Online research in philosophy

But Hardin hasn’t contented himself with reframing traditional philosoph- ical issues about color in a way that is sensitive to relevant empirical con- straints. In addition, he has been a staunch defender of color eliminativism — the view that there are no colors, qua properties of tables, chairs, and other mind-external objects, and a vociferous critic of several varieties of re- alism about color that have been defended by others (e.g., [Hardin, 2003], [Hardin, 2005]). These other views include the so-called (...) color physical- ism of [Hilbert, 1987], [Byrne and Hilbert, 1997a], [Byrne and Hilbert, 2003], and [Tye, 2000],¹ and, inconveniently, even the relationalist view defended in [Cohen, 2003a], [Cohen, 2004a], [Cohen, 2003b], [McLaughlin, 2003], and [Jakab and McLaughlin, 2003]. (shrink)

Religious beliefs, including those about an afterlife and omniscient spiritual beings, vary across cultures. We theorize that such variations may be predictably linked to ecological variations, just as differences in mating strategies covary with resource distribution. Perhaps beliefs in a soul or afterlife are more common when resources are unpredictable, and life is brutal and short.

Mental states differ from most other entities in the world in having semantic or intentional properties: they have meanings, they are about other things, they have satisfaction- or truth-conditions, they have representational content. Mental states are not the only entities that have intentional properties - so do linguistic expressions, some paintings, and so on; but many follow Grice, 1957 ] in supposing that we could understand the intentional properties of these other entities as derived from the intentional properties of mental (...) states (viz., the mental states of their producers). Of course, accepting this supposition leaves us with a puzzle about how the non-derivative bearers of intentional properties (mental states) could have these properties. In particular, intentional properties seem to some to be especially difficult to reconcile with a robust commitment to ontological naturalism - the view that the natural properties, events, and individuals are the only properties, events, and individuals that exist. Fodor puts this intuition nicely in this oft-quoted passage:

I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the
ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of _spin_, _charm_, and _charge_ will perhaps
appear upon their list. But _aboutness_ surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep.... If aboutness is
real, it must be really something else ([ Fodor, 1987 ], 97).

Some philosophers have reacted to this clash by giving up one of the two views generating the tension. For example, Churchland, 1981 ] opts for intentional irrealism in order to save ontological naturalism, while. (shrink)

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of language. Philosophy of language concerns quite a large number of topics, including meaning, truth, content, reference, the syntax and semantics of various linguistic constructions, the nature and role of presupposition in communicative interchange, speech acts, figurative uses of language, questions about the ontology of languages, the epistemology of language understanding and language learning, the mental/psychologial basis of linguistic understanding and use, and so on. Since we can't possibly study all of these (...) topics, we'll focus our energy on topics that are most central in recent philosophical work on language, and that have far-reaching consequences for other topics in philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that if God were to exist, then the actual world would be the best possible world. However, given that the actual world is clearly not the best possible world, then God doesn’t exist. In response, some have argued that the world could always be improved with the creation of new people and that there is thus no best possible world. I argue that this reasoning gives rise to an instance of Parfit’s mere addition paradox and should (...) thus be rejected. Others (Robert Adams, in particular) have argued that the actual world may, in fact, be the best possible world, at least for all actual people. I argue that this reasoning gives rise to Parfit’s non-identity problem and should thus be rejected. (shrink)

Two normative principles of toleration are offered, one individual-regarding, the other group-regarding. The first is John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; the other is “Principle T,” meant to be the harm principle writ large. It is argued that the state should tolerate autonomous sacrifices of autonomy, including instances where an individual rationally chooses to be enslaved, lobotomized, or killed. Consistent with that, it is argued that the state should tolerate internal restrictions within minority groups even where these prevent autonomy promotion of (...) members of the group. Finally, it is argued that toleration excludes external protections of minority groups. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a novel argument for scepticism about moral responsibility. Unlike traditional arguments, this argument doesn’t depend on contingent empirical claims about the truth or falsity of causal determinism. Rather, it is argued that the conceptual conditions of responsibility are jointly incompatible. In short, when an agent is responsible for an action, it must be true both that the action was non-accidental, and that it was open to the agent not to perform that action. However, as I (...) argue, an action is only non-accidental in those cases where it isn’t open to the agent not to perform it. (shrink)

