It is often said that Greek civilization underwent a transition from myth to reason. But what does this assertion mean? Is it true? Were the Greeks special in having evolved our sort of reason, or is that a mirage? In this book, some of the world's leading experts on ancient Greek myth, religion, philosophy, and history reconsider these fundamental issues.

To generalize about Aischylos is difficult; to generalize about Euripides is almost impossible; but to generalize about Sophokles is both possible and potentially rewarding. With Sophokles—or, rather, with the Sophokles of the seven fully extant tragedies—we can sense a mood, a use of language, and a style of play-making which are largely shared by all seven works. Of these characteristics it is surely the mood which contains the quintessence of Sophoklean tragedy. My aim in the first section of this paper (...) will be to open the way to an appreciation of that mood by following up one of the most important motifs in Sophokles: blindness. In the second section the scope of the enquiry will be widened: I shall show that, in using the blindness motif, Sophokles was drawing on a theme which was fundamental to a large number of mythical narratives told by Greeks from the time of Homer to that of Pausanias, and beyond. In the final section we shall return to Sophokles, placing him this time not against the background of the whole Greek mythical tradition but rather within the specific context of the fifth century B.C., and attempting to overhear the individual dramatic ‘voice’ used by him as he explored the implications of blindness. (shrink)

It is hardly controversial to assert that recent work on Greek mythology is methodologically diverse. However, there is one body of writing which seems to have become a reference point against which scholars of many persuasions–not excluding orthodox positivist philologists and adherents of psychoanalysis–feel the need to define their own position. I mean structuralism. G.S. Kirk and, later, W. Burkert have conducted their dialogues with it; C. Segal and more unreconstructedly R. Caldwell have tried to accommodate Lévi-Strauss and Freud under (...) the same blanket; a glance at bibliographical citations in studies of tragedy over the last twenty years will show how J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet have moved from the periphery to the centre. The polemical attitudes being struck by M. Detienne and C. Calame are directly generated by over-confident structuralist attempts to map out the mental territory they claimed as their own. (shrink)

Developments in both Convention jurisprudence and the English courts since the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998 have significantly extended the reach of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and thus the powers of the judges who administer that broadly-defined provision. Those developments include confirmation that article 8 operates horizontally between private citizens as well as in public law; extension of article 8 to issues of personal autonomy as well as to more narrowly understood issues of (...) privacy; increased emphasis on (judicially determined) proportionality and fair balance; and softening of the criteria for the engagement of article 8 in the first place. The English courts at the highest level have recognized that these developments require them to make decisions on issues of social or even moral priority, extending as far as critical scrutiny of criminal practice and sentencing. Recent cases in the House of Lords such as Countryside Alliance and R v G demonstrate a significant level of disagreement as to how those powers should be exercised, with the result that the outcome of future article 8 cases may depend on the judges’ personality and view of social priorities. (shrink)

Dans la seconde moitié du xxe siècle, l’étude de la mythologie grecque a connu, sous l’influence du structuralisme lévi-straussien, un profond renouvellement théorique et méthodologique, qui n’est cependant pas allé sans désillusions ni remises en question. La plus violente d’entre elles fut sans doute portée par l’ouvrage de Marcel Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie, publié en 1981. L’auteur y dénonçait les errances du structuralisme alors dominant, en insistant sur l’impossibilité de su...

Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.

This is the first volume compiling English translations of Leibniz's journal articles on natural philosophy, presenting a selection of 26 articles, only three of which have appeared before in English translation. It also includes in full Leibniz's public controversies with De Catelan, Papin, and Hartsoeker. The articles include work in optics, on the fracture strength of materials, and on motion in a resisting medium, and Leibniz's pioneering applications of his calculus to these issues by construing them as mini-max and inverse (...) tangent problems. Other topics covered by the articles include: criticisms of the Cartesian estimate of motive force and Leibniz's proposal of a different way of estimating force to replace it; a proposed theory of celestial motions and gravitation, and derivation of the inverse square law; challenge problems concerning the isochronous curve and the catenary; a sample of work on gaming theory; and Leibniz's critique of atomism. (shrink)

