Relation of the philosophy of mind to the cultivation of moral feeling.

2008 ◽  
pp. 20-29
Author(s):  
Thomas Brown
1869 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Columbus Graham
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Susan Brophy

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.


In contrast to other helping professions, social work does not currently define itself as scientific, or as a scientific discipline. Starting with the work of John Brekke, this volume considers what a science of social work might look like. These ideas have developed from an extended collaboration among the chapter authors and others. Aspects of the framework described here include approaches to ontology and epistemology (scientific and critical realism); science and the the identity of social work; the context of Grand Challenges for social work; the place of values in a science of social work; the importance of theory in social work science; and how ideas from the philosophy of mind can also inform what a social work science should be. The volume then describes the application of social work science to social work practice, managing the tensions between rigor and relevance, and ways to educate future scholars. The concluding chapter suggests some ways in which this framework might affect social work practice and education in the future.


Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.


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