Using Alasdair MacIntyre as a foil, I defend what I take to be a viable Nietzschean genealogical account, showing that a proper perspectivism is neither perniciously subjectivist nor absolutist. I begin by arguing against MacIntyre’s assertion that genealogists are committed to the view that rationality requires neutrality and that as there is no neutrality, there is no rationality. I then continue by offering something of a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s view, designed partly to clarify the error pinpointed in MacIntyre’s arguments, but (...) primarily to amplify the Nietzschean solution. This reconstruction involves claiming that Nietzsche is committed to three different senses of “truth:” the “Truth” (with a capital “T”) of correspondence theories, “truth” which is really pragmatic knowledge that helps us survive, and, finally, “truth” that is nothing more that “metaphors and metonyms” which are falsely taken to be useful to survival. (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)

Philosophy of mind today is a sprawling behemoth whose tentacles reach into virtually every area of philosophy, as well as many subjects outside of philosophy. Of course, none of us would have it any other way. Nonetheless, this state of affairs poses obvious organizational challenges for anthology editors. Brian McLaughlin and I have attempted to meet these challenges in the present volume by focusing on ten controversial and fundamental topics in philosophy of mind. ‘Controversial’ is clear enough: we have chosen (...) topics about which there is not a settled consensus among philosophers. By ‘fundamental’, we don’t mean that the issues are easy or that the approaches taken toward them are introductory. Rather, we mean that (i) the resolution of these topics has implications for other issues inside and outside philosophy of mind, and (ii) past rounds of debate have revealed these topics as underlying broader disagreements. We asked leading philosophers of mind to defend one side or another on these topics. The result is what you now have in your hands. (shrink)

The Egalitarian Conscience pays tribute to the highly influential work of Professor G. A. Cohen. Professor Cohen is a philosopher of international stature and tremendous achievement, who has been vital to the flourishing of egalitarian political philosophy. He has a significant body of work spanning issues of Marxism and distributive justice, consistently characterized by original ideas and ingenious arguments. The high standard of rigour he sets for progressive thinkers, particularly himself, has been a source of inspiration for colleagues (...) and students alike. -/- The volume honours Professor Cohen with first-rate essays on a number of significant and fascinating topics, reflecting the wide-ranging themes of Professor Cohen's work, but united in their concern for questions of social justice, pluralism, equality, and moral duty. The contributors are scholars of international stature: Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, Susan Hurley, Will Kymlicka, Derek Parfit, John Roemer, T. M. Scanlon, Samuel Scheffler, Hillel Steiner, and Jeremy Waldron. There is an afterword by G. A. Cohen. (shrink)

Ritual atonement for Cohen aims exclusively at ethical repentance. Sins, or ethical failures, are regarded as unwitting misdeeds, corrigible once recognized. As individuals continue to vacillate, their need for repentance remains life-long. Rosenzweig, however, considers redemption from sin impossible without recourse to miracles. Individual failures are failures in wish, Rosenzweig implies, rather than failures in deed, as Cohen maintains; hence atonement requires above all the ongoing regulating of wishes through liturgical prayer. "Repentance" (t'shuvah), which for Cohen is (...) the "return" to ethical integrity, is for Rosenzweig the "return" to the daily, weekly, and yearly prayers of the Jewish liturgy. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: List of illustrations * Notes On Contributors * Introduction: B.Biebuyck, G.Buelens, O.de Graef, D.Hoens, S.Jttkandt * Who or What Decides: For Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of Decision--J.Hillis Miller * Catastrophic Narratives and Why the Catastrophe to Catastrophe Might Have Already Happened--E.Vogt * Breath of Relief: Sloterdijk and the Politics of the Intimate--S.van Tuinen * Man is a swarm animal--J.Clemens * Notes on the Bird War: Biopolitics of the Visible (in the Era of Climate Change)--T.Cohen * (...) Dialectical Catastrophe: Hegels Allegory of Physiognomy and the Ethics of Survival--P.Moll * Catastrophe, Citationality and the Limits of Responsibility in Disgrace--G.Buelens * Unpredictable Inevitability and the Boundaries of Psychic Life; D.Nobus * Who is Nietzsche?--A.Badiou * Is Pleasure a Rotten Idea?--A.Schuster * Nationalist Ext(im)asy: Maurice Barrs and the Roots of Fascist Enjoyment--G.Chaitin * Topography of the Border: Derrida Rewriting Transcendental Aesthetics--J.Hodge * Index List of illustrations * Notes On Contributors * Introduction: B.Biebuyck, G.Buelens, O.de Graef, D.Hoens, S.Jttkandt * Who or What Decides: For Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of Decision--J.Hillis Miller * Catastrophic Narratives and Why the Catastrophe to Catastrophe Might Have Already Happened--E.Vogt * Breath of Relief: Sloterdijk and the Politics of the Intimate--S.van Tuinen * Man is a swarm animal--J.Clemens * Notes on the Bird War: Biopolitics of the Visible (in the Era of Climate Change)--T.Cohen * Dialectical Catastrophe: Hegels Allegory of Physiognomy and the Ethics of Survival--P.Moll * Catastrophe, Citationality and the Limits of Responsibility in Disgrace--G.Buelens * Unpredictable Inevitability and the Boundaries of Psychic Life; D.Nobus * Who is Nietzsche?--A.Badiou * Is Pleasure a Rotten Idea?--A.Schuster * Nationalist Ext(im)asy: Maurice Barrs and the Roots of Fascist Enjoyment--G.Chaitin * Topography of the Border: Derrida Rewriting Transcendental Aesthetics--J.Hodge * Index. (shrink)