Is the point of belief and assertion invariably to think or say something true? Is the truth of a belief or assertion absolute, or is it only relative to human interests? Most philosophers think it incoherent to profess to believe something but not think it true, or to say that some of the things we believe are only relatively true. Common sense disagrees. It sees many opinions, such as those about matters of taste, as neither true nor false; it takes (...) it as obvious that some of the truth is relative. Mark Richard's accessible book argues that when it comes to truth, common sense is right, philosophical orthodoxy wrong. The first half of the book examines connections between the performative aspects of talk, our emotions and evaluations, and the conditions under which talk and thought qualifies as true or false. It argues that the performative and expressive sometimes trump the semantic, making truth and falsity the wrong dimension of evaluation for belief or assertion. Among the topics taken up are: racial slurs and other epithets; relations between logic and truth; the status of moral and ethical talk; vagueness and the liar paradox. The book's second half defends the idea that much of everyday thought and talk is only relatively true or false. Truth is inevitably relative, given that we cannot work out in advance how our concepts will apply to the world. Richard explains what it is for truth to be relative, rebuts standard objections to relativism, and argues that relativism is consistent with the idea that one view can be objectively better than another. The book concludes with an account of matters of taste and of how it is possible for divergent views of such matters to be equally valid, even if not true or false. When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true. (shrink)

For courses in Epistemology. Introduction to contemporary epistemology. Content is organized around "The Standard View"--the view that we do know most of the things reflective common sense tells us we know. Skepticism is discussed as only one of several objections to the view.

This book argues that a plausible account of emergence requires replacing the traditional assumption that what primarily exists are particular entities with generic processes. Traversing contemporary physics and issues of identity over time, it then proceeds to develop a metaphysical taxonomy of emergent entities and of the character of human life.

Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss (...) rather than debate. In _Together_ he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature. (shrink)

This text presents a clear and philosophically sound method for identifying, interpreting, and evaluating arguments as they appear in non-technical sources. It focuses on a more functional, real-world goal of argument analysis as a tool for figuring out what is reasonable to believe rather than as an instrument of persuasion. Methods are illustrated by applying them to arguments about different topics as they appear in a variety of contexts - e.g., newspaper editorials and columns, short essays, informal reports of scientific (...) results, etc. (shrink)

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share (...) our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true. (shrink)

Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than any other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals that could potentially explain why self-domestication occurred (...) in H. sapiens, whether by selecting in favor of cooperation and tolerance or by selecting against aggressiveness. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens rather than to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of self-domestication. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to coordinate in executing physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process. (shrink)

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we (...) interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across different generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. Thus, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology distributes our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. (shrink)

Touch is standardly taken to be a proximal sense, principally constituted by capacities to detect proximal pressure and thermal stimulation, and contrasted with the distal senses of vision and audition. It has, however, recently been argued that the scope of touch extends beyond proximal perception; touch can connect us to distal objects. Hence touch generally should be thought of as a connection sense. In this paper, I argue that whereas pressure perception is a connection sense, thermal perception is not. Thermal (...) perception is a proximal sense distinct from touch. One significant consequence of this is that it motivates an alternative explanation of how we detect the thermal properties of the things we touch and what they are. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an accentuation in claims that early Heideggerian works are infected with totalitarian ideas that came to full realisation in the early 1930s. In challenging this claim, I suggest that the trajectory from Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein in Being and Time to Heidegger’s later lamentable political involvements is both complicated and tenuous. After first defending this stance with reference to the account of Schuld in Being and Time, I draw substantively on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in arguing (...) that Heidegger’s later political thought amounts to a perversion of his earlier admittedly under-developed accounts of Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein. Further, with Nancy, I suggest there is much to be learned here more generally—both by Heidegger’s great insights and great failures—concerning the dialectic of self and community. (shrink)

This book takes a critical view on corporate practice, governmental action and the general approach to Corporate Social Responsibility. It draws on experience from the Workplace Innovation movement and argues that, as with motherhood and apple pie, it is hard to oppose CSR, with a community of well-meaning people. It is however necessary to challenge the foundations on which it is based. Many accounts of CSR assume a consistent model of capitalism around the world. It is suggested that capitalism can (...) be given a human face, as companies adopt programmes which go beyond the minimum legal requirements. This builds on traditions of optional corporate philanthropy. However, without changing the underlying working of the company, only cosmetic changes are made. In the author's words: "lipstick is applied to the capitalist pig". It can be a mistake to read too much into "Responsible Management", when the culture of management is designed around irresponsibility. Companies have developed elaborate schemes of outsourcing, in an environment of limited liability. This cannot easily be overcome through gestures. This book seeks to engage readers and to provoke thoughts. It can be angry and polemical, but it points a finger directly at ongoing superficial developments. (shrink)

This book is part jazz historiography, part autoethnography and part memoir. It sets forth a grounded theory of 'authenticating' as a basic socio-political process, with reference to Richard Ekins' participation in the social worlds of New Orleans jazz, and his life as a social constructionist social scientist and cultural theorist.

