This book is the first to concentrate on the problems of individuation and identity in early modern philosophy and to trace their philosophical development through the period in a coherent way.

Consider two red disks having the same non-relational properties. That they are two and not one, it is claimed by some philosophers, can only be accounted for by claiming that each disk contains an individuator, i.e., a bare particular, which is merely numerically different from the particular in the other disk. While sucli a claim is clearly dialectical, one need not rest the case for bare particulars solely on the dialectical argument. One can, by giving an accurate phenomenological description of (...) the situation containing the two red disks, also attempt to show that one is in fact acquainted with such entities. This latter possibility, however, has recently been challenged by Trentman on the grounds that one cannot give such a description without presupposing the existence of bare particulars. (shrink)

Consider two red disks having the same non-relational properties. That they are two and not one, it is claimed by some philosophers, can only be accounted for by claiming that each disk contains an individuator, i.e., a bare particular, which is merely numerically different from the particular in the other disk. While sucli a claim is clearly dialectical, one need not rest the case for bare particulars solely on the dialectical argument. One can, by giving an accurate phenomenological description of (...) the situation containing the two red disks, also attempt to show that one is in fact acquainted with such entities. This latter possibility, however, has recently been challenged by Trentman on the grounds that one cannot give such a description without presupposing the existence of bare particulars. (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of new articles examining the state of Irish philosophy during the lifetime of Ireland's most famous philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753). The thinkers examined include Berkeley, Robert Boyle, William King, William Molyneux, Robert Molesworth, Peter Browne, Jonathan Swift, John Toland, Thomas Prior, Samuel Madden, Arthur Dobbs, Francis Hutcheson, Mary Barber, Constantia Grierson, Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Sican, and John Austin. This interdisciplinary collection includes attention both to local Irish concerns and to Ireland's relation to the (...) broader European context, and discusses philosophical reflections on topics as diverse as religion, economics, laughter, and motherhood. (shrink)

This chapter develops and defends an account of reason: to reason is to scrutinize one’s attitudes by consulting the perspectives of other persons. The principal attraction of this account is its ability to vindicate the unique of authority of reason. The chapter argues that this conception entails that reasoning is a robustly social endeavor—that it is, in the first instance, something we do with other people. It is further argued that such social endeavors presuppose mutual respect on the part of (...) those participating in them. The account therefore yields a form of Kantian constructivism: we have an unconditional duty of respect for persons because such a duty is implicit in the very nature of reasoning. -/- . (shrink)

My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by (...) its ability to explain some important but otherwise recondite features of aesthetic practice and, more importantly, by allowing us to ground the normativity of aesthetic judgement in the familiar normativity of practice. It also offers a more systematic way of understanding the rivalry between the ideals of aesthetic universality and diversity. (shrink)

Many people find comparisons of the value of persons distasteful, even immoral. But what can be said in support of the claim that persons have incomparable worth? This chapter considers an argument purporting to show that the value of persons is incomparable because it is so great—because it is infinite. The argument rests on two claims: that the value of our capacity for valuing must equal or exceed the value of things valued and that our capacity for valuing is unbounded (...) in a very strong sense. After laying out this argument, I consider its implications for how we should regard each other. In particular, I suggest that it complicates efforts to understand morality as a system of principles. Instead, I propose that an aesthetic attitude, not unlike our experience of the sublime, is an apt response to humanity’s infinite value. -/- . (shrink)

sirAt a recent health authority meeting Professor Stacey, the NHSE Head of Research Ethics, was quoted as stating that for multicentre trials rapid responses were required ….

