This paper deals with three topics: types of rights, the development of the terminology of rights, and the question of the primacy of welfare rights. Because these topics are interrelated, my exposition does not observe rigid boundaries among them. There is no pretence at all that any of these subjects is fully covered here; nor is it proposed, except for one writer, to touch upon the contemporary literature on rights, as noteworthy as some of that literature is. In order to (...) gain entrance into the field, on which the writing has grown to massive proportions, I shall begin with an interesting historical phenomenon, some of whose philosophical import I want to explore. I should say at the outset, however, that the general motivation of this paper is the problem of the significance of the language of “rights.” Does it really make a difference, for instance, to speak of the “rights of man” rather than the “common duties of humanity”? Does the term “rights” add anything of special significance or is its only significance rhetorical and ideological? Can we dispense with the language of rights and still say everything we need to say about our moral relations? I confess to a moderate skepticism about the necessity of the language of rights in the last analysis. At any rate, this paper is intended as a contribution, however small, to this problem. The historical phenomenon with which I am going to begin will enable us to bring into focus the issue of the meaning of “rights.”. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

I defend an expanded reading of immanent causation that includes both inherence and causal efficacy; I argue that the latter is required if God is to remain the immanent cause of finite modes.

--Prophet mit Marx- und Engelszungen, von M. Walser.--Philosophie zwischen Traum und Apokalypse, von I. Frenzel.--Messianismus und Marxismus, von J. Moltmann.--Ein marxistischer Schelling, von J. Habermas.--Ein Gespräch über ungelöste Aufgaben der sozialistischen Theorie, von E. Bloch und F. Vilmar.--Ein grosser Einzelgänger, von I. Fetscher.--Ernst Blochs Evolution des Marxismus, von W. Maihofer.--Ausgewählte Bibliographie der Schriften über Ernst Bloch, zusammengestellt von R. Kübler (p. 133-[149]).

The present paper has the purpose of making a critical approach of the so called “independence thesis” (Unabhängigkeitsthese) between Law and Ethics based on the Kantian text about equity in his Doctrine of Law. To this critical approach, a weakening of the “independence thesis” is demonstrated according to some endogenous concepts of the Kant work, which we believe deals with an oblique opening of the Kantian’s law to ethics. To demonstrate this, we follow a methodological analytic way divided in three (...) moments: (i) an analysis of the concept of law in Kant; (ii) an explanatory approach of the “independence thesis”; and (iii) a critical approach of the “independence thesis”. (shrink)

How do we thrive in our behaviors and experiences? Positive neuroscience research illuminates the brain mechanisms that enable human flourishing. Supported by the John Templeton Foundation's Positive Neuroscience Project, which Martin E. P. Seligman established in 2008, Positive Neuroscience provides an intersection between neuroscience and positive psychology.In this edited volume, leading researchers describe the neuroscience of social bonding, altruism, and the capacities for resilience and creativity. Part I describes the mechanisms that enable humans to connect with one another. Part II (...) focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying the human ability and willingness to confer costly benefits on others. Part III examines the mechanisms by which human brains overcome adversity, create, and discover. Specific topics include: a newly discovered nerve type that appears to be specialized for emotional communication; the effects of parenting on the male brain; how human altruism differs from that of other primates; the neural features of extraordinary altruists who have donated kidneys to strangers; and distinctive patterns of brain wiring that endow some people with exceptional musical abilities. Accessible to a broad academic audience, from advanced undergraduates to senior scholars, these subjects have generated a fascinating and highly convergent set of ideas and results, shaping our understanding of human nature. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing claims in Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance is that Timothy Williamson’s celebrated anti-luminosity argument can be resisted when it comes to the condition ~K~KP—the condition that one is in no position to know that one is in no position to know P. In this paper, I critically assess this claim.

I examine the claim, made by some authors, that we sometimes acquire knowledge from falsehood. I focus on two representative cases in which a subject S infers a proposition q from a false proposition p. If S knows that q, I argue, S's false belief that p is not essential to S's cognition. S's knowledge is instead due to S's belief that p′, a proposition in the neighbourhood of p that S believes . S thus knows despite her false belief. (...) The widely accepted and plausible principle that inferential knowledge requires known premises is unscathed. (shrink)

In ‘The normative role of knowledge’ (2012), Declan Smithies defends a ‘JK-rule’ for belief: One has justification to believe that P iff one has justification to believe that one is in a position to know that P. Similar claims have been defended by others (Huemer, 2007, Reynolds, forthcoming). In this paper, I shall argue that the JK-rule is false. The standard and familiar way of arguing against putative rules for belief or assertion is, of course, to describe putative counterexamples. My (...) argument, though, won’t be like this – indeed I doubt that there are any intuitively compelling counterexamples to the JK-rule. Nevertheless, the claim that there are counterexamples to the JK-rule can, I think, be given something approaching a formal proof. My primary aim here is to sketch this proof. I will briefly consider some broader implications for how we ought to think about the epistemic standards governing belief and assertion. (shrink)