The contextualist epistemological theories proposed by David Lewis and othersoffer a view of knowledge which awards a central role to the contexts ofknowledge attributions. Such contexts are held to determine how strong anepistemic position must be in order to count as knowledge. Lewis has suggestedthat contextualism so construed can be used both to ward off the skeptic and tosolve the Gettier problem. A person knows P, he says, just in case her evidenceeliminates every possibility that not-P, where the domain of (...) `every' is determinedby the context. Lewis provides a list of rules that can tell us, for a given context,which not-P possibilities must be eliminated and which can properly be ignored.But his account entails, counterintuitively, that knowledge can truly be attributedeven to a person in a Gettier situation provided only that the attributor is ignorantof the fact that the person is gettiered. It has been criticized on those grounds byS. Cohen. In this paper I shall argue that most other forms of contextualism sufferthe same fate as Lewis's. The allies of contextualism haven't yet shown us whethercontextualism can succeed in maintaining a notion of ordinary knowledge whileresisting the absurdity that knowledge can be a matter of sheer good luck. At theend of the paper I shall suggest a possible solution to the problem by showing howCohen's line of criticism leads to a modified conception of what sort of justificationa belief must have to count as knowledge in ordinary contexts. (shrink)

If knowing requires believing on the basis of evidence that entails what’s believed, we have hardly any knowledge at all. Hence the near-universal acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology: if it's true that "we are all fallibilists now" (Siegel 1997: 164), that's because denying that one can know on the basis of non-entailing evidence1is, it seems, not an option if we're to preserve the very strong appearance that we do know many things (Cohen 1988: 91). Hence the significance of concessive (...) knowledge attributions (CKAs) (Rysiew 2001)—i.e., sentences of the form 'S knows that p, but it's possible that q' (where q entails not-p). To many, utterances of such sentences sound very odd indeed. According to David Lewis (1996: 550), however, such sentences are merely "overt, explicit" statements of fallibilism; if so, their seeming incoherence suggests that, contrary to our everyday epistemic pretensions, "knowledge must be by definition infallible" after all (ibid.: 549). -/- Recently Jason Stanley (2005) has defended fallibilism against the Lewisian worry that overtly fallibilistic speech is incoherent. According yo Stanley, CKAs are not just odd-sounding: in most cases, they are simply false. But this doesn't impugn fallibilism. Insofar as the odd-sounding utterances Lewis cites state the fallibilist idea, the latter portion thereof ('S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-p', e.g.) expresses the idea that the subject's evidence doesn't entail what's (allegedly) known (hence, the negation of any contrary propositions). According to Stanley, however, this is not the best reading of the possibility clauses CKAs contain. On the correct account of the latter, while the sentences Lewis cites are almost always self-contradictory, they don't capture the fallibilist idea after all. Here, we argue that the sentences in question do express precisely the fallibilist idea, but argue that Lewis has nonetheless failed to raise a problem for the latter. In addition, we respond to worries that the resulting view of the semantics of epistemic possibility statements has certain unacceptable consequences. (shrink)

