This book pursues the need for philosophical responses attuned to the complexity of terrorism.

Mediation and the standard model of romantic historicism -- Gothic mediation & history's two materialisms -- History's body and the historicist's dilemma -- Freedom and the minimum conditions of historicity -- Randomness, romantic historicism, & Walter Scott -- Romantic temporality and queer revolution.

I hold that a belief report characterizes the subject's belief not only by its truth conditions, but also by the token mental representations involved in it (based on conversational hints). To what extent does a belief report specify the mental representations required to make it true? I advance two surprising theses: (i) many reports specify representations by actually referring to them, and (ii) it is not clear that any ordinary reports simply leave open what sorts of representations are required for (...) their truth. I defend these claims from the arguments of Marga Reimer and other critics. (shrink)

Talk about Beliefs presents a new account of beliefs and of practices of reporting them that yields solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of...

Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 677-696 [Access article in PDF] Bentham and Hobbes:An Issue of Influence James E. Crimmins Historians of political thought commonly assume that the similarities in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) are the product of Bentham's reading of Hobbes and infer that Bentham was in a certain sense a disciple of Hobbes. 1 This has been generally (...) true through the past one hundred years of scholarship, from the commentator writing at the end of the nineteenth century who had no doubt that Bentham's "chief ideas and methods are to be found in Hobbes," to the end of the last century when Gerald Postema insisted that Bentham was "a careful student of Hobbes." 2 In between George Sabine argued that Hobbes's political philosophy "affected the whole later history of moral and political thought," but its powerful "positive influence" was most fully felt in the nineteenth century when his ideas were incorporated into the thinking of the utilitarians. 3 The implication of Sabine's comment [End Page 677] was that Hobbes's influence was not always of the positive sort. In other words, if one can conceive of influence being positive then it can also be negative, and Hobbes had just such an influence on many who read him until his ideas became respectable in the hands of Bentham and his associates. 4 John Plamenatz concurred. Bentham, he wrote, "lived in the shadow of Hobbes" and, together with James Mill, came close to "an uncritical acceptance" of Hobbes's doctrines. 5 Because Bentham abandoned Hobbes's "vocabulary" (laws of nature, natural rights, covenant, and so forth) "the difference between them appears so much greater than it is," claimed Plamenatz. But eliminate the troublesome phrases from Hobbes's writings and what remains, save for Hobbes's extravagant fear of anarchy, is strikingly similar to the fundamental political doctrines of Bentham. 6At the heart of the syndrome of ideas that the utilitarians are assumed to have inherited from Hobbes is the belief that the methods of physical science were the proper models for political explanation. 7 William Bluhm wrote that the mechanistic and naturalistic framework in which Hobbes couched his theory was not to be approached in the literature of political theory until Bentham set forth his felicific calculus. Since the time of Hobbes, Bluhm argued, Bentham stands out as the great exception to the history of neglect that has been the general fate of mathematical forms of analysis in the study of politics (until the second half of the twentieth century). 8 Moreover, in postulating man as a rational actor motivated by selfish interest and in suggesting that it is in the interest of the ruler to govern in the majority interest as the best way of preserving his own power, Bluhm argued that Hobbes provided "an interesting echo... of a central Benthamic principle, [and thus] good evidence that Hobbes is the forerunner of Utilitarianism." 9 The views of Sabine, Plamenatz, and Bluhm found an impressive echo in John Bowle's influential Hobbes and his Critics, where Hobbes is described as "a forerunner of the Benthamite school of political thought." 10 It is with this kind of understanding in mind, that W. H. Greenleaf [End Page 678] commented, "it is no accident that the modern revival of interest in Hobbesian ideas is associated with the utilitarians...." 11Oddly, these commentators have remarkably few references to Hobbes in Bentham's writings to work with. This paucity of textual evidence was noted by an early reviewer of the first edition of Bentham's works, who chose rather to speak of the "coincidences" between the thought of Hobbes and Bentham, only pausing to note that such is the "slippery" nature of general reasonings of the kind Hobbes and Bentham attempted that it should not startle us to find one a monarchist and the other a republican. 12 Nevertheless, it is generally assumed that Bentham did read Hobbes and that much of what he read he assimilated into his... (shrink)

In “On Sense and Reference,” surrounding his discussion of how we describe what people say and think, identity is Frege’s first stop and his last. We will follow Frege’s plan here, but we will stop also in the land of make-believe.

In Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic James E. Crimmins provides a fresh perspective on the history of antebellum American political thought. Based on a broad-ranging study of the dissemination and reception of utilitarian ideas in the areas of constitutional politics, law education, law reform, moral theory and political economy, Crimmins illustrates the complexities of the place of utilitarianism in the intellectual ferment of the times, in both its secular and religious forms, intersection with other doctrines, and practical (...) outcomes. The pragmatic character of American political thought revealed--culminating in the postbellum rise of Pragmatism--stands in marked contrast to the conventional interpretations of intellectual history in this period. Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic will be of interest to academic specialists, and graduate and senior undergraduate students engaged in the history of political thought, moral philosophy and legal philosophy, particularly scholars with interests in utilitarianism, the trans-Atlantic transfer of ideas, the American political tradition and modern American intellectual history. (shrink)

I present a counterexample to the claim that it is never true to say "I falsely believe that so-and-so." .

I wish first to motivate very briefly two points about the kind of context sensitive semantics needed for attitude reports, namely that reports are about referents and about mental representations; then I will compare two proposals for treating the attitudes, both of which capture the two points in question.