I defend a contextualist account of bare epistemic modal claims against recent objections. I argue that in uttering a sentence of the form ‘It might be that p,’ a speaker is performing two speech acts. First, she is (directly) asserting that in view of the knowledge possessed by some relevant group, it might be that p. The content of this first speech act is accounted for by the contextualist view. But the speaker's utterance also generates an indirect speech act that (...) consists in a weak suggestive that p. Since this second speech act is typically the main point of a bare epistemic modal utterance, our (negative or positive) responses to the utterance actually target this second speech act. I show how this two-speech-act account can explain the data recently adduced against contextualism. (shrink)

Contextualism, in its standard form, is the view that the truth conditions of sentences of the form ‘S knows that P’ vary according to the context in which they are uttered. One possible objection to contextualism appeals to what Keith DeRose calls a warranted assertability maneuver (or WAM), according to which it is not our knowledge sentences themselves that have context-sensitive truth conditions, but what is pragmatically conveyed by the use of such sentences. Thus, proponents of WAMs argue, the context (...) sensitivity of knowledge attributions is not a semantic phenomenon but a pragmatic one. I examine a number of WAMs and show that each (i) is seriously flawed, or (ii) undercuts standard contextualism if we hold a minimalist conception of semantic content. I propose an alternative form of contextualism that accommodates minimalism and is immune to the second type of WAM, and show that this new form of contextualism shares the virtues of standard contextualism. (shrink)

“Critical thinking in higher education” is a phrase that means many things to many people. It is a broad church. Does it mean a propensity for finding fault? Does it refer to an analytical method? Does it mean an ethical attitude or a disposition? Does it mean all of the above? Educating to develop critical intellectuals and the Marxist concept of critical consciousness are very different from the logician’s toolkit of finding fallacies in passages of text, or the practice of (...) identifying and distinguishing valid from invalid syllogisms. Critical thinking in higher education can also encompass debates about critical pedagogy, i.e., political critiques of the role and function of education in society, critical feminist approaches to curriculum, issues related to what has become known as critical citizenship, or any other education-related topic that uses the appellation “critical”. Equally, it can, and usually does, refer to the importance and centrality of developing general skills in reasoning—skills that we hope all graduates possess. Yet, despite more than four decades of dedicated scholarly work “critical thinking” remains as elusive as ever. As a concept, it is, as Raymond Williams has noted, a ‘most difficult one’ (Williams, 1976, p. 74). (shrink)

This is the last in a series of three papers on the history of the Lenz–Ising model from 1920 to the early 1970s. In the first paper, I studied the invention of the model in the 1920s, while in the second paper, I documented a quite sudden change in the perception of the model in the early 1960s when it was realized that the Lenz–Ising model is actually relevant for the understanding of phase transitions. In this article, which is self-contained, (...) I study how this realization affected attempts to understand critical phenomena, which can be understood as limiting cases of (first-order) phase transitions, in the epoch from circa 1965 to 1970, where these phenomena were recognized as a research field in its own right. I focus on two questions: What kinds of insight into critical phenomena was the employment of the Lenz–Ising model thought to give? And how could a crude model, which the Lenz–Ising model was thought to be, provide this understanding? I document that the model played several roles: At first, it played a role analogous to experimental data: hypotheses about real systems, in particular relations between critical exponents and what is now called the hypothesis of scaling, which was advanced by Benjamin Widom and others, were confronted with numerical results for the model, in particular the model’s so-called critical exponents. A positive result of a confrontation was seen as positive evidence for this hypothesis. The model was also used to gain insight into specific aspects of critical phenomena, for example that diverse physical systems exhibit similar behavior close to a critical point. Later, a more systematic program of understanding critical phenomena emerged that involved an explicit formulation of what it means to understand critical phenomena, namely, the elucidation of what features of the Hamiltonian of models lead to what kinds of behavior close to critical points. Attempts to accomplish this program culminated with the so-called hypothesis of universality, put forward independently by Robert B. Griffiths and Leo P. Kadanoff in 1970. They divided critical phenomena into classes with similar critical behavior. I also study the crucial role of the Lenz–Ising model in the development and justification of these ideas. (shrink)

