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274Language defines human existence. Yet defining language is a fraught project. I use the term "language" to refer to a specific mode of information transfer. First, it is a communicative mode. By communication I mean the information transfer serves a function, that is, an activity that occurs because it has increased the evolutionary fitness of ancestors. Secondly, while all communication is governed by norms, human communication, as opposed to biological communication, is governed by norms that …Read more
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34Intuition. 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. Kant talks …Read more
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415Becoming a Self: The past, present and future of selfhoodFriesenPress. forthcoming.What makes us persons? Is it our bodies, our minds, or our consciousness? For centuries, philosophers have sought to answer these questions. While some believe humans are physical or biological, others claim we have an immaterial soul. This book proposes a new alternative. Selves were formed in evolution through connections and commitments to others when early hominins lived in tribal groups and developed languages. As humans learned to fulfill these commitments, they not only cultivated …Read more
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27It is above all in virtue of the will, or freedom of choice, that I understand myself to bear in some way the image or likeness of God. For ... God's will ... does not seem any greater than mine when considered as will in the essential and strict sense. This is because the will simply consists in our ability to do or not do something; ... or rather, it consists simply in the fact that when something is put forward for our consideration by the intellect, we are moved to affirm or deny it, or purs…Read more
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44"Human beings ought to respect nature. For too long we have thought of ourselves as above nature, destroying our own habitat and annihilating other species which have as much right to exist as we do. The earth is an organic system in which each species must play its part, but humans have used technology to artificially disturb the harmony of nature. We cannot continue to violate nature's laws with impunity. If we don't respect our environment there will be disastrous consequences: nature will ta…Read more
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Thomas R. Berger, Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1981) Review (review)Labour/Le Travailleur 11. 1983.
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170Jacobs, in Choosing Character, seems to assume that there are selves already capable of voluntary choice who then choose their character by developing habits. I argue that selves, choice, responsibility and character form a conceptual and practical hermeneutic circle, a whole without which selfhood makes no sense. There can be no selfhood prior to responsible character.
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54The problem of universals arises when philosophy attempts to give an account of the relationship mind and objects, between language and the world. How do words succeed in being about things? In this paper I show how the problem of universals arises out of a particular theory about the relationship of words to things and that when an alternative theory is accepted the notion of universal dissipates and is replaced by the concept of meaning. Meaning, however, has its own problems. In the end I con…Read more
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74Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment (edited book)MIT Press. 2000.The essays in this collection step back to ask: Do the complex components of Dennett's work on intentionality, consciousness, evolution, and ethics themselves ...
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271The temporal unity of the self cannot be accounted for by the continuity of causal, factual, or contiguous relations between independently definable mental events, as proposed by Locke and Parfit. The identity of the self over time is normative: it depends on the institutional context of social rules external to the self that determine the relationship between past commitments and current responsibilities. (2005)
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190A self is a temporal unity in which responsibility for past commitments modifies how the present world is experienced and evaluated. This structure is analogous (a) to biological evolutionary changes in perception and (b) to how changes in a computer program determine how it will respond in the future. Responsibility is not an add-on to a self, but the mode of its integration over time. (Presented at Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference, Narrative and Understanding Persons, Universi…Read more
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189The self is not a metaphysical object but a mode of temporal organization unified by responsibility. Learning to be responsible constitutes the self as a self-identical entity over time. Responsibility depends on the current self interpreting previous events, attributing them to itself and thereby committing itself for the future. (2004)
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115Culture and PersonalityDissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain. 1970.Methodological and philosophical foundations in the anthropology of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.
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9Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive AssessmentMIT Press. 2000.An assessment of Dennett's philosophy by various philosophers. Includes Dennett's responses.
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24Daniel DennettContinuum/Bloomsbury. 2009.This book offers an introduction to and overview of Dennett's ideas, his writings and his contributions to the various fields of philosophy.
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209Explanation is a human activity. Teleological, causal, and evolutionary explanations are all valid forms of responding to particular puzzlements. Reductionism incorrectly assumes there is one absolute explanation. While causal explanation appeals primarily to necessity, evolutionary explanation is based largely on contingency.
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Epistemology and Academic FreedomIn Don Idhe & Hugh J. Silverman (eds.), Descriptions, State University of New York Press. pp. 286-295. 1985.
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195Biological organisms, languages and selves are normative entities, so must be understood in terms of norms. Mechanistic understanding is based on causal necessity, but normative understanding relies on a grasp of the contingencies of evolution, history and personal experience.
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236Against the concept that objects are defined by their self-contained essence – “thing-in-themselves” – Husserl and Foucault claim they are defined by intersubjectivity or social institutions. I argue that biological and even physical (complex) systems can constitute the unity and meaning of objects.
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1Daniel C, Dennett: Communication, Evolution, and SelfIn Jason Hannon & Robert Rutland (eds.), Philosophical Profiles in the Theory of Communication, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 219-234. 2012.Dennett's theory of communication
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296Four philosophers, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Dennett, and Hegel, who hold for the most part radically different philosophies, all agree on rejecting the notion of atomic entities, of “things-in-themselves,” and insist that objects only make sense – can only be what they are -- in a context.
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316Tomasello offers an evolutionary, palaeoanthropological account of the human origin of objects and objectivity. Husserl gives a phenomenological account of the constitution of objects by intersubjectivity. Comparing the two, I claim that Tomasello’s “naturalized” approach closely parallels Husserl’s transcendental approach.
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214Why should anyone be bound by cognitive norms, such as the norms of reason or mathematics? To become a mathematician is to learn to obey the norms of the mathematical community. A self becomes intentional by binding itself to communal norms. Only then can it have the freedom to think or make assertions about the community’s objects -- triangles or imaginary numbers, for example. Norms do not bind selves from the outside: being bound by norms is what constitutes a self.
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The Self as an Evolved Organism that Lives in a Pragmatically Defined WorldIn John R. Shook & Tibor Solymosi (eds.), Pragmatist Neurophilosophy: American Philosophy and the Brain, Bloomsbury Academic. 2014.
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279Modern selfhood presents itself as autonomous, overcoming emotion by following cognitive, moral and linguistic norms on the basis of clear, rational principles. It is difficult to imagine how such normative creatures could have evolved from their purely biological, non-normative, primate ancestors. I offer a just-so story to make it easier to imagine this transition. Early hominins learned to cooperate by developing group identities based on tribal norms. Group identity constituted proto-selves…Read more
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18Intentionality and Causality in John SearleCanadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1): 83-97. 1986.Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively separating the mental from the physical. Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which they are ‘about.’ Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot, by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no ‘outreach,’ as one might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they cannot exist at all u…Read more
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1Charles D. Laughlin, Jr, John McManus and Eugene G. D'Aquili, Brain, Symbol and Experience Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 13 (5): 241-244. 1993.
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51My thesis is that modern neurological discoveries overthrow the classical dualism which assigns all the constitutive activity of perception to the mind and leaves the body a purely passive role. The paper is in four parts: first I will present the traditional theory, using Berkeley's concept of activity as the key; then I will summarize the relevant aspects of contemporary neurology; third, the incompatibility of these two approaches will be discussed; finally, I will propose that we must reject…Read more
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300Thought is not based on an image that is isomorphic to the object. Descartes, Husserl, Frege, Wittgenstein and Brandom progressively overcome this Aristotelian misconception of the intentionality of thinking.
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Areas of Specialization
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The Self |
Theories of Personal Identity |
Personal Identity and Values |
Time |
Evolutionary Biology |
Mechanisms of Evolution |
Human Beings |