Arcesilaus and the Ontology of Stoic Cognition

Dialectic after Plato and Aristotle

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance, it immediately convinced many of its readers and captured the imagination of all. Its chief influence, at first, was on the Logical Positivists of the 1920s and 1930s, but many other philosophers were stimulated by its philosophy of language, finding attractive, even if ultimately unsatisfactory, its view that propositions were pictures of reality. Perhaps most of all, its own author, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920s, was fascinated by its vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships. C.K. Ogden's translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has a unique provenance. As revealed in Letters of C.K. Ogden (1973) and in correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and Moore all worked with Ogden on the translation, which had Wittgenstein's complete approval. The very name Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was of Ogden's devising; and there is very strong feeling among philosophers that, among the differing translations of this work, Ogden's is the definitive text - and Wittgenstein's version of the English equivalent of his Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Selten hat in den neueren Jahrhunderten ein philosophischer Erstling so durchgeschlagen und einen so unverruckbaren Platz unter den >grossen< Buchern errungen wie Heideggers "Sein und Zeit", das Buch eines Dreissigers" Hans Georg Gadamer in DIE ZEIT Nr 47 vom 19111982

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philosophy/Heidegger,%20Martin/(german)%20heidegger-sein%20und%20zeit.pdf

Sein und Zeit

Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In "Mind and World", based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, John McDowell offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. He illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy - the insidious persistence of dualism - in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable - but surmountable - failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls "the logical space of reasons" into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

Mind and World

What would something unlike us - a computer, for example - have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. "Making It Explicit" is an investigation into the nature of language - the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures - that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. "Making It Explicit" attempts to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic "meaning" in terms of "use" - in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. At the centre of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk - and so in the fullest sense being able to think - is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one's own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic signficance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind and logic is, finally, an account of who "we" are.

Arcesilaus and the Ontology of Stoic Cognition

Citations

Dialectic after Plato and Aristotle

References

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Sein und Zeit

Mind and World

Making it explicit : reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment

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