Neste Ano Internacional da Biodiversidade, reflito sobre as responsabilidades crescentes das entidades religiosas no contexto atual da Crise Ambiental. Faço uma retrospectiva sobre a origem evolutiva das religiões no contexto da evolução cultural do homem. Em seguida, menciono algumas dimensões ecológicas do pensamento religioso, significativas para os problemas ambientais. Paradigmas religiosos se originam de forma semelhante aos das ciências. As doutrinas sociais das igrejas, especialmente a igreja católica, estabelecem compromissos com os excluídos e promovem o desenvolvimento integral da pessoa humana, (...) buscando justiça social e econômica. Isto tem implicações para o equilíbrio ecológico e para o futuro da humanidade. Sugiro que as igrejas atuem mais intensamente, de forma integrada com a ciência, na intermediação política em prol da solução dos problemas ambientais. A moral religiosa ajudaria a reverter os ganhos econômicos advindos da utilização sustentável da biodiversidade genética para as culturas locais. Também antevejo um papel maior na conscientização das comunidades sobre os benefícios de uma vida equilibrada com a natureza e de uma exploração racional dos recursos naturais. A preservação da biodiversidade constitui uma questão moral de cuja conscientização e regulamentação legal urgentíssima dependemos para a sobrevivência dos ecossistemas naturais e da própria espécie humana. Palavras-chave: Evolução Cultural; Religião; Crise da Biodiversidade; Política Ambiental; Papel da Igreja.In this International Year for the Conservation of Biodiversity, I reflect on the increasing responsibilities of religious entities towards solving the present Environmental Crisis. I provide a retrospect on the debate over the origin of religions in the context of the cultural evolution of man. I then mention some ecological dimensions of religious thinking, which are particularly significant for approaching environmental problems. Religious paradigms originate in ways that are similar to those in science. The social doctrines of churches establish compromises for excluded groups and promote the unabridged development of the human individual, which includes social and economic justice. This has implications for the ecological balance of nature and for the future of humanity. I suggest that the Church should act more intensely, integrated with science, in the political intermediation that searches for solutions for our environmental problems. Religious morality could help to restore the economical benefits resulting from the sustainable use of genetic biodiversity to local cultures. I also foresee a larger role of the church in promoting human perceptions regarding the benefits involved in obtaining a more sustainable relationship with nature and in promoting a more rational exploitation of natural resources. The conservation of biodiversity represents a moral matter demanding urgent legislation for the survival of natural ecosystems and, ultimately, of the human species. Key words : Cultural Evolution; Religion; Biodiversity Crisis; Environmental Crisis; Role of Church. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans describes the acquisition of beliefs about one’s beliefs in the following way: ‘I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p.’ In this paper I argue that Evans’s remark can be used to explain first person authority if it is supplemented with the following consideration: Holding on to the content of a belief and (...) ‘prefixing’ it with ‘I believe that’ is as easy as it is to hold on to the contents of one’s thoughts when making an inference. We do not, usually, have the problem, in going, for example, from ‘p’ and ‘q’ to ‘p and q’, that one of our thought contents gets corrupted. Self-ascription of belief by way of Evans’s procedure is based on the same capacity to retain and re-deploy thought contents and therefore should enjoy a similar degree of authority. However, is Evans’s description exhaustive of all authoritative self-ascription of belief? Christopher Peacocke has suggested that in addition to Evans’s procedure there are two more relevant ways of self-ascribing belief. I argue that both methods can be subsumed under Evans’s procedure. (shrink)

David Sosa argues that the knowledge account of assertion is unsatisfactory, because it cannot explain the oddness of what he calls dubious assertions. One such dubious assertion is of the form ‘P but I do not know whether I know that p.’ Matthew Benton has attempted to show how proponents of the knowledge account can explain what’s wrong this assertion. I show that Benton’s explanation is inadequate, and propose my own explanation of the oddness of this dubious assertion. I also (...) explain what’s wrong with other dubious assertions mentioned by Sosa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Warner PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY: THE CASE OF FOUR QUARTETS I FOR plato the quarrel between philosophy and poetry was already an ancient one. Since his day strenuous efforts have been made to eliminate it by circumscribing each widiin carefully specified boundaries, on die principle that strong fences make good neighbors, and allowing die one to venture onto the territory of the other only as licensed. Thus until recently assessments (...) of the literary quality of a philosopher's writing have commonly been treated as extraneous to its value as philosophy, and philosophical probing of die thought of a poem as irrelevant to a literary critic's final assessment ofit. For some works, however, such compromises seem forced; Four Quartets is a case in point. Here we have a sustained effort to explore issues of a philosophical and theological nature in poetic terms — in a manner that challenges our understanding and lays claim to our assent. The poetry does not merely encapsulate a theoretical position, but enacts a process ofthought perceived as bearing on diese topics at least as significandy as do those processes commonly termed "philosophical," and diereby raises by implication more general issues concerning die status of those "philosophical" modes themselves. F. R. Leavis is well known both for his engagement with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and for his insistence on a clear separation between literary criticism and philosophy; dius his raising of philosophical questions as an integral and decisive element in his final and most extensive analysis ofthe Quartets is particularly striking: That Four Quartets offers us thought, searching, basic and rigorous, we have our assurance in the first ten lines of"Burnt Norton".... As thought, it aspires to a general validity.... 222 Martin Warner223 The questions, how must reality be conceived, and what is the nature of the human situation, have been raised in a way diat compels one to determine and verify one's own ultimate beliefs.1 Of course, Leavis is clear that the manner in which die poem raises these questions is not that traditionally associated with philosophy: "The 'music' of Four Quartets challenges a criterion that is not logic, but something equivalent in the field of total meaning. We can only tell what it is by intelligent self-exposure to the poetry" (p. 159). Similarly his mode of"determining " and "verifying" his own beliefs in response is that proper to literary criticism. But the questions are plainly philosophical ones, and one does not need the authority of Leavis to see that the poem raises them. From a philosophical point ofview, the interesting questions are the status of the manner in which it does so and the nature of the "criterion that is not logic" which is said to have an internal relation to that "intelligent selfexposure to the poetry" which Leavis in his critical practice seeks to exemplify. Unfortunately, this late commentary on Eliot's poetry is among the weakest in the Leavis corpus, precisely lacking "intelligent self-exposure to the poetry";2 but this should not lead us to dismiss its more general claims. In earlier and far stronger criticism Leavis had already argued that "Burnt Norton" does "by strictly poetical means the business ofan epistemological and metaphysical inquiry" ("Eliot's Later Poetry," p. 65). Further, die most distinguished recent criticism of Eliot's poetry is probably that of A. D. Moody,3 and he too finds himself driven to place his own "ultimate beliefs" in relation to it. On the one hand, "There is likely to be at least some degree of essential conformity between the way we live now and die way in which the poem would order life; and to that extent the poem can be said to express, and to give a form to, the sensibUity ofits age" (p. 264). But on the other, "It is a neurotic vision, one arising from some disorder or disease of the personality — or of his culture.... It is not easy to attain a detached view of die neurosis which is like a dominant gene in our culture. It is a matter... of the alienation ofman from mat to which he properly, of his nature, belongs — his being cut off from... (shrink)