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods. Seaford (...) argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal. (shrink)

Human biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory systems, (...) and the two main functions such artifacts have, which are to aid individual users in completing memory tasks and as a cultural inheritance channel (section 2). It then outlines some of our first symbolic practices such as making cave paintings and figurines, and then moves on to outline several key developments in external representational systems and the artifacts that support these such as written language, numeral systems and counting devices, diagrams and maps, measuring devices, libraries and archives, photographs, analogue and digital computational artifacts, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and smartphones (section 3). After that, it makes some brief points about the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of memory artifacts and speculates about the possible future of memory artifacts, arguing that it is very difficult to look beyond an epistemological horizon of more than five years (section 4). (shrink)

It is frequently argued that wrongdoers forfeit, through their wrongdoing, their previously held claim rights against being punished. But this is a mistake. Wrongdoers do not forfeit their claim rights against being punished when they violate rights. They forfeit their _immunity_ to having their claim rights against being punished removed. The reason for this, I argue, is that when they violate rights, wrongdoers culpably disregard the authority of right-holders to negotiate the conditions under which it is permissible to interact with (...) them. The effect of this, far from undermining the authority of right-holders, is to transfer authority to right-holders to unilaterally impose the ‘conditions of interaction’ on wrongdoers _after_ the violation. The conditions can be imposed for a diverse range of reasons and can take a variety of forms, including punishment. In this essay I explain and defend this new ‘unilateral authority theory’ of punishment. (shrink)

I. Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche and the body -- II. Prophetic speech in Levinas and Spinoza (and Maimonides) -- III. Levinas and Spinoza: to love God for nothing -- IV. Levinas and Spinoza: justice and the state -- V. Spinoza's Prince: for whom is the theological-political treatise written? VI. Levinas on Spinoza's misunderstanding of Judaism -- VII. Thinking least about death: mortality and morality in Spinoza, Heidegger and Levinas -- VIII. Spleen: Spinoza's babies, fools and madmen.

Joy of a certain kind has an important affective role in demonstrating the overcoming of nihilism for Nietzsche. In this chapter I explore how one might arrive at a point where they too can give voice to Zarathustra’s proclamation that “all joy wills eternity.” There are consistent references to eternity and infinitude in passages of Nietzsche’s discussing nihilism. This is most obviously borne out in Nietzsche scholarship with reference to discussions of eternal recurrence. But eternal recurrence does not have a (...) monopoly for denoting Nietzsche’s employment of the motifs of eternity and infinitude. Eternal recurrence and its affirmation, I argue, is only a kind of end point for a process of overcoming nihilism. -/- My concern here is the manner in which Nietzsche employs these motifs to track three different stages related to nihilism. The first stage demonstrates an affective response of initial disorientation, which aims to engender a realization by the “marketplace atheists” that humanity must undergo the phenomenon of nihilism. Th e second stage documents an active confrontation with this phenomenon, which in turn offers deeper, more terrifying yet also more positive consequences of this realization, ones proffering new forms of freedom. The third stage is the constructive use to which Nietzsche sets these motifs in the service of life-affirmation, of which eternal recurrence plays an integral part. I examine several important passages using these motifs in Nietzsche’s mature writings, particularly from The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to claim that they inform a developmental process concerning the realization of nihilism and its overcoming. -/- I conclude by claiming that the motifs of eternity and infinitude’s employment at each of these three stages mirrors the substance of the “Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” section in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate whether humans are unique in using tools and artifacts. Non-human animals exhibit some impressive instances of tool and artifact-use. Chimpanzees use sticks to get termites out of a mound, beavers build dams, birds make nests, spiders create webs, bowerbirds make bowers to impress potential mates, etc. There is no doubt that some animals modify and use objects in clever and sophisticated ways. But how does this relate to the way in which (...) humans make and use objects to achieve their goals? To answer this question, this paper first presents a taxonomy of artifacts, identifying four overlapping categories, namely embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective artifacts. It then discusses definitions of animal tool-use, arguing that we need a more liberal approach, one that goes beyond the use of tools that are embedded in occurrent perception-action cycles. This paper ends by analysing how instances of animal tool and artifact-use can be classified according to the four identified categories, concluding that some animals use embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective artifacts. In this sense, humans are thus not unique in the kinds of tools and artifacts we use. What is unique, however, is our unprecedented flexibility and openness to deeply incorporate a large variety of complex tools and artifacts into our embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective systems. (shrink)

Thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard develop a nuanced account of semantics and propositional attitudes. The collection addresses a range of topics in philosophical semantics and philosophy of mind, and is accompanied by a new Introduction which discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures.