George Berkeley is one of the greatest and most influential modern philosophers. In defending the immaterialism for which he is most famous, he redirected modern thinking about the nature of objectivity and the mind's capacity to come to terms with it. Along the way, he made striking and influential proposals concerning the psychology of the senses, the workings of language, the aims of science, and the scope of mathematics. In this Companion volume a team of distinguished authors not only examines (...) Berkeley's achievements but also his neglected contributions to moral and political philosophy, his writings on economics and development, and his defense of religious commitment and religious life. The volume places Berkeley's achievements in the context of the many social and intellectual traditions - philosophical, scientific, ethical, and religious - to which he fashioned a distinctive response. (shrink)

The young Hegel was entranced by the notion of intellectual intuition, and this notion continues to entrance many of Hegel’ commentators. I argue that Kant provided three distinct conceptions of an intuitive intellect, that none of these involve aconceptual intuitionism, and that they differ markedly from Fichte’s and Schelling’s conceptions of intellectual intuition. I further argue that by 1804 Hegel recognized that appealing to an aconceptual model, or to Schelling’s model, or to his own early model of intellectual intuition generates (...) inevitable and insoluble problems of question-begging. By incorporating several important points from Kant’s Transcendental Ideal into his reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism, Hegel’s mature discursive and conceptual account of ‘absolute knowing’ performs some of the functions Kant assigned to the intuitive intellect, though without invoking any such intuitive intellect. I discuss several of these functions. (shrink)

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical and literary classic of the highest order. It is also an extremely relevant work because of its engagement with issues as alive today as in Hume's time: the design argument for a deity, the problem of evil, the dangers of superstition and fanaticism, the psychological roots and social consequences of religion. In this outstanding and unorthodox collection, an international team of scholars engage with Hume's classic work. The chapters include state-of-the-art contributions (...) on the central interpretive questions posed by the Dialogues as well as major contributions relating it to contemporary issues in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, moral psychology, and social philosophy. Additional contributions tackle the historical and philosophical background of the Dialogues, relating it to Hume's own systematic philosophy, to the work of other key seventeenth and eighteenth-century figures - Locke, Clarke, Bayle, Cudworth, Malebranche, Spinoza, Lord Bolingbroke, and Voltaire, among others - to early modern neo-Epicureanism in the life sciences, and, notably, to what Darwin missed by thinking too much like William Paley and not enough like Hume's Philo. Overall, this volume provides fresh and even groundbreaking perspectives on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It is essential reading for students and scholars of Hume, the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of religion and the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...) as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way, and indeed the only way, of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for pleasure in free and creative activity. Doing this allows us to be both particular sorts of agents and creatures regulated by the universalizing demands of reason. (shrink)

_Grounds of Pragmatic Realism_ shows Hegel is a major epistemologist, who disentangled Kant’s critique of judgment, across the Critical corpus, from transcendental idealism, and augmented its enormous evaluative and justificatory significance for commonsense knowledge, the natural sciences and freedom of action.

John McDowell’s ethical writings interpret ethical experience as intentional, socially-conditioned, virtuous responsiveness to situations and develop a modest account of practical rationality. His work converges with investigations of ethical experience by recent Kant scholars and Emmanuel Levinas. The Kantian interpreters and Levinas locate the categorical demands of ethical experience in rational agents’ demands for respect, while McDowell finds it in noble adherence to the demands of virtuous living. For McDowell, moral-practical rational efforts to justify ethics cannot transcend one’s form of (...) life and are motivated by desires to coerce others under a veneer of rationality or an unnecessary modern anxiety to protect community beliefs. He overlooks how such justifications can be motivated by a desire to give an account of one’s beliefs out of responsibility to others different from oneself, a responsibility elicited by others in ethical experience as depicted by the Kantian interpreters and Levinas. (shrink)