An unrecognised copy (1665) in Kant’s private library of Michael Piccart’s Isagoge (1605), an introduction to the system of Aristotelian philosophy together with Kant’s own remarks on this author (Refl 4160, AA 17, p. 439) can be established as an original source for the Kantian ‘ideosphere’. First, I point out contexts and consequences of Piccart’s Altdorfian Aristotelianism, in contrast to the Königsbergian Aristotelianism (emphasised by Tonelli’s research). To further check the quality of Piccart as a source of Kant’s, a conceptual (...) case-study is elaborated with Kant’s critical distinction between analytics as a “logic of truth” (KrV, B 85) and dialectics as a “logic of illusion” (KrV, B 86). Hereby, dialectics is understood as part of an Aristotelian division of logic in analytics, dialectics and sophistics (Königsberg/Rabe versus Altdorf/Piccart). As will be shown by the paradigmatic case of the famous Königsbergian proponent of Aristotelianism, Paul Rabe, Kant cannot have received the suggestion for his own critical distinction from Rabe’s Cursus Philosophicus. Instead, Piccart refers to a passage of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which suggests the very distinction between an analytic philosopher who searches for scientific truth and dialecticians and sophists. For different reasons, they do not claim any scientific seriousness. (shrink)

Patricia Smith Churchland's Neurophilosophy argues that a mind is the same thing as the complex patterns of neural activity in a human brain and, furthermore, that we will be able to find out interesting things about the mind by studying the brain. I basically agree with this stance and my comments are divided into four sections. First, comparisons between human and non?human primate brains are discussed in the context, roughly, of where one should locate higher functions. Second, I examine Churchland's (...) views on reduction and levels of organization, which I find mostly congenial. Third, a key point of disagreement about the relationship and importance of language to specifically human cognition is taken up. I like Churchland's critique of certain sentential paradigms, but I try to show using an analogy with cellular coding systems why we need to get a better theory of ?sentences?. Finally, I discuss how the models introduced in the last chapter might be extended to make better contact with neurobiology and language. (shrink)

A is for Alice and astronomers arguing about acceleration -- B is for Bernard's body-exchange machine -- C is for the Catholic cannibal -- D is for Maxwell's demon -- E is for evolution (and an embarrassing problem with it) -- F is for the forms lost forever to the prisoners of the cave -- G is for Galileo's gravitational balls -- H is for Hume's shades -- I is for the identity of indiscernibles -- J is for Henri Poincaré (...) and alternative geometries -- K is for the Kritik and Kant's kind of thought experiments -- L is for Lucretius' spear -- M is for Mach's motionless chain -- N is for Newton's bucket -- O is for Olbers' paradox -- P is for Parfit's person -- Q is for the questions raised by thought experiments quotidiennes -- R is for the rule-ruled room -- S is for Salvatius' ship, sailing along its own space-time line -- T is for the time-travelling twins -- U is for the universe, and Einstein's attempts to understand it -- V is for the vexed case of the violinist -- W is for Wittgenstein's beetle -- X is for xenophanes and thinking by examples -- Y is for counterfactuals and a backwards approach to history -- Z is for Zeno and the mysteries of infinity. (shrink)

Pragmatic arguments seek to demonstrate that you can be placed in a situation in which you will face a sure and foreseeable loss if you do not behave in accordance with some principle P. In this article I show that for every P entailed by the principle of maximizing expected utility you will not be better off from a pragmatic point of view if you accept P than if you don’t, because even if you obey the axioms of expected utility (...) theory it is possible to place you in a situation in which you will face a certain and foreseeable loss. This shows that for a large class of Ps, there is no pragmatic difference between people who accept P and those who don’t. (shrink)

Can one teach democracy? This question came repeatedly to my mind as I read Jan-Werner Müller's stimulating contribution to the recent literature on the past history, current travails, and future p...

1. If A is strongly amorphous , then its power set P is dually Dedekind infinite, i. e., every function from P onto P is injective. 2. The class of “inexhaustible” sets is not closed under supersets unless AC holds.

