Timothy Williamson gives an original and provocative treatment of deep metaphysical questions about existence, contingency, and change, using the latest resources of quantified modal logic. Contrary to the widespread assumption that logic and metaphysics are disjoint, he argues that modal logic provides a structural core for metaphysics.

Vagueness provides the first comprehensive examination of a topic of increasing importance in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Timothy Williamson traces the history of this philosophical problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches such as fuzzy logic. He illustrates the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague language, and defends the controversial realistic view that vagueness is a (...) kind of ignorance--that there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is. (shrink)

When I take off my glasses, the world looks blurred. When I put them back on, it looks sharpedged. I do not think that the world really was blurred; I know that what changed was my relation to the distant physical objects ahead, not those objects themselves. I am more inclined to believe that the world really is and was sharp-edged. Is that belief any more reasonable than the belief that the world really is and was blurred? I see more (...) accurately with my glasses on than off, so visual appearances when they are on have some cognitive priority over visual appearances when they are off. If I must choose which kind of visual appearance to take at face value, I will choose the sharp-edged look. But what should I think when I see a mist, which looks very blurred however well I am seeing? Indeed, why choose to take any of the looks at face value? Why not regard all the choices as illegitimate projections of ways of seeing the world onto the world itself? (shrink)

The second volume in the _Blackwell Brown Lectures in Philosophy_, this volume offers an original and provocative take on the nature and methodology of philosophy. Based on public lectures at Brown University, given by the pre-eminent philosopher, Timothy Williamson Rejects the ideology of the 'linguistic turn', the most distinctive trend of 20th century philosophy Explains the method of philosophy as a development from non-philosophical ways of thinking Suggests new ways of understanding what contemporary and past philosophers are doing.

Understandably absorbed in technical details, discussion of the semantic paradoxes risks losing sight of broad methodological principles. This chapter sketches a general approach to the comparison of rival logics, and applies it to argue that revision of classical propositional logic has much higher costs than its proponents typically recognize.

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

The paper clarifies and defends the orthodox view that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true against recent criticisms. It argues that apparent counterexamples to orthodoxy result from uncritical reliance on a fallible heuristic used in the processing of conditionals. A comparison is developed between such counterpossibles and vacuously true universal generalizations.

This chapter presents an overview of the major interpretations of probability followed by an outline of the objective Bayesian interpretation and a discussion of the key challenges it faces. I discuss the ramifications of interpretations of probability and objective Bayesianism for the philosophy of mathematics in general.

Imagine a philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece. The hot question is: what are things made of? Followers of Thales say that everything is made of water, followers of Anaximenes that everything is made of air, and followers of Heraclitus that everything is made of fire. Nobody is quite clear what these claims mean, and some question whether the founders of the respective schools ever made them. But amongst the groupies there is a buzz about all the recent exciting progress. The (...) mockers and doubters make plenty of noise too. They point out that no resolution of the dispute between the schools is in sight. They diagnose Thales, Anaximenes and Heraclitus as suffering from a tendency to overgeneralize. We can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, or what houses are made of, but to ask what things in general are made of is senseless, some suggest, because the question is posed without any conception of how to verify an answer; language has gone on holiday. Paleo-pragmatists invite everyone to relax, forget their futile pseudo-inquiries and do something useful instead. (shrink)

The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is the so‐called negative program's critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since the negative program has been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordinary judgments about real‐life cases, the critique is in immediate danger of generating into global scepticism, because all human judgments turn out to depend on intuitions. (...) Recently, some proponents of the negative program have tried to demarcate the target of their critique more narrowly. However, their attempts are still far too indiscriminate, and over‐generate scepticism. Nevertheless, once experimental philosophy has refined its own methodology, it may contribute to the refinement of the methodology of mainstream philosophy, by filtering out the effects of cognitive bias, although it offers no prospect of doing without judgments on real or imaginary cases. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary language (...) philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

Two opposing tendencies in the philosophy of language go by the names of ‘referentialism’ and ‘inferentialism’ respectively. In the crudest version of the contrast, the referentialist account of meaning gives centre stage to the referential semantics for a language, which is then used to explain the inference rules for the language, perhaps as those which preserve truth on that semantics (since a referential semantics for a language determines the truth-conditions of its sentences). By contrast, the inferentialist account of meaning gives (...) centre stage to the inference rules for the language, which are then used to explain its referential semantics, perhaps as the semantics on which the rules preserve truth. On pain of circularity, we cannot combine both directions of explanation. (shrink)

