Ioannis G. Ntagkas

What do psychedelics reveal about consciousness? What impact have psychedelics had on philosophy? In this rapidly growing area of study, this is the first volume to explore the philosophy of psychedelic experience, from a range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. In doing so, Philosophy and Psychedelics reveals just why the place of psychedelics in our societies should not be left to medical sciences alone, as psychedelic experience opens up new perspectives on fundamental philosophical questions relating to human experience, ethics, and the metaphysics of mind. Mapping a range of philosophical responses to the surge in studies into psychedelic drugs in the cognitive sciences, this go-to volume examines topics including psychedelics and the role of governance; psychedelics and mysticism; what psychedelics can tell us about dyadic thankfulness; and psychedelics as ways to gain new knowledge. Written by leading international scholars, the essays cover Western and non-Western traditions, from analytic philosophy to Zen Buddhism, and discuss a variety of hallucinogens, such as LSD, MDMA, and Ayahuasca, in order to build a much-needed bridge between the rapidly growing scientific research and the philosophy behind psychedelic experience.

Parfit’s attempt to supply an adequate epistemology for his objectivist theory of normative reasons rests on a conflation of the thesis _that there are normative reasons_ with the thesis _that there are robustly mind-independent normative reasons_. An _objectivist_ about normative reasons must hold not only that there are normative reasons, but that there are robustly mind-independent ones, and that’s where the epistemological problems enter in. Parfit’s defense of objectivist over subjectivist theories of normative reasons, I argue, rests on a subtle but systematic failure to recognize that one can be a subjectivist without being a nihilist, and that objectivism of the strong sort he defends is not the only alternative to nihilism. And so we’d better hope, since objectivism of the strong sort he defends has no acceptable epistemology.

Christine M. Korsgaard has had a profound influence on moral philosophy over the past forty years. Through her writing and teaching she has developed a distinctive, rigorous, and historically informed way of thinking about ethics, agency, and the normative dimension of human life more generally. The twelve original essays in this volume are written in her honor on the occasion of her retirement from teaching. They engage questions that recur in her work: Why are we obligated to do what morality demands? What features of our nature make us subject to moral obligation? What does it mean to be autonomous and responsible for what we do? What do we owe to nonhuman animals? Contributors include Stephen Darwall, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Barbara Herman, Richard Moran, Japa Pallikkathayil, Faviola Rivera-Castro, T.M. Scanlon, Tamar Schapiro, Sharon Street, David Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, and David Velleman. These essays shed light on Korsgaard's own views while staking out provocative new positions on the topics that feature centrally in her own work.

This article provides a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems and institutions, fleshing out a position best characterized as 'cognitive institutionalism'. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions, emergence, their working properties and their effect on economic performance should start with the analysis of cognitive processes. Exploring the nature of individual and collective learning the article suggests that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose. We also show how a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should look like; there is a path dependence at the cognitive level, at the institutional level and at the economic level and there are links among them.

There is a long tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences that emphasizes the meaningfulness of human action. This tradition doubts or even negates the possibility of causal explanations of human action precisely on the basis that human actions have meaning. This paper provides an argument in favour of methodological naturalism in the social sciences. It grants the main argument of the Interpretivists, i.e. that human actions are meaningful, but it shows how a transformation of a “nexus of meaning” into a “causal nexus” can take place, proposing the “successful transformation argument”. Based on previous work presented in my Naturalistic Hermeneutics, Cambridge University Press, 2005 the paper discusses four approaches that describe the “nexus of meaning” connected with a human action based on the motives, the intentions, the reasons, and the rationality of the action respectively. From the standpoint of eachapproach a causal nexus can arise, namely, if the respective motives, intentions, reasons, or the human rationality that are manifest in the different nexuses of meaning exhibit certain invariances. These approaches can be formulated as theories, which explain human action every time that the nexuses of meaning – described with the diverse conceptual apparatuses – can be transformed into causal nexuses. It is shown that explanations based on motives, intentions, reasons, or rationality are possible, as are explanations of human action based on, at least in principle, an unlimited number of other theories.