Scholars were greatly indebted to Max Charlesworth for publishing in 1965 the Latin text of Anselm’s Proslogion, together with his own translation and commentary. The intense discussion this argument has received since then has, however, clarified a number of points about the logic of this argument. Its first premise is not a definition of God, and that identification is one of the conclusions of a three-stage argument. Also, the much-discussed issue of the relation of Chap. 3 to Chap. 2 has (...) now been clarified: that the premise with which Anselm begins Chap. 3 is entailed by the conclusion of Chap. 2. For that reason, substituting a description of anything other than God for Anselm’s formula, such as Gaunilo’s Lost Island, entails that that thing both can and could not be thought not to exist. So, no such substitution is legitimate. (shrink)

This unique book clearly explains genetic and neuroimaging research on intelligence and how neuroscience findings may lead to enhancing it.

This paper compares and contrasts relational quantum mechanics with a pragmatist view of quantum theory. I first explain important points of agreement. Then I point to two problems faced by RQM and sketch DP?s solutions to analogous problems. Since both RQM and DP have taken the Born rule to require relative facts I next say what these might be. My main objection to RQM as originally conceived is that its ontology of relative facts is incompatible with scientific objectivity and undercuts (...) the evidential base of quantum theory. In contrast DP?s relative facts have all the objectivity we need to accept quantum theory as scientific knowledge. But a very recent modification to RQM has successfully addressed my main objection,bringing the two views into even closer alignment. (shrink)

Several proposals for moral enhancement would use AI to augment (auxiliary enhancement) or even supplant (exhaustive enhancement) human moral reasoning or judgment. Exhaustive enhancement proposals conceive AI as some self-contained oracle whose superiority to our own moral abilities is manifest in its ability to reliably deliver the ‘right’ answers to all our moral problems. We think this is a mistaken way to frame the project, as it presumes that we already know many things that we are still in the process (...) of working out, and reflecting on this fact reveals challenges even for auxiliary proposals that eschew the oracular approach. We argue there is nonetheless a substantial role that ‘AI mentors’ could play in our moral education and training. Expanding on the idea of an AI Socratic Interlocutor, we propose a modular system of multiple AI interlocutors with their own distinct points of view reflecting their training in a diversity of concrete wisdom traditions. This approach minimizes any risk of moral disengagement, while the existence of multiple modules from a diversity of traditions ensures pluralism is preserved. We conclude with reflections on how all this relates to the broader notion of moral transcendence implicated in the project of AI moral enhancement, contending it is precisely the whole concrete socio-technical system of moral engagement that we need to model if we are to pursue moral enhancement. (shrink)

While the proliferation of social media technologies in China has empowered the public with new opportunities for public expression and political engagement in a ‘virtual public sphere’, Chinese Internet censorship has meant that users have to develop creative ways to engage in political criticism. In a context where both mechanical and human censors are employed, Chinese users have become adept at utilizing the affordances of technology, Chinese language and cultural resources to express their opinions through social media. Drawing upon data (...) from the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo, surrounding the major chemical explosions in 2015 in Tianjin, the study explores three discursive techniques of indirection by Chinese social media users to express political criticism in the context of censorship. The study highlights that through the creative use of quotation, allusion and irony, users challenged the authority’s official narratives of the event. The study not only demonstrates the pluralization and dynamics of Chinese online expression, but also points to a better understanding of Chinese censoring as a continuingly evolving interplay between technology and cultural forms and between layers of government and users. (shrink)

The phrase “applied moral philosophy” might naturally be understood as the application of general moral principles to descriptions of particular situations in order to derive conclusions about what ought to be done in those situations, but given the lack of agreement on general principles, any such conclusions would be disputable. Other possibilities are that applied moral philosophy is ethical thought directed toward concrete rather than abstract moral issues, or toward practical moral problems that arise in actual social life rather than (...) toward imagined hypotheticals. According to the reflective equilibrium conception, we should seek to reach a set of moral beliefs that hang together coherently, the general beliefs explaining and justifying the more particular beliefs that seem acceptable after reflection. On this conception, a judgment at any level of generality can reasonably shape our all things considered responses to practical moral controversies, so no important line separates applied and nonapplied ethics. (shrink)

This book grew out of my confusion. If logic is objective how can there be so many logics? Is there one right logic, or many right ones? Is there some underlying unity that connects them? What is the significance of the mathematical theorems about logic which I've learned if they have no connection to our everyday reasoning? The answers I propose revolve around the perception that what one pays attention to in reasoning determines which logic is appropriate. The act of (...) abstracting from our reasoning in our usual language is the stepping stone from reasoned argument to logic. We cannot take this step alone, for we reason together: logic is reasoning which has some objective value. For you to understand my answers, or perhaps better, conjectures, I have retraced my steps: from the concrete to the abstract, from examples, to general theory, to further confirming examples, to reflections on the significance of the work. (shrink)