Swampman will appear to recognize Davidson's friends, but it is impossible for him to actually recognize them, as he has never seen them before.

Others have argued that this lack of a causal history renders incoherent the notion that Swampman could have a mind at all, which in turn raises the question of whether he is, in fact, a person.

* A third point of objection is that Davidson and the Swampman become individuals in their own rights immediately when they make choices of their own.

Swampman is an imaginary character introduced by Donald Davidson.

If Davidson goes hiking in a swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt while nearby another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules so that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death then this being, ' Swampman ', has a brain structurally identical to that which Davidson had and will thus presumably behave exactly like Davidson.

In principle, Davidson tells us, the above indeterminacies can be extended to any degree we like: the fact that the Swampman happens to be identical to Davidson does not change the fact that he could have arrived at that state by any one of countless histories, each of which would demand we interpret him differently.

( Note that Davidson calls Swampman ' it ' rather than ' he '.

For one thing, this is not a subject often discussed or analyzed.

It became the sole `` subject '' of `` international law '' ( a term which, it is pertinent to remember, was coined by Bentham ), a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena.

Accidental war is so sensitive a subject that most of the people who could become directly involved in one are told just enough so they can perform their portions of incredibly complex tasks.

I think it is essential, however, to pinpoint here the difference between the two concepts of sovereignty that went to war in 1861 -- if only to see better how imperative is our need today to clarify completely our far worse confusion on this subject.

His point is simply that the Tories have showered him with personal satire, despite the fact that as a private subject he has a right to speak on political matters without affronting the prerogative of the Sovereign.

he displays what outlanders call the New York mind, a state that the subject is necessarily unable to perceive in himself.

What we must have, if the United Nations is to survive, is as nonpolitical, nonpartisan an organization at the top as human beings can make it, subject to no single nation's direction and subservient to no single nation's ambition.

Even in these cases we should promote self-help by making it clear that our supporting assistance is subject to reduction and ultimately to termination.

It is obvious that this is a potential and lucrative source of revenue for the assessors of those towns where a substantial amount of such property would be subject to taxation.

However, if their United States income is not subject to the withholding of tax on wages, their returns are due June 15, 1962, if they use a calendar year, or the 15th day of the 6th month after the close of their fiscal year.

A minor is subject to tax on his own earnings even though his parent may, under local law, have the right to them and might actually have received the money.

Mr. Barcus spoke on the subject of scholarships for Juniors -- with which he is very familiar.

Flash is allowed, subject to above restrictions.

Foliage is the outstanding photo subject in many of the Southern locales mentioned above and some specific tips on how and where to shoot it are in order.

It is this subject matter that has brought Mason a large and enthusiastic following among sportsmen, but it is his exceptional performance with this motif that commends him to artists and discerning collectors.

Ordinary politeness may have militated against this opinion being stated so badly but anyone with a wide acquaintance in both groups and who has sat through the many round tables, workshops or panel discussions -- whatever they are called -- on this subject will recognize that the final, boiled down crux of the matter is education.

When a family buys a home the title is subject to a perpetual easement to Tri-State.

The amount paid by the oil company to Tri-State for the use of its oil distribution system and the privilege of supplying all the homes, is subject to negotiation but naturally must be profitable to both parties.

The Public Service Commission has ruled that this is not a public utility, subject to their many regulations.

The elasticity is a parameter of fluids which is not subject to simple measurement at present, and it is a parameter which is probably varying in an unknown manner with many commercial materials.

When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don't know, but their language is too philosophical for me.

As long as perception is seen as composed only of isolated sense data, most of the quality and interconnectedness of existence loses its objectivity, becomes an invention of consciousness, and the result is a philosophical scepticism.

) Functionalism as a sociological credo is, therefore, not a direct consequence of observations, but rather an indirect consequence of philosophical inference and judgment.

The purpose of this sort of philosophical study of sociology is not to tyrannize but to clarify the principles of social science.

I shall first indicate a couple of weaknesses in Fromm's analysis, then argue that, granted these weaknesses, he still has much left that is valuable, and, finally, raise the general question of a philosophical versus a sociological approach to the question of alienation.

the `` sober opinion '' of his letter to Noyes, written when Hardy was eighty years old, is essentially that of his first `` philosophical '' notebook entry, made when he was twenty-five: `` The world does not despise us: it only neglects us '' ( Early Life, p. 63 ).

It is Martin Heidegger, not Nietzsche, who elaborated a new interpretation of Aristotle, intended to warrant his deconstruction of scholastic and philosophical tradition.

Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners ' claims to profound powers were known from antiquity.

The concept that matter is composed of discrete units and cannot be divided into arbitrarily tiny quantities has been around for millennia, but these ideas were founded in abstract, philosophical reasoning rather than experimentation and empirical observation.

Applied ethics is the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment.

It is thus a term used to describe attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life.

Chinese philosophy is the dominant philosophical thought in China and other countries within the sinosphere, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Also known as Lokāyata, it is a system of Hindu philosophy that assumes various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference. It is named after its founder, Cārvāka, author of the Bārhaspatya-sūtras.

There is still the position, based on the philosophical question of personal identity, termed open individualism, and in some ways similar to the old belief of monopsychism, that concludes that individual existence is illusory, and our consciousness continues existing after death in other conscious beings.

He was undoubtably the biggest influence on Plotinus in his development of Neoplatonism, although little is known about his own philosophical views.

Very little is known about his philosophical views.

The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature.

Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty.

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.

In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects.

Axiology ( from Greek, axiā, " value, worth "; and ,-logos ) is the philosophical study of value.

It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics — philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of value — or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar to value theory and meta-ethics.