Alex Byrne and Jordi Fernández propose two different versions of a transparency theory of self-knowledge. According to Byrne, we self-attribute beliefs by an inference from what we take to be facts about the world (following a rule he calls BEL). According to Fernández, we self-attribute the belief that p on the basis of a prior mental state, a state which constitutes our grounds for the belief that p (thereby realizing a procedure he calls Bypass). In this paper, I present the (...) two theories in outline and discuss various objections concerning their normative (Can the procedure give us knowledge?) and metaphysical aspects (Is the procedure functional?). I conclude that especially the metaphysical objections against Bypass are somewhat more difficult to counter than those against BEL and that the modifications required of Fernández’s theory make it very similar to Byrne’s. -/- Alex Byrne y Jordi Fernández proponen dos diferentes versiones de la teoría de la transparencia del autoconocimiento. Según Byrne, para autoatribuir creencias inferimos qué es lo que creemos a partir lo que tomamos como hechos sobre el mundo (siguiendo una regla que Byrne llama BEL). Según Fernández, autoatribuimos la creencia de que p con base en un estado anterior a esta creencia, un estado que fundamenta la creencia de que p (realizando un procedimiento que él llama Bypass). En este artículo expongo las dos teorías y discuto objeciones que conciernen su aspecto normativo (¿puede el procedimiento darnos conocimiento?) y metafísico (¿es funcional el procedimiento?). Concluyo que en especial las objeciones metafísicas son más graves en el caso de Bypass que en el de BEL y que las modificaciones requeridas de la teoría de Fernández la asemejan mucho a la de Byrne. (shrink)

Self-knowledge presents a challenge for naturalistic theories of mind. Peter Carruthers’s (2011) approach to this challenge is Rylean: He argues that we know our own propositional attitudes because we (unconsciously) interpret ourselves, just as we have to interpret others in order to know theirs’. An alternative approach, opposed by Carruthers, is to argue that we do have a special access to our own beliefs, but that this is a natural consequence of our reasoning capacity. This is the approach of transparency (...) theories of self-knowledge, neatly encapsulated in Byrne’s epistemic rule (BEL): If p, believe that you believe that p (Byrne 2005). In this paper, I examine an objection to Carruthers’s theory in order to see whether it opens up space for a transparency theory of self-knowledge: Is it not the case that in order to interpret someone I have to have some direct access to what I believe (cf. Friedman and Petrashek 2009)? (shrink)

What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker (1988), a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker (1988 and 2009) and Byrne (...) (2005), claims that we can reason our way from belief about the world to self-knowledge about such belief. While Shoemaker’s “zany argument” fails to show how such reasoning can issue in self-knowledge, Byrne’s account, which centres on the epistemic rule “If p, believe that you believe that p”, is more successful. Two interesting objections are that the epistemic rule embodies a mad inference (Boyle 2011) and that it makes us form first-order beliefs, rather than revealing them (Gertler 2011). I sketch responses to both objections. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision.1 More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form 'By sentence S (or word w), agent A means that m' and 'Agent A believes that p.' My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds (...) of indeterminacy that have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this .. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision. More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form ‘By sentence S, agent A means that m’ and ‘Agent A believes that p.’ My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy that (...) have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this paper does not address.I will first explain the phenomena of semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision, and then explore their relationships with the indeterminacy thesis. (shrink)

These days there are many different understandings and definitions of the term aesthetics. Sometimes it is regarded as identical to the pleasing or the sensual, other times it has a more workaday meaning, being associated with e.g. a well-stocked lunch table. The common denominator, however, is that aesthetics is understood as something that can be recorded in the real world, having been assigned an independent existence. The concept has thus undergone ‘ontological dumping’, by which we understand that an analytical concept (...) has become a “thing in the world”, i.e. an epistemological state has been transformed into an ontological state. The problem with this is that what can potentially be used to understand has instead turned into something to be understood. In the endeavour not to downgrade the epistemological dimension in favour of the experiential dimension, we attempt in this article to re-establish aesthetics as an analytical concept: Something to be seen with – instead of something that is seen. In addition, we put it into perspective alongside culture and art, which we feel has undergone the same ontological dumping. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications this may have for educational practice. As its theoretical springboard, the article takes the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, drawing its exemplary material from the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. (shrink)

Las primera de las conmemoraciones en torno al pensamiento del teólogo y filósofo español Francisco Suárez, que después serán repetidas de forma regular, se produjo en el ámbito académico occidental entorno a la celebración del tercer centenario de su muerte. La universidad de Munich rindió tributo con la publicación del volumen colectivo titulado P. Franz Suarez, S. I. De entre aquellas páginas hemos querido recuperar y adaptar a la lengua castellana el estudio del prestigioso medievalista Martin Grabmann. La referencia a (...) éste entre los especialistas en el pensamiento suareciano es un lugar común a la hora de precisar el carácter sintético y ecléctico de la obra metafísica de Suárez, así como para ilustrar la tesis de la penetración de sus ideas en el ámbito protestante. Es nuestra pretensión que la traducción que aquí presentamos auxilie tanto al historiador, a modo de recordatorio de un valor que generalmente no encuentra asiento en nuestros escritos ni en nuestras aulas, como al especialista, en la justa ponderación de sus rasgos y en especial, de su influencia. (shrink)

