Book reviewed in this article: The Ethics of War. By Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill.

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

Barrie Paskins; V*—Some Victims of Morality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 89–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

Barrie Paskins; V*—Some Victims of Morality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 89–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

There are various equivalent formulations of the Church-Turing thesis. A common one is that every effective computation can be carried out by a Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis is often misunderstood, particularly in recent writing in the philosophy of mind.

Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the dye industry was at the center of claims about the productivity of organic chemistry. Dyestuffs were widely represented as the most complex molecules to find commercial application, and positioned at the center of nationalist projects to establish chemical industry, especially in Britain and the United States. By the later twentieth century, the complex of scientific hopes which surrounded dyestuffs had largely disappeared. In Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s terms, they had changed from “epistemic things” to, at (...) best, “technical objects,” and lost their future-bearing status as the lynchpin of organic chemistry. Although developments in dyeing continue, dyestuffs have vacated the scientifically and culturally dynamic position that they once occupied; any restoration of this status would require a radical change in economic and material conditions. This paper considers the senses in which this change of status should be considered as the death of dyestuffs as a scientific object. (shrink)

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I have chosen this title to set myself the task of commenting on the practice of philosophy in the light of my work as a philosopher in a university postgraduate department of war studies. I shall begin with some general remarks on how we are to understand ‘philosophy’, then discuss a neglected one-sidedness in the commentary which philosophers have attempted on such topics as the problems of the nuclear age.

I have chosen this title to set myself the task of commenting on the practice of philosophy in the light of my work as a philosopher in a university postgraduate department of war studies. I shall begin with some general remarks on how we are to understand ‘philosophy’, then discuss a neglected one-sidedness in the commentary which philosophers have attempted on such topics as the problems of the nuclear age.