As Joshua Cohen observes, “[t]he notion of a deliberative democracy is rooted in the intuitive idea of a democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among citizens” (1989: 21). Deliberative democrats insist that this deliberation must be public in a radical sense: only reasons that can be embraced by all of us are truly public, and hence justificatory. As Gerald Postema has put it, a public reason must (...) be a shared reason (1995b: 70). Postema, and most deliberative democrats, insist that this idea of public, shared reasoning, is not simply a theoretical commitment, but a regulative aim of practical politics: “[a]greement among members of the community is set as the openended task or project of ...[the] exercise of practical reason and judgment”(Postema, 1995a: 356). Thus “[t]he aim of the regulative idea is agreement of conviction on the basis of public reasons uttered as assessed in public discourse...” (Postema, 1995a: 356). Of course advocates of deliberative democracy are well aware that complete actual consensus is not a reasonable aim “even under ideal conditions” (Postema, 1995a: 356). The deliberations of citizens may not yield a consensus, and so we may have to cut the discussion off by taking a vote (Postema, 1995a: 356). Habermas’ view is more complex. His “two-track” conception of deliberative politics conceives of an interplay between democratic procedures and deliberative collective will formation: the procedures do not.. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold some verion of the doctrine of "basic knowledge". According to this doctrine, it's possible for S to know that p, even if S doesn't know the source of her knowledge that p to be reliable or trustworthy. Stewart Cohen has recently argued that this doctrine confronts the problem of easy knowledge. I defend basic knowledge against this criticism, by providing a contextualist solution to the problem of easy knowledge.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction Seyla Benhabib; Part I. Freedom, Equality, and Responsibility: 2. Arendt on the foundations of equality Jeremy Waldron; 3. Arendt's Augustine Roy T. Tsao; 4. The rule of the people: Arendt, archê, and democracy Patchen Markell; 5. Genealogies of catastrophe: Arendt on the logic and legacy of imperialism Karuna Mantena; 6. On race and culture: Hannah Arendt and her contemporaries Richard H. King; Part II. Sovereignty, the Nation-State and the Rule of Law: 7. Banishing the (...) sovereign? Internal and external sovereignty in Arendt Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen; 8. The decline of order: Hannah Arendt and the paradoxes of the nation-state Christian Volk; 9. The Eichmann trial and the legacy of jurisdiction Leora Bilsky; 10. International law and human plurality in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin Seyla Benhabib; Part III. Politics in Dark Times: 11. In search of a miracle: Hannah Arendt and the atomic bomb Jonathan Schell; 12. Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: optimism in dark times Benjamin R. Barber; 13. Keeping the republic: reading Arendt's On Revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall Dick Howard; Part IV. Judging Evil: 14. Are Arendt's reflections on evil still relevant? Richard Bernstein; 15. Banality reconsidered Susan Neiman; 16. The elusiveness of Arendtian judgment Bryan Garsten; 17. Existential values in Arendt's treatment of evil and morality George Kateb. (shrink)

Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy In Focus contains the excellent and popular Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross translation of Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy . It also contains a portion of the Replies to Objections II, in which Descartes discusses how the method employed in the Meditations, which he calls "analysis," differs from the method of "synthesis" employed by the geometer. In his introduction, Stanley Tweyman provides a fresh and detailed discussion of the relationship between Descartes' Rules (...) for the Direction of the Mind and the method of "analysis," and their applications to the Meditations . The six critical papers drawn together in this book present a broad and exegetical commentary on the Meditations and give an indication of the diversity of scholarly opinion which exists on the topic of method in Descartes' philosophy. An extensive bibliography is also included. Contributors: D. M. Clarke, E. Curley, D. Garber, L. Cohen, J. Hintikka, Georges Moyal, and Stanley Tweyman. (shrink)