Collaboration on the First Edition of Spacetime Physics began in the mid-1960s when Edwin Taylor took a junior faculty sabbatical at Princeton University where John Wheeler was a professor. The resulting text emphasized the unity of spacetime and those quantities (such as proper time, proper distance, mass) that are invariant, the same for all observers, rather than those quantities (such as space and time separations) that are relative, different for different observers. The book has become a standard introduction to (...) relativity. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics embodies what the authors have learned during an additional quarter century of teaching and research. They have updated the text to reflect the immense strides in physics during the same period and modernized and increased the number of exercises, for which the First Edition was famous. Enrichment boxes provide expanded coverage of intriguing topics. An enlarged final chapter on general relativity includes new material on gravity waves, black holes, and cosmology. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics provides a new generation of readers with a deep and simple overview of the principles of relativity. (shrink)

THE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER I THE RENAISSANCE OF LOGIC WITHIN the last two decades the scholarly world has witnessed a revival of interest in logic ...

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

I was not impressed by Dr Geggie's article offering a survey of the attitudes of newly appointed consultants towards research fraud ( Journal of Medical Ethics 2001; 27 :344–6). Indeed, by mixing up categories of misconduct from what is at most “bad behaviour” to the very serious, he is not entirely beyond reproach himself. I remind readers that Dr Geggie suggested that 55.7% of the respondents had observed (from the title) “research fraud”. If the term “research fraud” is to have (...) any meaning, it must be reserved for conduct that consciously and deliberately attempts to impose a fraud on others. The US National Academy of Sciences' report, On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research distinguishes clearly between “misallocation of credit, honest errors, and errors caused through negligence” and “deception, making up data or results, changing or misreporting data or results, and plagiarism”. The former are “ethical transgressions... that generally remain internal to the scientific community... dealt with locally through peer review, administrative action, and the system of appointments and evaluations”. The latter “strike at the heart of the values on which science is based”. The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy reached similar conclusions, restricting research misconduct to “fabrication, falsification and plagarism”. I agree with these assessments. In Dr Geggie's paper, deception would include deliberate falsification of data (category 3 of Dr Geggie's table 1), cheating (4A) and deliberately plagiarising …. (shrink)

When it is seen that those who speak for the new society also establish it wherever they are, then the ranks of oppression and inequity break and straggle; when it is seen that those who speak for the new society are less regardful of the comfort and rights of others than are the best in the old society, then the ranks of oppression and inequity re-aline [sic] and advance anew to battle. He that cries against externally-enforced order carries complete conviction (...) only when he ceases to create disorder by discourtesy, tumult, and greater invasions. I can have little faith in the professed love of liberty of one who denies to me the opportunity to hear what he or she does not care to hear, just as I can have little faith in the professions of the Censor who denies to me the opportunity to read what he does not care to read. “We learn to do by doing.”. (shrink)

Everybody knows that humans are cultural animals. Although this fact is universally acknowledged, many opportunities to exploit it are overlooked. In this article, I propose shifting our attention from local examples of extended mind to the cultural-cognitive ecosystems within which human cognition is embedded. I conclude by offering a set of conjectures about the features of cultural-cognitive ecosystems.

We group the existing variants of the familiar set-theoretical and truth-theoretical paradoxes into two classes: connective paradoxes, which can in principle be ascribed to the presence of a contracting connective of some sort, and structural paradoxes, where at most the faulty use of a structural inference rule can possibly be blamed. We impute the former to an equivocation over the meaning of logical constants, and the latter to an equivocation over the notion of consequence. Both equivocation sources are tightly related, (...) and can be cleared up by adopting a particular substructural logic in place of classical logic. We then argue that our perspective can be justified via an informational semantics of contraction-free substructural logics. (shrink)

Metaphysical modalities are definable from counterfactual conditionals, and the epistemology of the former is a special case of the epistemology of the latter. In particular, the role of conceivability and inconceivability in assessing claims of possibility and impossibility can be explained as a special case of the pervasive role of the imagination in assessing counterfactual conditionals, an account of which is sketched. Thus scepticism about metaphysical modality entails a more far-reaching scepticism about counterfactuals. The account is used to question the (...) significance of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. (shrink)

The history of yoga -- Yoga prior to Patañjali -- The Vdic period -- Yoga in the Upanisads -- Yoga in the Mahabharata -- Yoga and Sankhya -- Patañjali's yoga -- Patañjali and the six schools of Indian philosophy -- The Yoga sutras as a text -- The commentaries on the Yoga sutras -- The subject matter of the Yoga sutras -- The dualism of yoga -- The Sankhya metaphysics of the text -- The goals of yoga -- The eight (...) limbs of yoga -- The present translation and commentary -- Meditative absorption -- Practice -- Mystic powers -- Absolute independence. (shrink)

