Hume uses the term 'idea' to refer to both mental acts and mental contents.

In The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (1910), Dewey characterizes Hume as an orthodox empiricist wedded to a static and unchanging view of mental life. The lead essay argues that Darwinism is a cure for the errors of traditional empiricism. This paper demonstrates that Hume is a precursor to Darwin, and thus to Dewey, by reviewing the historical case that Hume directly influenced Darwin’s theory of evolution. Using Dewey’s discussion of the design versus chance problem, the paper throws light on (...) the origins of his misinterpretation of Hume, and suggests that the two thinkers are closer than Dewey’s criticism would allow. (shrink)

Hume's notion of conception is closer to Reid's than Reid realizes and may lie behind Hume's charge in the letter to Hugh Blair (1762) that Reid's philosophy "leads us back to innate ideas".

John Arbuthnot's celebrated but flawed paper in the Philosophical Transactions of 1711-12 is a philosophically and historically plausible target of Hume's probability theory. Arbuthnot argues for providential design rather than chance as a cause of the annual birth ratio, and the paper was championed as a successful extension of the new calculations of the value of wagers in games of chance to wagers about natural and social phenomena. Arbuthnot replaces the earlier anti-Epicurean notion of chance with the equiprobability assumption of (...) Huygens's mathematics of games of chance, and misrepresents the birth ratio data to rule out chance in favour of design. The probability sections of Hume's Treatise taken together correct the equiprobability assumption and its extension to other kinds of phenomena in the estimation of wagers or expectations about particular events. Hume's probability theory demonstrates the flaw in this version of the design argument. (shrink)

Contrariety is essential to Hume's notion of experience. Its role suggests that experience itself, its specificity, and the contrariety of events must be actual, not merely hypothetical.

The examples Hume relies on in _Treatise_ I.iv.2 raise questions about the role of contrariety in experience as it affects belief in the objects of perception.

The atomist Hume inherited by classical American pragmatism is a false Hume. I trace the origins and reception of the atomist Hume in the pragmatic tradition and the correction of this reading in modern Hume scholarship, and then argue (1) that in the Treatise Hume assumes that we first encounter wholes, not parts, in experience, (2) that the distinction of parts is possible only after the experience of wholes, and (3) that their distinction as well as their separation is not (...) real, pace James, but hypothetical. (shrink)

there are two lines of influence of David Hume on the history of classical American pragmatism: the familiar atomist-nominalist-associationist of empirical psychology reviled by Kantian and idealist critics, on the one side, and the conjectural historian and early developmentalist, or evolutionary, philosopher who was important to Darwin, on the other. The classical pragmatists received the first most directly through the work of Thomas Hill Green, in his edition of the Treatise of Human Nature—with its long critical introduction—that appeared in the (...) 1870s. In this essay I argue that the atomist of the traditional reading is a false Hume, with the hope that identification of the error will make way for a better... (shrink)

Belief is a species of mere conception, and is modifiable, rather than bivalent (believing or disbelieving). The attendant-impression theory of transformation of conception into belief expresses the moral dimension of one and the same thing, of which the manner-of-conception (without attendant impression) theory of the transformation refers to the epistemic dimension of that same thing. These two aspects of the transformation of conception into belief point to an ambiguity in Hume's use of the term IDEA: as act and as content. (...) The act of conception, its content, and the pedigree of that content are all mutually indeterminate. The imagination conceives, constructs contents, and transforms conception into belief. The foundation of the role of mere conception in belief is the mind's "native situation of indifference", which makes it possible for Hume to account not only for warranted but also unwarranted belief. Hume is interested not only in what should actuate the soul but what does so in fact. Hume's real innovation lies in a theory of belief unburdened by traditional representation and in the effects rather than the external foundations of certitude. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himself, leading representatives of pragmatism, as well (...) as critical and legal theorists. The essays cover a range of subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory as well as the relation of major figures such as Hegel, Pierce, Mead and Dewey to Habermas and pragmatism. (shrink)

Review of Frederic R. Kellogg, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., _Legal Theory And Judicial Restraint_ (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Review of Ryan Nichols, _Thomas Reid's Theory of Perception_ (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Featuring essays from leading philosophical scholars, __12 Modern Philosophers__ explores the works, origins, and influences of twelve of the most important late 20th Century philosophers working in the analytic tradition. Draws on essays from well-known scholars, including Thomas Baldwin, Catherine Wilson, Adrian Moore and Lori Gruen Locates the authors and their oeuvre within the context of the discipline as a whole Considers how contemporary philosophy both draws from, and contributes to, the broader intellectual and cultural milieu.

Picturing Knowledge is a collection of papers on scientific illustration written by historians and philosophers of science. While the philosophers of science tend to focus on the question whether illustrations are more than helpful aids to symbolic proofs and linguistic explications, the historians are interested in the presuppositions attaching to particular modes of representation—the decision what to depict and how to depict it. David Knight discusses the conventions determined what were appropriate and relevant illustrations for textbooks of chemistry. He calls (...) attention to their increasing depersonalization, as pictures of the alchemical laboratory with its furnace and flasks, and then of elegantly clad, unmussed aristocrats gave way to pictures of molecules. Robert J. O’Hara shows how metaphysical assumptions about the organization of nature, in particular the assumption that there existed a system of visible analogies and correspondences across groups of plants and animals, persisted from Linnaeus’s time even into post-Darwinian biology. Stephanie Moser argues that artists’ depictions of australopithecine hominids in semi-popular illustrated magazines of the 1940s and 1950s first reflected, but then entrenched, a view of their mode of life featuring nuclear families, wooden clubs, and homey caves, subsequently rejected as improbable. Other historians investigate the history and problems of scientific representation itself. Bert Hall provides a brief survey of botanical, anatomical, and mechanical illustration, and considers the competing demands of elegance and informativeness. Martin Kemp considers the very different requirements of anatomical and astronomical depictions. Anatomical illustration lends itself to what he calls a “rhetoric of reality” aimed at convincing the viewer that the illustration is what he would see inside an actual human body, while astronomical illustration is unconcerned with the appearances of the heavens, and is a translation of measurements into a scheme representing what cannot literally be seen. (shrink)

I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains ‘proximate’ but is shared (...) between different language users. Throughout, I emphasize the epistemological role of observation sentences. (shrink)

The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.