Metaphor is a crucially context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. This fact was not clearly recognized until some time in the 1970’s. Until then, most theorists assumed that a sentence must have a fixed set of metaphorical meanings, if it had any at all. Often, they also assumed that metaphoricity was the product of grammatical deviance, in the form of a category mistake. To compensate for this deviance, they thought, at least one of the sentence’s constituent terms underwent a meaning-changing ‘metaphorical twist’, which (...) deleted the objectionable selection restriction or semantic marker (e.g., Levin 1977) or turned one of the term’s fixed set of connotations into its denotation (e.g., Beardsley 1962). This situation changed as theorists began to pay more serious attention to how metaphors actually function. First, it was pointed out that not all sentences used metaphorically are logically or even pragmatically absurd (Cohen 1975). Second, it became increasingly obvious that in the context of different sentences, and in the context of the same sentence as uttered by different speakers on different occasions, the same word could be used metaphorically to express many, very different meanings. Semantic theories became increasingly bloated as theorists attempted to encompass all this variety within the lexicon. Eventually, semantic theories of metaphor were largely abandoned. Instead, theorists generally maintained either that metaphors are a type of speaker meaning, on which a speaker says one thing in order to mean something else (e.g., Grice 1975, Searle 1979), or else that metaphors don’t have any distinctive ‘meaning’ at all, but simply cause certain distinctive effects in their hearers (e.g., Davidson 1984, Rorty 1987). Philosophers of language have devoted much energy in the last 30 years to investigating the various ways in which context can affect communicated.. (shrink)

Professor Cohen, 'Jerry' to very many, has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. He has been both a worthy successor to Isaiah Berlin in the chair and also his own man. Born into a Jewish family in Montral, Cohen was educated at McGill University and then in Oxford under Berlin and Gilbert Ryle. He taught philosophy vigorously at University College London and became known as the first proponent of analytical Marxism. His resolute (...) book illustrative of that way of thinking is Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence . Cohen has not been imprisoned by it, as his subsequent writings make clear -- Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality and If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? The article below, which appeared in Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Political Philosophy , Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures (Cambridge University Press), has also been reprinted in Stephen Law (ed.), Israel, Palestine and Terror (Continuum). (shrink)

S. Adams, W. Ambrose, A. Andretta, H. Becker, R. Camerlo, C. Champetier, J.P.R. Christensen, D.E. Cohen, A. Connes. C. Dellacherie, R. Dougherty, R.H. Farrell, F. Feldman, A. Furman, D. Gaboriau, S. Gao, V. Ya. Golodets, P. Hahn, P. de la Harpe, G. Hjorth, S. Jackson, S. Kahane, A.S. Kechris, A. Louveau,, R. Lyons, P.-A. Meyer, C.C. Moore, M.G. Nadkarni, C. Nebbia, A.L.T. Patterson, U. Krengel, A.J. Kuntz, J.-P. Serre, S.D. Sinel'shchikov, T. Slaman, Solecki, R. Spatzier, J. Steel, D. Sullivan, (...) S. Thomas, A. Valette, V.S. Varadarajan, B. Velickovic, B. Weiss, J.D.M. Wright, R.J. Zimmer. (shrink)

The field of textbooks in philosophy of mind is a crowded one. I shall consider six recent texts for their pedagogical usefulness. All have been published within the last five years, though two are new editions of previously published books. The first three are authored monographs: by K. T. Maslin, Barbara Montero, and André Kukla and Joel Walmsley. I then review three anthologies, each with two editors: William Lycan and Jesse Prinz, Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro, and Brian McLaughlin and (...) Jonathan Cohen. These six texts constitute a diverse bunch. Within each of the two groups (monographs and anthologies), each individual text differs significantly from the other two in its approach, scope, and thus suitability for various levels of teaching. (shrink)

An ordering ( $\leq_K$ ) on maximal almost disjoint (MAD) families closely related to destructibility of MAD families by forcing is introduced and studied. It is shown that the order has antichains of size c and decreasing chains of length $\mathfrak{c}^+$ bellow every element. Assuming $\mathfrak{t} = \mathfrak{c}$ a MAD family equivalent to all of its restrictions is constructed. It is also shown here that the Continuum Hypothesis implies that for every $\omega^\omega-bounding$ forcing P of size c there is a (...) Cohen-destructible, $\mathbb{P}-indestructible$ MAD family. Finally, two other orderings on MAD families are suggested and an old construction of $Mr\acute{o}wka$ is revisited. (shrink)

