Philosophical Investigations – Free Special Issue

Virtual Issue: Philosophical Investigations from past to present

Founded in 1978 and associated with the British Wittgenstein Society, Philosophical Investigations is published quarterly by Wiley-Blackwell. This international journal features articles, discussions, critical notices and reviews covering every branch of philosophy. Whether focusing on traditional or on new aspects of the subject, it offers thought-provoking articles and maintains a lively readership with an acclaimed discussion section and wide-ranging book reviews.

In this exciting virtual issue, the editorial team have selected some of the best articles, critical notices and reviews published in Philosophical Investigations from 1980 to the present day. We are confident that you will find this virtual issue interesting and informative. See below for a full list of articles, critical notices and reviews.

Hilary Putnam awarded The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy

Hilary Putnam, released by Dr. Putnam himself

Hilary Putnam is being awarded The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy 2011 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy 2011 is being awarded to Hilary Putnam “for his contribution to the understanding of semantics for theoretical and ‘natural kind’ terms, and of the implications of this semantics for philosophy, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science and metaphysics“.

Hilary Putnam (b. July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher and mathematician who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s. He is most well know in the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. Putnam is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws; as a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.

Read articles written by Hilary Putnam:

Truth and Convention: On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Relativism
dialectica

Travis on Meaning, Thought and the Ways the World Is
The Philosophical Quarterly

Quantum Logic, Conditional Probability, and Interference
dialectica

Is Semantics Possible?
Metaphilosophy

Comment on “Empirical Realism And Other Minds”
Philosophical Investigations

God and the Philosophers
Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Liberalism, Radicalism and Contemporary “Unrest”
Metaphilosophy

Analyticity and Apriority: Beyond Wittgenstein and Quine
Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Does The Disquotational Theory Really Solve All Philosophical Problems
Metaphilosophy

Education For Democracy
Educational Theory

Multiply realized memory

In a recent Scientific American article, evidence is presented for multiple realizability.

What is multiple realizability? Let’s begin with functionalism. Functionalism is a dominant view in the philosophy of mind and concerns the relationship between the brain and the mind. Take a physical apparatus (such as the brain), and divide it into components each defined by what causes it, and what it causes. Functionalism is the view that the mind consists of such components. It has the consequence that different physical apparatuses can give rise to (or ‘realize’) the same components, so defined. Think for example, of all the different physical objects that can realize a corkscrew. They can be constituted and look very different. But they all share the same causal role.

Neuroscientist Larry R Squire has discovered that the physical states that realize memories change as the memories become more entrenched. They begin in the hippocampus. Over time the memories become entrenched ‘in’ the neocortex, until eventually the hippocampus is no longer needed and so no longer constitutes part of the physical realizer of a given memory.

For the original article go here.

 Related articles:
Multiple Realizability
By Eric Funkhouser , University of Arkansas
(Vol. 2, February 2007)
Philosophy Compass

Can Physicalism be Non-reductive?
By Andrew Melnyk , University of Missouri
(Vol. 3, November 2008)
Philosophy Compass