This distinguished collection of essays has been produced to honour Donald McKinnon, who retired from the Norris-Hulse Professorship of Divinity in the ...

Animal and plant species exhibit an astonishing diversity of sexual systems, including environmental and genetic determinants of sex, with the latter including genetic material in the mitochondrial genome. In several hermaphroditic plants for example, sex is determined by an interaction between mitochondrial cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) genes and nuclear restorer genes. Specifically, CMS involves aberrant mitochondrial genes that prevent pollen development and specific nuclear genes that restore it, leading to a mixture of female (male‐sterile) and hermaphroditic individuals in the population (...) (gynodioecy). Such a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex determination system is thought to be rare outside plants. Here, we present one possible case of CMS in animals. We hypothesize that the only exception to the strict maternal mtDNA inheritance in animals, the doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) system in bivalves, might have originated as a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex‐determination system. We document and explore similarities that exist between DUI and CMS, and we propose various ways to test our hypothesis. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

When Donald Davidson published his influential article ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ [1963], many of his contemporaries were convinced that reasons for action could not be causes of anything, so that even an explanation such as ‘Gilbert knelt because he had decided to propose to Gertrude’ did not work by citing Gilbert’s decision as a cause of his kneeling. Davidson was mainly responsible for demolishing that consensus and reinstating causalism—the thesis that psychological or rationalizing explanations of human behaviour are a (...) species of event-causal explanation—as the dominant view in the philosophy of action, so that it is now often regarded as an obvious truth. (shrink)

Susan Stewart has sculpted a book. If her poetry collection, Columbarium (2003), avowed its controlling Empedoclean element to be water, then The Ruins Lesson p.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXI, Number 2, November 1995, pp. 151-164 On Hume's Conservatism DONALD W. LIVINGSTON In Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy,1 John Stewart seeks to establish two theses. The first is that Hume's philosophical skepticism does not entail political conservatism as many commentators have argued, and the second is that central to all of Hume's writings, but especially to the History and the Essays, (...) is a program of major reforms. These include an ethic of individualism and cosmopolitanism, protection of private property, representative government under the rule of law, free trade, anti-imperialism, and moderate secularization. Stewart is right, I think, that these reforms are central to Hume's philosophic project, and he explores them with historical depth and subtlety. What is not so convincing, however, at least in the form presented, is the thesis that Hume is a liberal and not a conservative. And it is this thesis that I wish to explore. The first thing to appreciate is the sense in which Hume is neither a liberal nor a conservative. These are early nineteenth century terms framed to characterize a political and intellectual response to the French Revolution and to the Industrial Revolution. Liberalism and conservatism were not and could not have been a part of Hume's own self-understanding. That understanding is revealed clearly enough in Hume's remark that he was a whig in respect to "things" and a tory in respect to "persons" (HL II237). That is, he admired the moral character of Charles I and leading royalists more than the characters of Cromwell and the Puritan fanatics. But he was happy about the unintended consequences of the Puritan rebellion which led to the constitution of liberty Donald W. Livingston is at the Philosophy Department, Emory University, 214 Bowden Hall, Atlanta GA 30322 USA. 152 Donald W. Livingston of 1689 (the whig order of "things," namely liberty and the rule of law). But though Hume could not have thought of himself as a liberal or a conservative, it is possible to find intimated in his philosophy a pattern of thought significantly similar to a later structure of thought which may properly be called liberal or conservative as the case may be. Such retrospective judgments are legitimate as long as there is sufficient evidence to support the appropriate historical claim about what Hume did and thought he had done and an adequate philosophical theory of what liberalism and conservatism are. But if Hume is to be recruited as part of a liberal or conservative political tradition, we must be clear about what is meant by the terms 'liberal' or 'conservative '. And this is no easy matter; for these terms have not only changed their meanings over time, they are highly contested terms, being in their very nature partisan expressions the explication of which cannot entirely escape a political commitment. What I find unsatisfactory about Stewart's thesis that Hume should not be thought of as part of the conservative political tradition is not so much what he says about the critical and reforming character of Hume's thought (in that he is essentially correct) as that he does not offer a philosophical theory of conservatism or liberalism. The result is that much of the liberalism he finds in Hume would be embraced by self-professed conservatives, and some of what he characterizes as conservatism would be denied. One must gather Stewart's meaning for these terms from various contexts. In some places a conservative is thought of as a philosophical skeptic who has nothing to cling to but the raft of custom and is, consequently, incapable of making judgments of truth. Or, a conservative may be one who can indeed make judgments but is uncritical and perhaps even bigoted in doing so. Or finally, a conservative may be one whose character is informed by an ungenerous disposition to defend the status quo regardless of the oppression of others.2 Stewart argues that Hume is not a conservative in these senses but is a critical political theorist whose philosophical skepticism not only did not prohibit, but positively legitimated the formulation of truths about political things. In his... (shrink)

Johnstone, H. W., Jr. Rhetoric and communication in philosophy.--Smith, C. R. and Douglas, D. G. Philosophical principles in the traditional and emerging views of rhetoric.--Wallace, K. R. Bacon's conception of rhetoric.--Thonssen, L. W. Thomas Hobbes's philosophy of speech.--Walter, O. M., Jr. Descartes on reasoning.--Douglas, D. G. Spinoza and the methodology of reflective knowledge in persuasion.--Howell, W. S. John Locke and the new rhetoric.--Doering, J. F. David Hume on oratory.--Douglas, D. G. A neo-Kantian approach to the epistomology of judgment in criticism.--Bevilacqua, (...) V. M. Lord Kames's theory of rhetoric.--Brockriede, W. E. Bentham's philosophy of rhetoric.--Anderson, R. E. Kierkegaard's theory of communication.--Macksoud, S. J. Ludwig Wittgenstein, radical operationism and rhetorical stance.--Stewart, J. J. L. Austin's speech act analysis.--Torrence, D. L. A philosophy of rhetoric from Bertrand Russell.--Clark, A. Martin Buber, dialogue, and the philosophy of rhetoric.--Bennett, W. Kenneth Burke--a philosophy in defense of un-reason.--Dearin, R. D. The philosophical basis of Chaim Perelman's theory of rhetoric. (shrink)