This article analyses and discusses research-ethical dilemmas, ambivalences and problematic issues. This is done firstly by making a distinction between procedural research ethics and particularistic research ethics. Such a distinction refl ects a theoretical construction and generalization – in practice there can be a very close correlation between the two types. Hereafter, the distinction will therefore be used as a jumping-off point for the presentation of a pragmatic-dualist research ethics. Th e approach is dualist because it draws on the presence (...) of two independent, contrasting understandings, which are essentially diff erent yet equal aspects of good research ethics; and it is pragmatic because this dualism is first and foremost structural and institutional by nature, and designed with an eye to what can realistically and expediently be done in practice. Thus the intention of the article is to both analyze and discuss two different understandings of research ethics and simultaneouslyqualify a research ethics that draws on both these understandings. At the same time, the intention is to try to visualize a diff erent understanding of research ethics which others can address and elaborate on or qualify but even at this point can be included in an arsenal or catalogue of research-ethical understandings and approaches that can be exploited in research-ethical practice. (shrink)


Someone who believes “I believe it will rain” can easily be mistaken about the rain. But it does not seem likely, and might even be impossible, that he is wrong about the fact that he believes that it is going to rain. How can we account for this authority about our own beliefs – the phenomenon known as first person authority? In this paper I examine a type of theory proposed, in distinct forms, by Crispin Wright and Jane Heal for (...) an explanation of our authority. Both authors claim that our second-order beliefs (of the form “I believe that p”) are constitutive of the first-order beliefs that are self-ascribed in them (beliefs of the form “p”) and both try to derive the necessity of first person authority from this constitutive relation. My paper analyses and criticizes the two proposals and suggests a non-constitutive, alternative account of first person authority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hobbes: A Biography by A. P. MartinichMartin HarveyA. P. Martinich. Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xxxii + 384. Cloth, $34.95.In his most recent biography of Hobbes, A. P. Martinich informs the reader that he is “here to praise Hobbes, not to bury his theory”—a task which the author accomplishes with a great deal of literary dexterity (233). The work is chronological in structure with (...) each of the eleven chapters devoted to a specific period in Hobbes’s intellectual and personal development. The reader receives an in depth and well wrought treatment of Hobbes’s earliest years in Malmesbury, including a thorough discussion of his dissolute father and his tutelage in the classics under Robert Latimer. Martinich also goes into detail concerning Hobbes’s student life at Oxford, his lifelong relationship with the Cavendishes, Hobbes’s participation in the Great Tew Circle as well as his decade long exile in France and ultimate return to England. Hobbes’s later years, particularly his fruitless disputes with the Royal Society, are also admirably chronicled.Interwoven with the above is a detailed overview of most of Hobbes’s major and minor works, from his translation of Thucydides in 1629 to Behemoth, published in 1679. Martinich pays close attention to Hobbes’s foundational works in philosophy, particularly The Elements of Law, Leviathan, and De Corpore. The author provides a clear and concise introduction to all facets of Hobbes’s philosophical system and spends time explaining what Hobbes took his project to be; namely the construction of a tripartite Elementa Philosophiae devoted, respectively, to metaphysics/physics, psychology and ethics/politics (118–9). The critical exegesis of Anti-White is exceptional, providing as it does an excellent conceptual backdrop to Hobbes’s mature and considered philosophy of science as found in De Corpore. As such, Hobbes’s philosophical corpus is presented, rightly I believe, as a continuum, by no means seamless perhaps, but nonetheless exhibiting at base a considerable amount of theoretical integrity.As is well known, Hobbes was quite the cantankerous character engaging in numerous professional and, ultimately, personal rows with the great minds of his time. Hobbes’s acrimonious wranglings with René Descartes, Thomas White, Bishop Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Robert Boyle, Seth Ward, and John Wallis all receive their due. The comically churlish debate between Hobbes and Descartes is especially well presented. [End Page 680]Stylistically, Martinich adopts a somewhat pithy approach (e.g., William Cavendish is described as follows: “It was not that Cavendish was unprincipled; rather, his principle was opportunism.” [20]) which, for the most part, is quite successful in keeping the reader’s attention, even when complex philosophical ideas are being conveyed. The work, much to Martinich’s credit, is also punctuated with numerous amusing tidbits such as his listing of the oral exam questions which Hobbes and his fellow students adequately had to answer in order to receive their B.A., e.g., “Whether a new inundation of water [over the whole earth] would be a greater catastrophe than all of it freezing” (13). Hobbes would be happy to know that things haven’t changed all that much.Substantively, a few points are in order. First, as one might expect, Martinich spends a great deal of time discussing Hobbes’s theological views and he is at great pains to paint Hobbes as a committed Calvinist (137–43; see Martinich’s The Two Gods of Leviathan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]) for a fuller discussion of this issue. In all fairness, the author readily admits that his reading is a minority interpretation, but this being the case perhaps more time should have been devoted to discussing the received view, i.e., that Hobbes, if he is not an atheist, is at most a deist and not a theist. Second, Martinich portrays Hobbes’s sovereign as wholly absolute, unfettered not only by the civil, but the natural law as well. While quite correct in maintaining that the sovereign, since he or she (or they), is not subject to civil law, it does not follow that Hobbes necessarily believes that “whatever the sovereign says is law” (50). Indeed, in Chapter XXVI of Leviathan Hobbes... (shrink)