The hermeneutic circle serves as a standard argument for all those who raise a claim to the autonomy of the human sciences. The proponents of an alternative methodology for the human sciences present the hermeneutic circle either as an ontological problem or as a specific methodological problem in the social sciences and the humanities. In this paper I would like to check the soundness of this argument. I will start with listing and shortly sketching out three variations of the problem. I will then critically discuss these and appeal to alternative solutions and I will close with a short conclusion.

A philosophical theory of explanation should provide solutions to a series of problems, both descriptive and normative. The aim of this essay is to establish the claim that this can be best done if one theorizes in terms of explanatory games rather than focusing on the explication of the concept of explanation. The position that is adopted is that of an explanatory pluralism and it is elaborated in terms of the rules that incorporate the normative standards that guide the processes of discovery and justification of explanations as well as the modes of their communication, dissemination, and adoption. They constitute the rules of the explanatory game that the participants are playing. The philosophical project consists in describing and normatively appraising the rules that constitute these games.

A philosophical theory of explanation should provide solutions to a series of problems, both descriptive and normative. The aim of this essay is to establish the claim that this can be best done if one theorizes in terms of explanatory games rather than focusing on the explication of the concept of explanation. The development of the precise meaning of the concept of scientific explanation occupies centre-stage in all contemporary approaches. The alternative position that seems obvious and which is adopted is that of an explanatory pluralism. At every moment of time there is a stock of explanations available in a society proposed by ordinary people “in the wild” or by specialists organized formally or semi-formally within specific organizational structures such as churches, universities, etc. The terms of provision, control, and dissemination of explanations in this collective explanatory enterprise are regulated by the different rules that the participants have come to adopt over time. These rules incorporate the normative standards that guide the processes of discovery and justification of explanations as well as the modes of their communication, dissemination, and adoption. They constitute the rules of the explanatory game that the participants are playing. The philosophical project consists in describing and normatively appraising the rules that constitute these games. This project is fundamentally liberal, in the sense that participants and non-participants to the game alike engage in the critical discussion and revision of the rules or to put it in other terms, the project is fundamentally naturalistic - philosophers and scientists equally take part in it.

One way to show that text interpretation can be treated as a scientific problem is to show that the standards that are currently used in the natural sciences when dealing with problems not involving meaningful material can also be successfully employed in the case of text interpretation. These standards involve intersubjective intelligibility, testability with the use of evidence, rational argumentation, and making methodological decisions aiming at the attainment of truth, accuracy, simplicity and other epistemic values. In the case of text interpretation—despite the fact that we deal with meaningful material—hypotheses can be formulated, consequences can be drawn by deduction, and these can be tested against empirical data. This claim is substantiated by the provision of an example of a scientific text

Le pragmatisme est souvent associé au nominalisme. Pourtant, dans l’esprit de son fondateur, C. S. Peirce, le pragmatisme va de pair avec le réalisme. Après avoir examiné les ressorts de ce paradoxe et noté plusieurs points communs aux divers pragmatistes, on présente les grands traits de ce que pourrait être un réalisme pragmatiste bien compris. On suggère qu’un tel réalisme dispositionnel, qui s’inscrit dans une démarche métaphysique et éthique résolue, constitue une voie prometteuse pour qui veut pouvoir donner sens au projet d’une « connaissance » métaphysique et apporter de possibles réponses au cynisme relativiste ambiant.

While Peirce presented himself as a "scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe", merely adapting the virtues involved in Scotism to the requirements of modern science to erect a plain scientific realistic metaphysics, he was also eager to emphasize that "everybody ought to be a nominalist at first" because such an hypothesis is "simpler than realism" and because "the economy of research prescribes to try the simpler one first, and to continue in that opinion", until one "is driven out of it by the force majeure of irreconciliable facts". Even if, at first, he had been "blinded by nominalistic preconceptions", he also confessed that he had "never been able to think differently on that question of realism" and...

