§ 21. Until a few years ago the hope of the physicist seems on the whole to have been that he would eventually be able to exhibit a single interconnected system of perfectly deterministic causal laws. He took the relation of cause and effect in all change to be such that from a determinate antecedent state of that which changes there must necessarily follow a different subsequent state of it, and it was assumed by him that complete knowledge of the (...) antecedent state must enable exact prediction of the subsequent state. I do not think it matters here whether that which changes was taken as a limited subject of change or as the whole physical world. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to (...) distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”. (shrink)

§ 1. The purpose of this paper is to inquire what distinction can or should be drawn between logic on the one hand and on the other psychology, so far as psychology concerns itself specifically with the problem of knowledge. The suggestions I have to make are very provisional, and are based mainly on a criticism of the late Mr. Bradley's views of the nature and scope of logic and psychology. For this reason I have for my title adapted from (...) Bradley's article on “Association and Thought” a famous phrase which seems to me to illustrate fairly well the meeting-point of these two sciences in his thinking. At the same time this very criticism is itself chiefly founded upon philosophical considerations with which Bradley at least as much as any other writer has taught me to sympathize. In short, I assume some sort of Absolute Idealism; and my excuse must be the further assumption—which I hope the reader will more readily tolerate— that the proper criticism of any theory is that which it can be shown to pass upon itself in the course of its own development. (shrink)

Philosophy , October 1974, contains an article entitled ‘Aristotle's Four Becauses’, by Professor Max Hocutt, who contends that Aristotle's aitia means ‘a because’ or ‘an explanation’ rather than ‘a cause’ and should be translated accordingly. He argues that only Aristotle's efficient ‘cause’ is a cause in the English sense of the word, and that ‘Aristotle's theory of “causes” is simply an application of his theory of syllogistic to the analysis of scientific knowledge’ . Both contentions deserve a word.

§ 1. Of all the subjects which for well over two thousand years have remained the more or less constant topics of philosophical discussion, I can think of none which has not at some time by some philosopher been dismissed as a nonentity or an illusion. The history of philosophy seems to show that we cannot begin fairly to estimate the nature of any element in the universe until we have steadily contemplated a universe from which that element has been (...) hypothetically eliminated. (shrink)

For a century or so after his death Hegel's system excited, if not wider diversity of interpretation and more bitter controversy, then certainly more bewilderment, than had ever before befogged the battlefields of speculative thought. A few fervent disciples maintained that their master had achieved a system substantially if not in all detail final and complete, a philosophy destined to set at rest forever all serious philosophic doubt. Others agreed that this claim to finality was inherent in the system, but (...) mocked openly, proclaiming Hegel an arrogant megalomaniac. (shrink)

I Have often wished that someone would write a History of Oxford Honour Schools. But I want that work written for reasons which the title does not immediately suggest.

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to (...) distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”. (shrink)

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to (...) distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”. (shrink)

Is the State organic? Does it, or should it, in some way transcend the individual natures of its citizens, so as itself to be an individual more complete and of higher value than the singular individuals who compose it? Is it thus in some sense an organism, and are its citizens in some sense organs of it which gain for themselves a higher value and significance in subserving it?