Michael Losonsky

This paper explores the relationships between perception, representation and appetition in Leibniz's later metaphysics, and defends four theses. First, for Leibniz perceptions are not the carriers of content, but they are identical to representational content. Second, Leibniz's appetitions are the carriers of content and he should be taken at his word when he declares, "Thought consists in conatus". Third, while it is true that for Leibniz representational content is determined by a species of mapping or function from representation to what is represented, this is not the only component that determines representational content for Leibniz. The correspondence in terms of which Leibniz characterizes representation includes an ontological component, namely a lineage or trace from representation to represented object via God's creation, and appetitions constitute this trace. Finally, Leibniz's account of how ideas represent and how perceptions represent are distinct, and derivation plays a key role in how ideas represent.

In this comprehensive study of Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, Donald Rutherford attempts to recover Leibniz’s theodicy as an essential part of his philosophy. Although Rutherford does not succeed in showing that the theodicy is essential to Leibniz’s metaphysics, he effectively uses the theodicy as an entry into Leibniz’s metaphysics and he highlights the many links between them. Of course, there are other significant ways of entering Leibniz’s philosophy—he wanted to “do justice to theology as to physics”—but Rutherford reminds us that Leibniz ties all areas, even his dynamics, to the view that this is the best of all possible worlds.

At a crucial point in the final section 12 of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he refers to "the whimsical condition of mankind".1 This occurs in his concluding remarks about the untenability of what he calls "Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism" that set the stage for "mitigated scepticism, or ACADEMICAL philosophy", which then culminates in the famous agitated final paragraph of the first Enquiry that advocates "havoc" and committing certain kinds of books "to the flames".I wish to examine the content, context, and significance of Hume's characterization of the human condition as whimsical because I believe that it sheds light on the...

"A man of versatile mind"—a remark from a letter to Locke by a life-long friend—is the subtitle of the first chapter of this biography. It could also be the book's subtitle. Relying on Locke's correspondence, manuscripts, and mostly unpublished journals, Woolhouse pieces together a detailed quilt that exhibits the tremendous variety of Locke's interests and activities. Locke, who admitted to wandering interests , wrote about medicine, horticulture, religion, education, economics, government, and human understanding, as well as occasional poetry and a play.

The dispute between individualism and anti-individualism is about the individuation of psychological states, and individualism, on some accounts, is committed to the claim that psychological subjects together with their environments do not constitute integrated computational systems. Hence on this view the computational states that explain psychological states in computational accounts of mind will not involve the subject''s natural and social environment. Moreover, the explanation of a system''s interaction with the environment is, on this view, not the primary goal of computational theorizing. Recent work in computational developmental psychology (by A. Karmiloff-Smith and J. Rutkowska) as well as artificial agents or embedded artificial systems (by L.P. Kaelbling, among others) casts doubt on these claims. In these computational models, the environment does not just trigger and sustain input for computational operations, but some computational operations actually involve environmental structures

According to a simple similarity theory of representation, x represents y because x and y share some properties. In Meaning and Mental Representation, Robert Cummins rejects this account for representations that play a role in cognition because, among other things, a similarity theory of representation precludes a satisfactory account of an essential cognitive task, namely abstraction. Intelligent beings have representations of classes and properties, and we need an account for such representations. Cummins argues that a causal covariance theory of representation, even a very simple version of it, is superior to a similarity theory because causal covariance at least makes abstraction possible. I want to argue that this is not so. Covariance theories of representation do not achieve abstraction.