Dance is an 1100-line dialogic drama rambic pentameter free verse between one Nisus, a philosophical seeker, and Amanda, a Beatrice-like embodiment of divine wisdom. The author uses the drama to argue three theses: The inherent identity of thought and reality and the validity of speculative idealism as an approach to knowledge of the world; the necessity for positing an Absolute Spirit as the ultimate standard of truth; and the concrete actuality of this absolute. In thirty long footnotes at the end (...) of the poem Beach indicates how the ideas pursued in the poem can be traced through Hegel’s philosophy of absolute idealism. (shrink)

I explain and criticize a theory of beliefs and of belief sentences offered by Graeme Forbes. My main criticism will be directed at Forbes' idea that, as a matter of the semantic rules of belief reporting -- as a matter of the meaning of belief ascriptions -- to get at the subject's way of thinking in an attitude ascription, we must use expressions that are "linguistic counterparts" of the subject's expressions. I think we often do something like that, but that (...) we have other, equally good methods of getting at ways of thinking; so what is wanted is a more inclusive characterization of the rules of belief reporting by which we manage to do it -- a characterization more along the lines of: anything goes. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham was an ardent secularist convinced that society could be sustained without the support of religious institutions or beliefs. This is writ large in the commonly neglected books on religion he wrote and published during the last twenty-five years of his life. However his earliest writings on the subject date from the 1770s, when as a young man he first embarked on his calling as a legal theorist and social reformer. From that time on, religion was never far from (...) the centre of his thoughts. In Secular Utilitarianism, James Crimmins illustrates the nature, extent, and depth of Jeremy Bentham's concern with religion, from his Oxford days of first doubts to the middle years of quiet unbelief, and finally, the zealous atheism and secularism of his later life. Dr Crimmins provides an interpretation of Bentham's thought in which his religious views, hitherto of little interest to Bentham scholars, are shown to be integral: on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, and on the other central to the development of his entirely secular view of society. (shrink)

'This volume provides major texts of the eighteenth-century religious exponents of utilitarianism, three of Bentham's important works on religion, and neglected essays by James Mill and by John Stuart Mill on utilitarianism and religion. No better guide and editor for these texts could be found than James Crimmins, the world's leading scholar on this subject. Since most of these writings are quite scarce, the collection is an indispensable resource for every student of the history of British moral, political, and (...) religious thought.' - J. B. Schneewind This publication represents the most complete collection ever of original writings on religion and utilitarianism. Illustrating both the sympathetic and antagonistic relationships between the principle of utility and religious beliefs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is a work that no scholar of modern political thought should be without. Divided into two parts, religious and secular, the collection reprints the most important and salient contributions to the debate. It includes both the well-known writers and the lesser-known but equally important contributors, making this volume the best one-stop resource for undergraduates, graduates, scholars in the field, and all those interested in the relation of politics to religious belief. All materials are newly typeset. As well as two general introductions the collection features a biographical note on each author and detailed notes on each text. --all texts are reset and fully indexed --11 new introductions --features key writings and extracts long out of print. (shrink)

Utilitarian ideas in nineteenth-centuryAmerica have been given short shrift inmodern historical and philosophicalscholarship. Collecting the relevant publishedwork together in one place is an essentialstarting point for any serious investigation of American utilitarians andtheir critics. James Crimmins and Mark Spencer have made an expertselection from scattered sources of around 60 important articles andessays. These include treatments of Bentham by his friend John Neal,editor of The Yankee, and commentaries on John Stuart Mill gatheredfrom rare American journals. There are also discussions of (...) utilitarianjurisprudence by the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, andpieces by many other writers. This collection, with its substantialeditorial introduction, will be vital reading for historians of ideas,scholars of philosophy and political thought, and any one elseinterested in the fate of utilitarianism in America. (shrink)

The increasing secularization of political thought between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries has often been noted, but rarely described in detail. The contributors to this volume consider the significance of the relationship between religious beliefs, dogma and secular ideas in British political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to J.S. Mill. During this period, Britain experienced the advance of natural science, the spread of education and other social improvements, and reforms in the political realm. These changes forced religion to account for itself (...) and to justify its existence, both as a social institution and as a collection of fundamental articles of belief about the world and its operations. This book, originally published in 1990, conveys the crucial importance of the association between religion, secularization and political thought. (shrink)

The idea of utility as a value, goal or principle in political, moral and economic life has a long and rich history. Now available in paperback, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism captures the complex history and the multi-faceted character of utilitarianism, making it the first work of its kind to bring together all the various aspects of the tradition for comparative study. With more than 200 entries on the authors and texts recognised as having built the tradition of utilitarian thinking, (...) it covers issues and critics that have arisen at every stage. There are entries on Plato, Epicurus, and Confucius and progenitors of the theory like John Gay and David Hume, together with political economists, legal scholars, historians and commentators. Cross-referenced throughout, each entry consists of an explanation of the topic, a bibliography of works and suggestions for further reading. Providing fresh juxtapositions of issues and arguments in utilitarian studies and written by a team of respected scholars, The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism is an authoritative and valuable resource. (shrink)

It is controversial whether the truth conditions of attitude sentences are opaque. It is not, or shouldn't be controversial, however, that conditions of apt or unexceptionable usage are opaque. A framework for expressing such uncontroversial claims of opacity is developed, and within this framework it is argued that opacity resides at a locutionary level — that it is a matter of expressed content (which might not be truth-conditional). The same claim is made for a related pattern in attitude talk which (...) is labeled the moonlighting use of thing-talk. (shrink)

In the twelve recent essays collected here, Shoemaker unfolds a comprehensive account of first-personal access to mental phenomena.