Being social creatures in a complex world, we do things together. We act jointly. While cooperation, in its broadest sense, can involve merely getting out of each other’s way, or refusing to deceive other people, it is also essential to human nature that it involves more active forms of collaboration and coordination (Tomasello 2009; Sterelny 2012). We collaborate with others in many ordinary activities which, though at times similar to those of other animals, take unique and diverse cultural and psychological (...) forms in human beings. But we also work closely and interactively with each other in more peculiar and flexible practices which are in distinctive ways both species-specific and culturally and historically contingent: from team sports to shared labour, from committee work to mass demonstrations, from dancing to reminiscing together about old times. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend the view that Spinoza is committed to allowing for the existence of a plurality of possible worlds, that his necessitarianism is merely moderate, not strict enough to exclude the possibility of other worlds. To show that evidence for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is lacking, we shall concentrate on Don Garrett's article, “Spinoza's Necessitarianism,” in the conviction that his case for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is the strongest one available.

Kant stated that there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. The faculty of feeling has received the least scholarly attention, despite its importance in Kant's broader thought, and this volume of new essays is the first to present multiple perspectives on a number of important questions about it. Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the (...) other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings, such as respect and sublimity, tell us about the nature of feeling for Kant? And what about other important feelings that have been overlooked or mischaracterized by commentators, such as enthusiasm and hope? This collaborative and authoritative volume will appeal to Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and those working on topics in ethics, aesthetics, and emotions. (shrink)

Bioethics today has become a subject of wide public concern. Almost every one of its tenets is being seriously questioned and likely to be reformulated. Moreover, the pressure on bioethics continues to mount as the number of moral conflicts that buffet our society increases. What, then, will bioethics look like a decade from now? In the variety of approaches that have been employed in the practice of bioethics, one has dominated in the United States in the last decade and a (...) half. That approach is "principlism", the use of moral principles to address theoretical issues and to resolve conflicts at the bedside. Recently, however, bioethicists and others increasingly have realized the limitations of principlism and are calling for the development of alternative approaches such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative ethics, casuistry, and virtue ethics. This book maps the debate over principlism and the future direction of U.S. bioethics. Part One consists of a sociological description of U.S. bioethics at the beginning of the 1990s, along with a defense of principlism by one of its major proponents. Part Two maps cross-cultural critiques of principlism, while Part Three covers five alternatives to it. Three essays in Part Four - by a bioethicist, a physician, and a theologian - reflect on the future of U.S. bioethics, principlism, and its alternatives. The Afterword emphasizes the place of religion and theological discourse in the alternative approaches and in the future of bioethics. (shrink)

It may be nearly impossible to use standard principles to make a decision about a complex ethical case. The best decision, say virtue ethicists in the Aristotelian tradition, is often one that is made by a person of good character who knows the salient facts of the case and can frame the situation appropriately. In this respect ethical decisions and strategic decisions are similar. Rationality plays a role in good ethical decision-making, but virtue ethicists emphasize the importance of intuitions and (...) emotions as well.Virtue ethics suggests a reconciliation of the factual and the normative. Virtues may explain as well as justify actions. The same is true of other psychological states and events. That psychological terms have normative implications does not render them useless in explanation. As Aristotle does not distinguish cleanly between the normative and empirical, so many moral philosophers today reject the is-ought dichotomy. They are prepared to learn from economists, psychologists, and other empirical scientists who offer information about the nature of the good life and of values. Social psychologists who study community or corporate culture suggest a close relationship between organizational and ethical features, much as Aristotle saw a close relationship between politics and ethics. We should infer from all this that in business ethics there is good reason for philosophers and organization scholars to work closely together. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that religion is responsible for dictating and guiding moral behavior. This study investigated that claim and its relationship to monetary incentive, self-esteem, and gender within the context of academic dishonesty. A sample of 65 undergraduate students were assessed using a revision of Allport's Religious Orientation Scale and then monitored for cheating on a computerized version of the Graduate Records Exam under different experimental conditions. Self-esteem and monetary incentive were manipulated, and gender was selected to measure their (...) effect on cheating behavior. Results of this study found that: participants’ religious orientation was not related to their tendency to cheat in any way; participants cheated significantly more when receiving monetary incentive for their performance than when they did not; participants with induced low self-esteem cheated significantly more than those with induced high self-esteem; and men cheated more than women at a level that bordered on significance. Academic performance was not found related to academic cheating. Findings are discussed in the context of existing literature. (shrink)

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units (...) of analysis defined by inherent properties of the elements to units defined in terms of dynamic patterns of correlation across elements, the study of cognitive ecosystems will become an increasingly important part of cognitive science. (shrink)