Recent decades have seen attacks on philosophy as an irrelevant field of inquiry when compared with science. In this book, Graham Mc Fee defends the claims of philosophy against attempts to minimize either philosophy’s possibility or its importance by deploying a contrast with what Wittgenstein characterized as the “dazzling ideal” of science. This ‘dazzling ideal’ incorporates both the imagined completeness of scientific explanation—whereby completing its project would leave nothing unexplained—and the exceptionless character of the associated conception of causality. On such a scientistic world-view, what need is there for philosophy?
In his defense of philosophy (and its truth-claims), Mc Fee shows that rejecting such scientism is not automatically anti-scientific, and that it permits granting to natural science (properly understood) its own truth-generating power. Further, Mc Fee argues for contextualism in the project of philosophy, and sets aside the pervasive (and pernicious) requirement for exceptionless generalizations while relating his account to interconnections between the concepts ofperson,
substance,
agency, and
causation.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Chapter One Introductory — A still point in a turning world?
§1. Introduction: The ‘dazzling ideal’ of science
§2. Priority in science: The possibility of an ordo cognoscendi
§3. The six ‘still points’: Connecting persons, agency, and meaning
§4. Meaning what we say: Normativity, responsibility and understanding
§5. Wittgenstein, exceptionlessness & occasion-sensitivity
§6. Sellars’s two images of humankind
§7. Philosophy and language again
§8. Conclusion: The project of this work
Chapter One References/Bibliography
Chapter One Notes
Chapter Two Persons as Agents: The Possibility of Genuine Action
§1. Introduction: the ‘free will’ issue
§2. Setting the scene
§3. What is determinism?
§4. Determinism as an issue for philosophy
§5. Causality and exceptionlessness§6. Causality and agency
§7. On Davidson’s anomalous monism
§8. Connections
§9. Locating science in the ‘action’ debate
§10. Conclusion: A therapeutic resolution
Chapter Two References/Bibliography
Chapter Two Notes
Chapter Three What Persons Are: Identity, Personal Identity and Composition
§1. Introduction to numerical identity
§2. Five (quick) properties of numerical identity
§3. What are the covering concepts?
§4. Psychological discontinuity & multiple personality
§5. Wiggins (1980) ‘solution’
§6. Hunting logical possibility
§7. Some problems for problem-cases
§8. Identity and composition
§9. Conclusion
Chapter Three References/Bibliography
Chapter Three NotesChapter Four What Persons are Not: Causality, Minds and the Brain
§1. Introduction
§2. The causal story of past behavior: causal sufficiency
§3. Brain-states and behaviour
§4. The problem of plasticity
§5. Deploying the “is” of composition
§6. Reducing thoughts to brain states: six cases of a Bugatti Veyron
§7. Contemporary science and the permanence of explanation
§8. The body’s role
§9. The ‘mereological fallacy’, from Bennett & Hacker
§10. Exceptionlessness in correlation: returning to ‘other minds’
§11. Wittgenstein’s question about states and processes
Chapter Four References/Bibliography
Chapter Four Notes
Chapter Five Evolutionary Explanation in Psychology: Not an Issue
for Philosophy?
§1. Introduction: Sketching the biology
§2. The individual and evolution
§3. The place of the individual in evolutionary theory
§4. Genes (and memes)
§5. Reasoning in evolutionary psychology
§6. Dual-Inheritance theory
§7. Conclusion
Chapter Five References/Bibliography
Notes Chapter Five Notes
Chapter Six Persons, Artificial Intelligence, and Science Fiction
Thought-Experiments
§1. Introduction
§2. The Turing Test
§3. Searle’s Chinese room
§4. To be or not to be — that is not the android’s question
§5. The Aphrodite Argument
§6. Like a person?
§7. Half-time score
§8. Thought-experiments and Science Fiction
§9. Blade Runner
§10. Caught in the Turing trap?
§11. The strange case of West World
§12. Conclusion: An unfamiliar idea in Descartes
Chapter Six References/Bibliography
Chapter 6 Notes
Chapter Seven Considerations of Exceptionlessness in Philosophy:
or, ‘Everything … ‘
§1. Introduction: the problem
§2. Ziff’s cheetahs
§3. Defeating disambiguation
§4. “All”, “every”, and contexts
§5. Conclusion
Chapter Seven References/Bibliography
Chapter Seven Notes
Chapter Eight Philosophy without Exceptionlessness
§1. Introduction: Thinking about cases lacking exceptionlessness
§2. Parables, not propositions
§3. A worked example: Practical constraints on free action?
§4. Two constraints on practical freedom
§5. A third constraint
§6. Argument and ‘the redeeming word’
§7. Conclusion
Chapter Eight References/Bibliography
Chapter Eight Notes
Chapter Nine Conclusion: The Place of Reason
§1. Introduction: Truth, reason and responsibility
§2. What science can and cannot offer
§3. Reason, and the dangers of truth-denial, or relativism
§4. Three comparisons in Descartes
§5. Again, Sellars’s two images of humankind
§6. Sellars on what is real
§7. Confronting the parochial
§8. Conclusion
Chapter Nine References/Bibliography
Chapter Nine Notes
Über den Autor
Graham Mc Fee is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK, and a member of the Philosophy Department at California State University Fullerton. He has lectured and published nationally and internationally on, especially, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the aesthetics of dance.
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