I propose to reconsider Gilbert Ryle’s thesis in 1956 in his introduction to The Revolution of Philosophy that “the story of twentieth-century philosophy is very largely the story of this notion of sense or meaning” and, as he writes elsewhere, the “preoccupation with the theory of meaning is the occupational disease of twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon and Austrian philoso- phy.” Ryle maintains that this preoccupation demar- cates analytic philosophy from its predecessors and that it gave philosophy a set of academic credentials as a rigorous discipline with its own domain and method. I will maintain that Ryle, with some minor qualifica- tions, was correct in his assessment of the nature of analytic philosophy at that time, and I will argue that the next 50 years continued to be, very largely, the story of meaning, exemplified by the groundbreaking work of Rawls and Kripke. However, I argue that this work also contains the seeds that contributed to the emergence of philosophies that represent a significant departure from analytic philosophy

A theory of reference for proper names according to which reference is fixed solely in terms of the contents of language users' minds is an idealist theory. A theory of reference for proper names in which reference is fixed not in terms of the contents of language users' minds, but in terms of causal chains connecting users to referents is a materialist theory. A dualist theory is one in which reference is fixed both by the contents of minds and causal chains. The main reason materialists and dualists have for rejecting an idealist account of reference for proper names is that it supposedly cannot deal with certain facts of reference. These facts of reference, pointed out by Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke, are cases in which a name's user appears to associate beliefs or intentions with a name whose contents are either false of the referent or too meagre to identify it, but nevertheless the name succeeds in referring to its referent. In addition to telling a tale about a cataclysm that attempts to motivate an idealist account of reference, in this paper I will show that an idealist can handle these facts of reference. In the problematic cases the idealist can very well point to a content of the mind that identifies the referent: the referent's individual essence.

English translation by Kneller and Losonsky of Klaus Reich, Die Vollständigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel "This classic of Kant scholarship, whose first edition appeared in 1932, deals with one of the most controversial and difficult topics in the Critique of Pure Reason: Kant's table of judgments and their connection to the table of categories. Kant's attempt to derive the latter from the former is called the "Metaphysical Deduction," and it paves the way for the Transcendental Deduction that is universally recognized as the heart of the Critique." "Many commentators have passed over the Metaphysical Deduction in silence, as if embarrassed by Kant's fatuity, and his critics are almost unanimous in finding its premise ungrounded, its argument incorrect, and its conclusion false. At the heart of the failure of the Metaphysical Deduction, it is alleged, is Kant's inability to justify the table of the forms of judgment. Critics argue that Kant simply took these forms of judgment from the logic textbooks of his day and doctored them so as to yield the required categories. Such objections were current even in Kant's time; they were repeated by Hegel, and are commonplaces of Kant criticism today." "This book is the fullest and most systematic evaluation ever made of the Metaphysical Deduction. Reich argues that its principal conclusion is correct even though Kant failed to establish it in the Metaphysical Deduction proper, and he defends the conclusion by using Kant material far removed from the text of the Metaphysical Deduction, notes by Kant that only became available in the 1920's and that remain even now untranslated into English. With the publication of this translation for English-speaking Kant scholars, a neglected and impugned part of the Critique of Pure Reason can finally receive the attention it deserves."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

According to an idealist theory of reference for proper names the reference of proper names is fixed by what name users express in their beliefs, intentions, thoughts, and so forth. My task is to show that an idealist can defend himself against the proponent of the causal theory of reference, who claims that reference cannot be fixed solely by what is expressed in name users' minds. An idealist can handle certain facts of reference the causal theorist believes idealists cannot handle. Moreover, there are possible tales that undermine the causal theory and motivate an idealist one. The idealist can also gather the material he needs for his defense--essences--from the distinction between a theory of reference and a theory of meaning that causal theorists like to draw. Finally, unlike the causal theorist, the idealist does not leave ontology in the lurch

Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from comparative linguistics. This volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology.

According to a computational view of mind, thinking is identified with the manipulation of internal mental representations and intelligent behavior is the output of these computations. Although Thomas Hobbes's philosophy of mind is taken by many to be a precursor of this brand of cognitivism, this is not the case. For Hobbes, not all thinking is the manipulation of language-like symbols, and intelligent behavior is partly constitutive of cognition. Cognition requires a 'passionate thought', and this Hobbsian synthesis of inner thought and outer behavior suggests a resolution to the contemporary conflict between cognitive theories of mind that make KNOWING THAT primary and pragmatic theories that make KNOWING HOW primary.