Après avoir erré quelques années, étudiant férocement studieux mais aussi très anarchiste, après avoir déambulé le long des docks du port de Glasgow, alors du dernier stade de la révolution industrielle, entouré d'une drôle de musique où les accents de Rimbaud («Je me crois en enfer») et de Hölderlin («Ce que tu veux, c'est un monde») se mêlaient aux phrasés grinçants de L'Opéra de quat'sous de Bertolt Brecht, je me posais la question : que faire? Que faire de fondamental? D'abord (...) pour donner un fondement et un mouvement à une existence individuelle, mais aussi pour tenter de changer le cours des choses, sur les plans culturel, civilisationnel et sociopolitique. Pendant le XIXe et le XXe siècle on a cru, malgré tout, que l'Histoire était synonyme de Progrès. Qu'elle menait quelque part : à un grand Etat, au communisme universel, à un Supermarché du bonheur. Personne n'a plus confiance dans l'Histoire. D'où un grand vide existentiel et culturel. Sans utopisme, sans réenchantement facile, Kenneth White entreprend une navigation hauturière dans un espace de vie et de pensée, qui a toujours existé au large de l'Histoire. Les escales de ce voyage sont au nombre de cinq : une analyse socio-politique de la fin de la modernité ; une investigation qui remonte aux origines de la culture ; l'examen de diverses tentatives de refondation sociale à travers le monde ; la question, posée encore trop timidement par l'écologie, de l'habitation de la Terre ; et enfin, une critique de la situation contemporaine de l'art. (shrink)

Los medios de comunicación incrementan la cobertura de hallazgos sobre el pasado. Impedir la discriminación por razón de sexo es mandato de los códigos deontológicos periodísticos. Desde la perspectiva de género, el estudio abordó la presencia de científicas como sujetos noticiables y fuentes expertas. Se analizaron mediante técnicas cuantitativas y cualitativas mensajes (n=59) en los dos principales diarios españoles de referencia (El País, El Mundo). Es preponderante la voz del profesional de la arqueología y prima la autoría de reporteros especializados. (...) Lo femenino ocupa un segundo plano temático, que relega a la mujer como científica, especialista y reportera. (shrink)

The Systematicity Arguments is the only book-length treatment of the systematicity and productivity arguments.

Biologists seems to hold two fundamental beliefs: Organisms are organized into levels and the individuals at these levels differ in their properties. Together these suggest that there will be massive multiple realization, i.e. that many human psychological properties are multiply realized at many neurobiological levels. This paper provides some documentation in support of this suggestion.

About this book Mr. Burke contributes an introductory and summarizing remark, "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?

As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but afterCounter-Statement(1931), he began to discriminate a ...

Traditionally, questions about the role of the arts in moral thought have focused on the arts’ role in the acquisition of new moral knowledge, the refinement of moral concepts, and the capacity to apply our moral view to particular situations. Here I suggest that there is an importantly different and largely overlooked role for the arts in moral thought: an ability to reconfigure the structure of our moral thought and effect what we might call a revolution in that framework. In (...) this article I explain this distinction between two kinds of change in view, suggest the second type has not been addressed by the extant literature, provide examples of this role, and argue for its importance. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that the fact that our universe is fine-tuned for life favors both a design hypothesis as well as a non-teleological multiverse hypothesis. The claim that the fine-tuning of this universe supports a non-teleological multiverse hypothesis has been forcefully challenged however by Ian Hacking and Roger White. In this paper we take this challenge even further by arguing that if it succeeds, then not only does the fine-tuning of this universe fail to support a multiverse hypothesis, but (...) it tends to favor a single-universe hypothesis instead. (shrink)

What is the nature of law and what is the best way to discover it? This book argues that law is best understood in terms of the social functions it performs wherever it is found in human society. In order to support this claim, law is explained as a kind of institution and as a kind of artefact. To say that it is an institution is to say that it is designed for creating and conferring special statuses to people so (...) as to alter their rights and responsibilities toward each other. To say that it is an artefact is to say that it is a tool of human creation that is designed to signal its usability to people who interact with it. This picture of law's nature is marshalled to critique theories of law that see it mainly as a product of reason or morality, understanding those theories via their conceptions of law's function. It is also used to argue against those legal positivists who see law's functions as relatively minor aspects of its nature. -/- This method of conceptualizing law's nature helps us to explain how the law, understood as social facts, can make normative demands upon us. It also recommends a methodology for understanding law that combines elements of conceptual analysis with empirical research for uncovering the purposes to which diverse peoples put their legal activities. (shrink)

Argues that the explanation of man's social and cultural differences is best defined by history, not human biology, maintaining that humans shape their social lives by their historical activities.