometimes with a no.  Consider the question about alternative possibilities.  In De libertate arbitrii, Anselm seems clearly to deny that freedom involves alternative possibilities.  God, the good angels, and the blessed dead cannot do otherwise than preserve rectitude, but they are still free—freer, in fact, than those who are capable of abandoning  4  rectitude.   On the other hand, in De casu diaboli Anselm seems to require alternative possibilities for freedom.  For if an angel is to be just, Anselm says, he must have both the power to will rectitude and the power to will happiness.  If only one power were given him, he  1  References to Anselm are given as follows: DV=De veritate, DLA=De libertate arbitrii, DCD=De casu diaboli, DC=De concordia, and CDH=Cur Deus Homo.  W henever we quote a text we give a reference to the critical edition of F. S. Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1968), identified as ‘S’; and to the English translations in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), identified as ‘O’.  All translations are our own.</div><br />
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  <item rdf:about="http://www.umsu.de/?d=2010-08-28">
    <title>Papers found on 2010-08-28</title>
    <link>http://www.umsu.de/?d=2010-08-28</link>
    <dc:date>2010-08-28T00:00+00:00</dc:date>
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<a href='http://people.umass.edu/kbj/homepage/index_johnson.htm'>Kyle Johnson</a>:
   <a href='http://people.umass.edu/kbj/homepage/Content/StonyBrook.pdf'>A Remerge Theory of Movement</a>    (pdf, 21 pages)<br />
<div>We need a better theory of movement. e present theories harbor stipulations and give little traction on understanding why movement has the properties it does. A presently popular theory of movement has the following ingredients.</div><br />
<a href='http://people.umass.edu/kbj/homepage/index_johnson.htm'>Kyle Johnson</a>:
   <a href='http://people.umass.edu/kbj/homepage/Content/sicogg_lectures.pdf'>The Copy Theory of Movement: Spell Out</a>    (pdf, 61 pages)<br />
<div>( ) Di erence in Semantic Displacement a. Total Reconstruction: Mary kaupir ikke skó. ¬ Mary kaupir skó b. Variable Binding: Which book Mary had read e set of propositions such that x Mary had read x, x a book. A guard stands before every bank x if x is a bank then a guard stands before x...</div><br />
<a href='http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/faculty-harrell.php'>Mara Harrell</a>:
   <a href='http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/harrell/Creating_Argument_Diagrams.pdf'>Creating Argument Diagrams</a>    (pdf, 28 pages)<br />
<div>The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek “philos” (meaning love) and “sophia” (meaning wisdom); thus philosophy literally is the “love of wisdom.” Whatever else philosophy may be, most people agree that it still retains this spirit of its etymological roots, and that when we are engaged in philosophy we are pursuing wisdom for the sake of itself. Wisdom, however, is not the same thing as knowledge or information. We aren’t merely trying to amass list of interesting ideas, or believe anything that sounds good. Wisdom is, at least in part, the reflection on and critical evaluation of what we ourselves and others around us believe about some very heady topics.</div><br />
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