Stewart's purpose is to show that Hume is not a political conservative, but is better understood as a liberal. The author is reacting against several recent works on Hume: David Miller's Philosophy and Ideology in Hume's Political Thought, Donald W. Livingston's Hume's Philosophy of Common Life, and Frederick G. Whelan's Order and Artifice in Hume's Political Philosophy. These "all share, with variations, the nineteenth-century view that Hume's epistemology led him to conservatism". Stewart acknowledges that the term "conservative" (...) is used in different ways by these authors, but not so differently that they cannot be collectively refuted by showing Hume to be a liberal, that is, one "who thought that major reforms were highly desirable in the United Kingdom in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries". Stewart is referring here to substantial "economic and political reforms," but not to "socialist, Marxist, or neoliberal reforms.". (shrink)

D. In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: 1) the agent does x intentionally; 2) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and 3) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.

Moving beyond both realist and anti-realist accounts of mathematics, Shapiro articulates a "structuralist" approach, arguing that the subject matter of a mathematical theory is not a fixed domain of numbers that exist independent of each other, but rather is the natural structure, the pattern common to any system of objects that has an initial object and successor relation satisfying the induction principle.

Machine generated contents note: Essay 1.

Stewart Shapiro's ambition in Vagueness in Context is to develop a comprehensive account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary according to their context: a person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall (even short) with respect to professional basketball players. The key feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague (...) terms also vary in the course of conversations and that, in some cases, a competent speaker can go either way without sinning against the meaning of the words or the non-linguistic facts. As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak; but vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. (shrink)

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we (...) understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to assess the prospects for a Scottish neo-logicist foundation for a set theory. We show how to reformulate a key aspect of our set theory as a neo-logicist abstraction principle. That puts the enterprise on the neo-logicist map, and allows us to assess its prospects, both as a mathematical theory in its own right and in terms of the foundational role that has been advertised for set theory. On the positive side, we show that (...) our abstraction based theory can be modified to yield much of ordinary mathematics, indeed everything needed to recapture all branches of mathematics short of set theory itself. However, our conclusions are mostly negative. The theory will fall far short of the power of ordinary Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. It is consistent that our set theory has models that are relatively small, smaller than the first cardinal with an uncountable index. More important, there is a strong tension between the idea that the iterative hierarchy is somehow ineffable, or indefinitely extensible, and the neo-logicist theme of capturing mathematical theories with abstraction principles. (shrink)

Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics in Climate (...) Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

The author believes that large‐scale rationality on the part of the interpretant is essential to his interpretability, and therefore, in his view, to her having a mind. How, then are cases of irrationality, such as akrasia or self‐deception, judged by the interpretant's own standards, possible? He proposes that, in order to resolve the apparent paradoxes, one must distinguish between accepting a contradictory proposition and accepting separately each of two contradictory propositions, which are held apart, which in turn requires to conceive (...) of the mind as containing a number of semi‐independent structures of interlocking beliefs, desires, emotions, memories, and other mental states. (shrink)

Two things become one thing, something having parts, and something becoming something else, are cases of many things being identical with one thing. This apparent contradiction introduces others concerning transitivity of identity, discernibility of identicals, existence, and vague existence. I resolve the contradictions with a theory that identity, number, and existence are relative to standards for counting. What are many on some standard are one and the same on another. The theory gives an account of the discernibility of identicals using (...) phrases like “insofar as”. And it holds that standards for counting remain or shift depending on our purposes. (shrink)

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to think about rationality, as defined in the following passage: ‘Reason’ for a long time meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men. Today, on the contrary, it is not only the business but the essential work of reason to find means for the goals one adopts at any given time. To use what Horkheimer called objective reason, and what others have called expressive or (...) non–instrumental reason, is to reflect on one's goals, to attempt to determine what preferences one ought to hold. On the other hand, to use what Horkheimer called subjective reason is to ‘be concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted’, that is, to be instrumentally rational. This contrast between non-instrumental and instrumental reason is at the heart of many contemporary social and philosophical disputes. 1. (shrink)

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning . This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes often includes powers and abilities in his descriptions of the world. Meanwhile, Hobbes’s philosophical picture of the world appears quite reductive, and he seems sometimes to say that nothing exists but bodies in motion. In more extreme versions of such a picture, there would be no room for powers. Hobbes is not an eliminativist about powers, but his view does tend toward ontological minimalism. It would be good to have an account of what Hobbes thinks powers are, and (...) how they fit into his understanding of the world. In this chapter, I investigate Hobbes’s account of the metaphysics of powers and abilities. Section 1 considers three important aspects of Hobbes’s account of powers: the connection between powers and causes; the modal aspects of powers; and the connection between powers and motions. Sections 2 and 3 then consider interpretive arguments about whether Hobbes identifies powers with underlying corporeal features. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Michael Rescorla has argued that it makes sense to compute directly with numbers, and he faulted Turing for not giving an analysis of number-theoretic computability. However, in line with a later paper of his, it only makes sense to compute directly with syntactic entities, such as strings on a given alphabet. Computing with numbers goes via notation. This raises broader issues involving de re propositional attitudes towards numbers and other non-syntactic abstract entities.

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)