My thesis tests a novel definition of consciousness by applying it to theories of self-consciousness. This definition attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of consciousness from those of knowledge, belief, awareness, and perception by describing it as the noticing of objects and the registering of facts in thought. My investigation of self-consciousness is phenomenological in that it leaves aside questions as to whether selves exist or what their nature is and just examines what the contents of self-consciousness are. The main question, (...) throughout the thesis, is whether there are any contents that necessarily enter self-consciousness understood as consciousness associated with meaningful use of the first personal pronoun. My answer to this question is that there are not. This answer is reached after the discussion of a range of prominent theories that have emanated from Kant. All these theories have in common that they can be phenomenologically clarified with the help of my description of consciousness. Kant’s own views of “empirical self-consciousness” are phenomenologically relatively modest; but what he says about “transcendental self-consciousness”, incorporating a priori consciousness of one’s identity, cannot be phenomenologically supported. Similar restrictions apply to Fichte’s theory, which develops the notion of transcendental self-consciousness, explicating it as consciousness of “this very consciousness”. Strawsonian theories of self-consciousness (P.F. Strawson, G. Evans, Q. Cassam) claim that self-consciousness requires some awareness of oneself as a spatiotemporally located physical object. I argue that such a claim cannot be phenomenologically substantiated. The Strawsonian theories rely on a questionable “discrimination requirement”; but even if it is assumed that they are justified in claiming that, as self-conscious beings, we have to know, believe, perceive or be aware that we are physical objects, it still does not follow that we have to be conscious, in my sense, of ourselves as such objects. There is no particular type of object that is necessarily noticed and no particular type of fact that is necessarily registered in thought by a person who can meaningfully use the first personal pronoun. In the last part of the thesis, some of the results of the earlier chapters are applied to the problem of how to explain first person authority and an explanation which is compatible with those results is suggested. (shrink)

What is the relation between reasoning and self-knowledge? According to Shoemaker, a certain kind of reasoning requires self-knowledge: we cannot rationally revise our beliefs without knowing that we have them, in part because we cannot see that there is a problem with an inconsistent set of propositions unless we are aware of believing them. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. A second account, versions of which can be found in Shoemaker and Byrne, claims that we can (...) reason our way from belief about the world to self-knowledge about such belief. While Shoemaker’s “zany argument” fails to show how such reasoning can issue in self-knowledge, Byrne’s account, which centres on the epistemic rule “If p, believe that you believe that p”, is more successful. Two interesting objections are that the epistemic rule embodies a mad inference and that it makes us form first-order beliefs, rather than revealing them. I sketch responses to both objections. ¿Qué relación existe entre el razonamiento y el autoconocimiento? Según Shoemaker, cierto tipo de razonamiento depende de un autoconocimiento: no podemos revisar nuestras creencias racionalmente sin saber que las tenemos, en parte porque no podemos ver que la inconsistencia de un conjunto de proposiciones constituye un problema a menos que estemos conscientes de creerlas. En el presente artículo argumento que esta propuesta es errónea. Una segunda posición, versiones de la cual se pueden encontrar en Shoemaker y Byrne proclama que es posible razonar desde creencias sobre el mundo hacia un autoconocimiento sobre tales creencias. Mientras el zany argument de Shoemaker no logra mostrar cómo tal razonamiento puede resultar en un autoconocimiento, la teoría de Byrne, que se centra en la regla epistémica “Si p, cree que crees que p” tiene más éxito. Dos objeciones interesantes son que la regla epistémica incorpora una inferencia insana y que nos hace formar creencias de primer orden, en lugar de revelarlas. Esbozo respuestas a ambas objeciones. (shrink)

1 Grasping Properties I will present an argument for property dualism. The argument employs a distinction between having a concept of a property and grasping a property via a concept. If you grasp a property P via a concept C, then C is a concept of P. But the reverse does not hold: you may have a concept of a property without grasping that property via any concept. If you grasp a property, then your cognitive relation to that property is (...) more intimate then if you just have some concept or other of that property. To grasp a property is to understand what having that property essentially consists in. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a number of public intellectual debates in current Thai Theravada Buddhism that are related to several fundamental questions regarding the meaning and function of the Pali canon. The focal point of this investigation will be debates in which the Thai scholar monk Phra Payutto (b. 1939) has been playing a significant role. In these debates, the Pali canon is regarded as a central text endowed with special normative and formative authority. I will look at contestations (...) that concern Theravada-ness and, at the same time, and inextricably linked with this, at concepts of demarcation to systems of religious beliefs and practices that are believed to be ‘outside’ Theravada. This, of course, engages the question of inclusivism, exclusivism and pluralism within Theravada. In so doing, I explore and posit concepts on the meanings and functions of the Pali canon that position it either as the or an authoritative reference. (shrink)