After recalling the progress made in the diagnosis of the post-truth phenomenon, thanks to recent experimental findings (from cognitive and social psychology) and theoretical work (post-truth versus half-lies and propaganda, degrees in epistemic vice and scale of responsibility), we indicate four other ways to improve our awareness of the scope and mechanisms of post-truth: we introduce some qualifications so as to distinguish between a post-truth world and an Orwellian universe, the negative and positive sides of emotions, an utter contempt for facts, and the sharp dichotomy between facts and values, and between science denialism and blind scientism. Finally, objective truth being taken for granted, we make some suggestions for a “way out”: we should be aware of our cognitive biases and of possible sources of manipulation, cultivate our epistemic virtues, and keep evidence as a prior demand. We should also work in a “scientific spirit,” i.e., refuse any compromise with society, morality, or practice so as to ensure freedom of conscience within an academic and democratic “space of reasons.” But even more urgently, we should avoid some still too frequent misunderstandings about truth itself and about knowledge (which we identify), and remember that post-truth is serious because it is a threat to reality itself: hence we should also take care of our metaphysical prejudices and work to find better ways of ensuring metaphysical knowledge.

Charles Sanders Peirce shares with many pragmatists, both classical and contemporary, a certain distrust of metaphysics, the nature and importance of which have been constantly questioned at the turn of the 20th century. It is however him who, after having decried it, claimed the possibility and the necessity of metaphysics. It is shown that this pragmaticist metaphysical project, which emphasizes logic, semiotics, inquiry and science (but without scientism), against the background of a very specific realist approach, is a source of inspiration for any enterprise concerned with responding to the “Integration Challenge”, and thus to think the links between metaphysics and epistemology, an objective which the metaphysician is held to tackle, if he wants to be able to establish the conditions of possibility of a genuine metaphysical knowledge.

For most early pragmatists, including the founder C.S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce's original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

"La métaphysique de tradition analytique ou continentale est florissante. Elle n'est plus seulement travaillée comme objet de l'histoire de la philosophie, elle est redevenue sujet de l'activité philosophique et productrice d'oeuvres nouvelles - qu'il s'agisse de la tradition dite continentale ou de celle dite analytique. Du côté "continental", hérité de Heidegger, c'est estimer que la métaphysique, en tant qu'enquête rationnelle sur l'être, doit être dépassée au profit d'un questionnement poétique. Du côté analytique, hérité du Cercle de Vienne, et notamment de Carnap, c'est prolonger l'oeuvre de philosophes qui estimaient que la logique symbolique nouvellement façonnée devait permettre d'établir le fait que tous les énoncés métaphysiques étaient dénués de sens. L'apologiste de la science que fut Carnap, tout comme son pourfendeur que fut Heidegger, ont l'un et l'autre convergé sur un même mot d'ordre :"le dépassement de la métaphysique". Ce renouveau actuel est donc d'autant plus étonnant que ces deux courants se réclamaient l'un et l'autre de l'héritage de Kant, lequel récusait déjà la triple ambition de la métaphysique théorique à connaître rationnellement la surnature, les choses en soi et les faits ultimes constituant la nature. Cet ouvrage, qui réunit d'éminents spécialistes de la question, propose ainsi un état des lieux de la réflexion métaphysique contemporaine."--Page 4 of cover.

À l'heure des fake news et des sciences alternatives, on pourrait facilement croire que tout est relatif. Cet essai voudrait pourtant suggérer le contraire. De nombreux malentendus circulent sur les concepts de vérité, de connaissance ou de réalité, déformés par l'idée-même de post-vérité. En nous proposant de nous méfier de nos préjugés métaphysiques les plus ancrés et d'œuvrer à une authentique connaissance métaphysique, cet essai de philosophie engagée nous invite à nous installer dans un espace académique et démocratique des raisons, seul à même de garantir la liberté de conscience. Il démontre ainsi que les idéaux de vérité et de connaissance constituent moins un rempart ou un déni de la vie qu'ils ne sont les meilleurs alliés de nos idéaux de solidarité et de justice sociale"--Page 4 of cover.