Errol Lord offers a new account of the nature of rationality: what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons, and dispels doubts about whether we ought to be rational.

Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe. In The Intelligibility of Nature (...) , Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike. (shrink)

> I read the two papers you sent me and found the Budapest one particularly > clear. But I have two reservations concerning your scheme. The first is > that I don?t understand why one needs collapse, and the second is that the > collapsing scheme seems so complicated. Perhaps it is best to illustrate > using an example.

Father Lord, author of Armchair Philosophy, herein offers to a wider audience some notes from a recent talk to the Philosophers in St. Louis. He believes that writing is necessary not only to express, but also really to assimilate philosophy.

Father Lord, author of Armchair Philosophy, herein offers to a wider audience some notes from a recent talk to the Philosophers in St. Louis. He believes that writing is necessary not only to express, but also really to assimilate philosophy.

Table of Contents: Preface vii Introduction: Philosophy and Operationalism 1 1. "What was Worth Knowing" in 1500 10 2. Humanism and Ancient Wisdom: How to Learn Things in the Sixteenth Century 30 3. The Scholar and the Craftsman: Paracelsus, Gilbert, Bacon 49 4. Mathematics Challenges Philosphy: Galileo, Kepler, and the Surveyors 65 5. Mechanism: Descartes Builds a Universe 80 6. Extra-Curricular Activities: New Homes for Natural Knowledge 101 7. Experiment: How to Learn Things about Nature in the Seventeenth Century 131 (...) 8. Cartesians and Newtonians 149 Conclusion: What was Worth Knowing by the Eighteenth Century 168 Notes and References 171 Documentation and Further Reading 181 Dramatis Personae 193 Glossary of Major Terms 197 Index 201. (shrink)

Criticising judges : fair game or off-limits? -- Academics and judges -- Are the judges too powerful? -- Magna Carta and compensation culture -- Does judicial review undermine democracy? -- Liability of public authorities in negligence -- The shifting sands of statutory interpretation -- Time to call it a day : some reflections on finality and the law -- The globalisation of law -- Recent developments in commercial law conference -- The contribution of construction cases to the development of the (...) common law -- What is wrong with human rights? -- Human rights in an age of terrorism -- Religion and the law : some current problems -- The extraterritorial application of the European Convention on Human Rights : now on a firmer footing, but is it a sound one? -- Magna Carta--liberties, customs, and the free flow of trade -- Delay too often defeats justice -- Magna Carta and religion -- Runnymede -- Advocates as protectors of the rule of law -- Litigators--survive and thrive -- The Jackson reforms and civil justice -- Sharpening the public gaze : advances in open justice in England and Wales -- Threats to justice in the twenty-first century -- Halsey 10 years on---the decision revisited -- Arbitration versus litigation -- Arbitration after Brussels I reform -- School speech day -- How my classical education has affected my life -- Valedictory -- Changes in the law in the last 50 years. (shrink)

The mismatch between common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by the historian of science is traced to a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy came to be rearticulated as involving both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are illustrated by the eighteenth‐century views of Buffon. In the nineteenth century, a new enterprise called “science” represents the establishment of an unstable ideology of (...) natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements of the ideology of modern science are accordingly described as “natural philosophy” and “instrumentality” . The history of science in large part concerns the story of their shifting, often mutually denying, interrelations. (shrink)

Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin. I am one of your possible futures.

Check out ONGsucks.com, this is not a Justpeace or Better Times page, it's from a guy who's obviously fed up with the high prices of natural gas. We are too, that's why we put a wood stove in last year. For other energy conservation tips, check out our Better Times Energy Conservation Page.

Many' people in the community including myself are concerned at the continuation of the single member electorate system for election of members to the House of Representatives, and its failure to result in proper representation of the diversity of interests in the community. A multimember electorate system, or single electorate for each State or Territory, with random rotation of names on ballot papers, is long overdue after over a century of debate over existing undemocratic practices. The Australian Constitution allows that (...) "each State shall be one electorate" in the absence of. (shrink)

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enterprise initiated by Descartes, in that makes it into an effort to say the least one can confidentially assert rather than the most that one can usefully propose, as a way of understanding the scientifically accepted data.

The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering what counts as cultural history in that domain and attempts to coordinate it with the sociologically informed studies of the past ten orfifteen (...) years. The label "sociocultural" seems a more useful term by which to capture recent developments. (shrink)

My dissertation is a systematic defense of the claim that what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to the reasons you possess. The dissertation is split into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. In Part I--Coherence, Possession, and Correctly Responding--I argue that my view has important advantages over popular views in metaethics that tie rationality to coherence (ch. 2), defend a novel view of what it is to possess a reason (ch. 3), and defend a novel (...) view about what it is to act and hold attitudes for normative reasons (ch. 4). In Part II--Foundationalism, Deception, and The Importance of Being Rational--I argue that foundationalists about epistemic rationality should think that the foundational beliefs are held for sufficient reasons (ch. 5), argue that my view solves the New Evil Demon problem for externalism (and solves a related and underapprieciated problem) (ch. 6), and argue that my view can vindicate the thought that we ought to be rational (ch. 7). (shrink)

Free speech is a great value and forms the life blood of a civilised society. It is however, one of several values and may sometimes come into conflict with them. In those cases it may need to be restricted. Hate speech is one such case and the author argues that it can and should be prohibited.

Burd se ha propuesto redimir nuestra tradicional inferioridad en los estudios maquiavélicos, y creo que quedará patente que ha dado una explicación mucho más satisfactoria de El príncipe que la que cualquier país poseyera con anterioridad. Su edición comentada proporciona todas las respuestas a un conocido problema de la historia de Italia y de la literatura política. En realidad, el antiguo problema ha dejado de existir, y ningún lector de este volumen continuará preguntándose cómo un hombre tan inteligente y razonable (...) llegó a proponer consejos tan execrables. (shrink)