We continue the investigation of the Laver ideal ℓ 0 and Miller ideal m 0 started in [GJSp] and [GRShSp]; these are the ideals on the Baire space associated with Laver forcing and Miller forcing. We solve several open problems from these papers. The main result is the construction of models for $t , where add denotes the additivity coefficient of an ideal. For this we construct amoeba forcings for these forcings which do not add Cohen reals. We show (...) that c = ω 2 implies $\operatorname{add}(m^0) \leq \mathfrak{h}$ . We show that b = c, d = c implies $\operatorname{cov}(\ell^0) \leq \mathfrak{h}^+, \operatorname{cov}(m^0) \leq \mathfrak{h}^+$ respectively. Here $\operatorname{cov}$ denotes the covering coefficient. We also show that in the Cohen model $\operatorname{cov}(m^0) holds. Finally we prove that Cohen forcing does not add a superperfect tree of Cohen reals. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others. "Some [essays], like Joseph Brodsky's tribute, are touchingly personal. Others, like G. A. Cohen's 'Isaiah's Marx, and Mine,' mingle personal reminiscences with a more theoretical look at Berlin's ideas. . . . The volume is a fitting tribute to a thinker famed for his erudition, eclecticism, and clarity (...) of style."--Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor "One of the many merits of this rich and rewarding collection is the sense-very imperfectly conveyed here-it transmits of the tone of Berlin's writings and conversation, of the multiplicity of his interests and the variety of his achievements. . . . The essays testify to the character of Berlin's mind as a luminous prism, in which the cultural traditions of Russia, England and Judaism are marvelously refracted."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement "[T]he collection testifies to the learning and profundity of Berlin's thought and, by way both of reminiscence and influence, to the charm and gaity of its expression."--Anthony Quinton, The Times of London. (shrink)

Farrell, B. A. The criteria for a psycho-analytic interpretation.--Gardiner, P. Error, faith, and self-deception.--Cohen, G. A. Beliefs and roles.--Deutsch, J. A. The structural basis of behaviour.--Hampshire, S. Feeling and expression.--Putnam, H. The mental life of some machines.--Davidson, D. Psychology as philosophy.--Nagel, T. Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness.--Williams, B. The self and the future.--Parfit, D. Personal identity.

Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews. The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. (...) Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality, features discussions of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and the Sokal hoax, and closes with a substantial new essay on the mind-body problem. Written with characteristic rigor, these pieces reveal the intellectual passion underlying the incisive analysis for which Nagel is known. (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Chʻan (Zen) Buddhism in China: its history and method, by H. Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames.--Horace M. Kallen: A bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China, by Hu Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames, Jr.--Horace M. Kallen: a bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

This paper develops a normative evaluation of the minimum wage in the light of recent evidence and theory about its effects. It argues that the minimum wage should be evaluated using a consequentialist criterion that gives priority to the jobs and incomes of the worst off. This criterion would be accepted by many different types of consequentialism, especially given the two major views about what the minimum wage does. One is that the minimum wage harms the jobs and incomes of (...) the worst off and the other is that it does neither much harm nor much good. The paper then argues at length that there are no important considerations besides jobs and incomes relevant to the assessment of the minimum wage. It criticizes exploitation arguments for the minimum wage. It is not clear that the minimum wage would reduce exploitation and the paper doubts that, if it did, it would do so in a morally significant way. The paper then criticizes freedom arguments against the minimum wage by rejecting appeals to self-ownership and freedom of contract and by arguing that no freedom of significance is lost by the minimum wage that is not already taken account of in the main consequentialist criterion. The conclusion is that, at worst, the minimum wage is a mistake and, at best, something to be half-hearted about. Footnotes1 My thanks to Paul Brown and Jerry Cohen for their written and verbal help, Andrew Williams for long discussions of this paper, two anonymous referees and the editors, and audiences at the Universities of Auckland, Newcastle, and Reading. (shrink)

During the summer of 1999 and in April 2002 Iwent to the Netherlands in order to meet someof the leading authorities on the euthanasiapolicy. They were asked multiple questions.This study reports the main findings to thequestion: should doctors suggest euthanasia totheir patients? Some interviewees did notobserve any significant ethical concernsinvolved in suggesting euthanasia. For variousreasons they thought physicians should offereuthanasia as an option. Two intervieweesasserted that doctors don''t propose euthanasiato their patients. Five interviewees objectedto physician''s initiative.