W.V. Quine is one of the leading figures of 20th century analytic philosophy, and still among the most influential. But his work can be challenging and complex, and indeed often misunderstood. In this updated introduction to Quine's thought, Gary Kemp examines his seemingly disparate views as a unified whole and offers a valuable guide for anyone approaching Quine for the first time.

Sennett and Fisher: Quine on Paraphrase and Regimentation: Regimentation plays an integral role in Quine's influential approaches to metaphysics, philosophy of science, and semantics. In this paper we explore Quine's views on regimentation and its applications. We also consider how the Quinean view of regimentation interacts with his views on ontological commitment, holism, indeterminacy of translation, and the inscrutability of reference.

Of all the major philosophical works, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most rewarding, yet one of the most difficult. Norman Kemp Smith's Commentary elucidates not only textural questions and minor issues, but also the central problems which arise, he contends, from the conflicting tendencies of Kant's own thinking. Kemp Smith's Commentary continues to be in demand with Kant scholars, and it is being reissued here with a new introduction by Sebastian Gardner to set it (...) in its contemporary context. (shrink)

I make a Quinean case that Quine’s ontological relativity marked a wrong turn in his philosophy, that his fundamental commitments point toward the classical view of ontology that was worked out in most detail in hisWord and Object. This removes the impetus toward structuralism in his later philosophy.

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

This paper argues that we can acknowledge the existence of moral truths and moral progress without being committed to moral realism. Rather than defending this claim through the more familiar route of the attempted analysis of the ontological commitments of moral claims, I show how moral belief change for the better shares certain features with theoretical progress in the natural sciences. Proponents of the better theory are able to convince their peers that it is formally and empirically superior to its (...) rivals, and the better theory may be promoted to the status of the truth. Yet there is no 'decision-procedure' for ethics any more than there is for molecular biology. The betterness of true theories can be grasped through what I term 'undirectional narratives' of progress. And while there are true moral claims and perhaps numerous moral truths yet to be discovered, we should reject currently popular forms of moral realism with bivalence. Some moral claims lend themselves to the construction of fully reversible, bi-directional narratives and are likely neither true nor false. (shrink)

In this chapter, it is described and assessed how political scientists use rational choice theories to offer causal explanations. We observe that the ways in which rational choice theories are considered to be successful in political science differs, depending on the explanandum in question. Political scientists use empirical variants of rational choice theories to explain the political behavior of individual agents and analytical variants to explain the behavior of collective actors. Both variants are used for distinct explananda, which ask for (...) different modes of explanation that raise in turn different explanatory demands toward rational choice theories. We argue that when political scientists discuss the explanatory usefulness of rational choice theories, they should assess them in light of the demands they are supposed to meet. This would enable a more nuanced and problem-oriented appraisal of rational choice theories in political science. (shrink)

I argue that trustworthiness is an epistemic desideratum. It does not reduce to justified or reliable true belief, but figures in the reason why justified or reliable true beliefs are often valuable. Such beliefs can be precarious. If a belief's being justified requires that the evidence be just as we take it to be, then if we are off even by a little, the belief is unwarranted. Similarly for reliability. Although it satisfies the definition of knowledge, such a belief is (...) not trustworthy. We ought not use it as a basis for inference or action and ought not give others to believe it. The trustworthiness of a belief, I urge, depends on its being backed by reasons—considerations that other members of the appropriate epistemic community cannot reasonably reject. Trustworthiness is intersubjective. It both depends on and contributes to the evolving cognitive values of an epistemic community. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Catherine Malabou : “Unbind Me” Judith Butler : What Kind of Shape Is Hegel's Body in? Catherine Malabou : What Is Shaping the Body? Judith Butler : A Chiasm between Us, but No Chasm.

The main theme of volume 6 of Eco-ethica is "Ethics and Justice" which focuses on the idea of "justice" in a metaphysical, social, and personal sense. Justice is considered as a balance between opposite ambitions in interdependent persons, and as equity in legislation, but not as blind justice. Today it is valuable not only on the national, but also on the cosmopolitan level. Before it became personal justice, the idea of justice was considered metaphysical and social, both in European and (...) Chinese culture. However, in modern times, it is often reduced to a moral duty without meta-ethical responsibility. The last section considers the importance of the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) for clarifying the idea of justice. (Series: Eco-Ethica, Vol. 6) [Subject: Philosophy, Ethics]. (shrink)

"Faith Has Its Reasons" shows readers how struggles, heartache, and tears can transform from a nightmare into a ministry. This book contains the encouragement to take the first steps out of grief and climb the mountain out of the valley of the shadow of death. This book will also inspire those that may question heaven. A child's amazing visits to heaven gave him the courage to tell others about Jesus. His bravery and boldness after dying and losing his father will (...) open your eyes to how God can use an unthinkable tragedy for His glory. If you have endured a catastrophic loss and questioned God, this book will show you how to persevere and find happiness again. (shrink)

This collection of essays strikes new ground in our understanding of Kierkegaard's Either/Or and his authorship as a whole.