According to the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, human life is filled with so much suffering that procreation is morally impermissible. In the first part of this paper I present Zapffe’s pessimism-based argument for anti-natalism, and contrast it with the arguments for anti-natalism proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer and David Benatar. In the second part I explore what Zapffe’s pessimism can teach us about biomedical enhancement. I make the case that pessimism counts in favor of pursuing biomedical enhancements. The reason is (...) that the worse we take the baseline human condition to be, the stronger are our reasons to try to alter humanity, and the weaker are our reasons to fear technology-driven extinction. The prospect of enhancement, I further argue, gives pessimists a reason to reject anti-natalism. (shrink)

I discuss van inwagen's "first formal argument" for the incompatibility of causal determinism and freedom to do otherwise. I distinguish different interpretations of the important notion, "s can render p false." I argue that on none of these interpretations is the argument clearly sound. I point to gaps in the argument, Although I do not claim that it is unsound.

In this essay I focus upon John Martin Fischer’s notion of taking on responsibility. In his view moral actors must acquire a proper self-understanding to take on moral responsibility. I question whether Fischer steps out of his role as a subjectivist, when he maintains that having only guidance control is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. I suggest that subjectivists are committed to the notion that taking on responsibility includes the acquisition of a proper phenomenology of freedom. I compare actors (...) who have not acquired a sense of regulative control to actors whom Fischer identifies as nonresponsible actors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY lish a line of succession from Schleiermacher to Stenzel and further on to some of the most recent Platonic scholars in Germany. In this connection the peculiar character of Platon der Erzieher is a side issue. Gaiser seems only moderately interested in paideia and even tries to free Stenzel from the suspicion that he should have considered paideia as the essence of Platonism. Some sentences (...) in Stenzel's book which might suggest such an opinion are said to be "consciously one-sided formulations" (p. viii, note 7). Gaiser's true interest is Plato's ontology. Nothing explains his stand better than his endorsement of H. J. Kr~imer's representative work Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles. Kr~imer, whose major objective is a reconstruction of what he thinks was Plato's esoteric philosophy, has emphatically declared that he arrived at his results by pursuing the method and the factual interests of Stenzel. Gaiser's attempt to locate Stenzel's position must be understood in the light of this and perhaps similar declarations.1 This is not the place to discuss those of Stenzel's theories which are at best touched upon in Platon der Erzieher or even the theories of those who proclaim to be his heirs. There is, however, one point on which I insist. Gaiser tries to link Stenzel with Heidegger and points to the interest which Stenzel took in Heidegger in his later years. Platon der Erzieher appeared in the same year as Sein und Zeit. I believe that the two works belong to entirely different worlds. Whereas Heidegger powerfully broke up new dimensions of thought, the philosopher Stenzel, for better or worse, represents a period which had reached its end when he died in 1934. ERNST MORITZ MANASSE North Carolina College at Durham Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy. Introduction, Text, Translation and Indices by L. G. Westerink. (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1962. Pp. lii + 69.) L. G. Westerink, whose interest in the Alexandrian commentators on Plato has already borne ample and distinguished fruit in his editions of the Alcibiades commentaries of Olympiodorus and Proclus and of Damascius' lectures on the Philebus, has now further enriched our knowledge of Platonic studies in the sixth century A.D.by publishing a new critical text of a little-known set of introductory lectures to Plato, which originated in the Alexandrian school. The importance of the present work is indicated by the facts that the last critical text of these prolegomena, which forms part of a tenth-century manuscript in the Vienna National Library (Vindob. 1Cf. also Gaiser's new book Platons Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart, 1963), which appeared after this review was written. BOOK REVIEWS 247 phil. gr. 314), was published over a century ago by K. F. Hermann in his Appendix Platonica, and that the most recent commentary is that of L. Skowronski in a dissertation published in 1884. In other words, nothing substantial had appeared on the Prolegomena after the publication of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, and Westerink's great merit consists in bringing to bear upon the present work the insights gained from a study of these Aristotelian commentaries. For the same professors taught both Plato and Aristotle at Alexandria, and not only did their teaching of one color their views on the other, but they frequently borrowed ideas, quotations, stories, and even phrases from one another. The chief aim of the Introduction (pp. ix-l) is to investigate the authorship of the Prolegomena, which the almost unanimous agreement of scholars since 1675 (the one exception is Beutler in RE s.v. "Olympiodorus") had attributed to Olympiodorus. W. begins by establishing the Alexandrian background of these lectures and by discussing, one by one, the characteristic beliefs of the various members of the school and the way in which these are reflected in introductory lectures to Aristotle. This is followed by a painstaking analysis of the sources of the Prolegomena and finally the conclusion that the present text belongs "in the immediate surroundings of Olympiodorus and Elias" (p. xlix). Discrepancies between the biography of Plato here and in Olympiodorus' commentary on the A lcibiades militate, according to W., against Olympiodorus' authorship, although... (shrink)