In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or (...) localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics. (shrink)

This entry explores Charles Peirce's account of truth in terms of the end or ‘limit’ of inquiry. This account is distinct from – and arguably more objectivist than – views of truth found in other pragmatists such as James and Rorty. The roots of the account in mathematical concepts is explored, and it is defended from objections that it is (i) incoherent, (ii) in its faith in convergence, too realist and (iii) in its ‘internal realism’, not realist enough.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental PilgrimageRoger CorlessThe Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. By Norman J.Girardot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002. xxx + 780 pp.Don't make the mistake I made and allow the size of this book intimidate you. I let it sit around for many months, fearing, as did the author, to "[row] out (...) over the great ocean of material" (pp. xix-xx), but once I had set sail I found myself in enjoyable, if sometimes irascible, company and I was unwilling to jump ship. Girardot is in full command of his ark of fascinating and diverse creatures, and his main argument is never lost in the details. His writing is lucid and the text is broken up into manageable blocks by subheadings with intriguing titles, rendering each segment ehipassiko, encouraging us to keep reading.A book of this importance and weight (about 1.5 kg) deserves a review article more than just a review, or, better, a discussion panel at a major academic conference. This journal is notorious for reviews of astonishing length, but I would like my review to be short enough that it will actually be read, so that it will entice you to read the book. I will not attempt a summary nor will I critically address all the issues that are brought up. Instead, I will try to show why I regard this book as an instant classic and even, I would say, a watershed in the meta-science of sinological and Religionswissenschaftlich self-reflection.We all know James Legge as the perpetrator of The Chinese Classics, the multivolume opus that, in the 1960 Hong Kong University Press revision, dominates the Chinese religion(s) section of our personal libraries. Since there is nothing like it, we consult it, but we pretend we do not, for, after all, it's out of date, surely, and Legge was an old fuddy-duddy—Scottish, a Protestant missionary, and, worst of all, a Victorian. Girardot seems to have had somewhat this opinion of Legge when he assayed a brief biography of him, but he discovered that his "Legge work" (as he calls it) opened the door to a pivotal era in academe and world culture. Once the door to the long-neglected cupboard had been opened, all kinds of fascinating objects came tumbling out. "Oh, so that's how it used to be, and that's why it's like this today!" No scholar of Chinese religion(s) can afford to ignore Girardot's extensive and insightful ruminations on the state of the field then and now.The point of the book is summed up on page 531: "[Legge] is an outstanding [End Page 276] example of the difficult nineteenth-century passage from religious discourse to what Edward Said calls the 'secular criticism' of the modern world." To study Legge is to study the origins of our discipline. He may have been a fuddy-duddy; he was certainly a workaholic, putting his Sassenach colleagues at Oxford to shame by sleeping little and rising in the middle of the night to persist in his hermeneutic labors. But he was also a student of the heathen land he went to convert, and he tried his best not only to see (the presumed universal) God in the ancient texts but also to find something noble in apparent atheists and agnostics such as Confucius. In his interaction with Max Mueller (and this book is as much about Mueller as it is about Legge) he both agreed and disagreed, in a complex choreography, with the comparative method underpinning The Sacred Books of the East. He was a Scotsman's Scotsman, a stag at bay, dourly standing his ground (as a Congregationalist, and therefore a nonconformist both north and south of the border) against, first, the London Missionary Society and, later, the prevailing academic and ecclesiastical climate at Oxford.No armchair orientalist, as were some of his colleagues across the Channel, he befriended native informants and studied the indigenous commentaries (mostly Qing) to which they referred him, so that his translations, although not as fluid as Waley... (shrink)

This rich book differs from much contemporary philosophy of mathematics in the author’s witty, down to earth style, and his extensive experience as a working mathematician. It accords with the field in focusing on whether mathematical entities are real. Franklin holds that recent discussion of this has oscillated between various forms of Platonism, and various forms of nominalism. He denies nominalism by holding that universals exist and denies Platonism by holding that they are concrete, not abstract - looking to Aristotle (...) for inspiration. (shrink)

Translating Chinese Classics in a Colonial Context: James Legge and His Two Versions of the Zhongyong, by Hui Wang, Peter Lang Content Type Journal Article Pages 166-167 Authors Paul Boshears, Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien/The European Graduate School Journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy Online ISSN 1757-0646 Print ISSN 1757-0638 Journal Volume Volume 4 Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 1 / 2012.

In the years around 1900 one of the most significant practical consequences of new styles of bacteriological thought and practice was the development of preventive vaccines and therapeutic sera. Historical scholarship has highlighted how approaches rooted in the laboratory methods of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and their collaborators were transformed in local contexts and applied in diverse ways to enable more effective disease identification, prevention and treatment. Amongst these, the anti-anthrax serum developed by the Italian physician Achille Sclavo (1861–1930) has (...) received little to no attention from historians. This article positions Sclavo's serum as a neglected but significant presence in British microbiology, which achieved widespread uptake amidst a wave of optimism, despite prolonged uncertainty about its mechanism of action and dosage. After being introduced to Britain in 1904 by the enterprising first medical inspector of factories Thomas Morison Legge, within a matter of months the serum became regarded by medical practitioners as an effective treatment of cutaneous anthrax, though access to ‘fresh’ serum and the necessary speedy diagnosis remained problematic. Like the disease anthrax itself, discussion of ‘Sclavo's serum’ was out of all proportion to the relatively low number of cases, reflecting a deep-seated fascination with the wider possibilities afforded by effective serum therapy. (shrink)

From James Legge’s first attempt to translate the Yijing in the English speaking world in 1854, to the latest translation, The Original Meaning of the Yijing, by Joseph A. Adler in 2019, the process of translating the Yijing into English has been continuing for nearly 170 years, and there are countless translations by numerous translators. Historically, these English translations of the Yijing reveal five trends: first, the translations rely on the authoritative, traditional commentaries on the Yijing; secondly, some (...) translations rely on the personal help and interpretations of Yijing scholars in China; thirdly, some translations depend on recently unearthed documents of the Yijing; fourthly, Yili and Xiangshu are more or less involved in these translations, although the focus of each translation is not always the same; fifthly, most translations strive for the “original” meaning of the Yijing, especially with the unearthed documents of the Yijing since the 1970s. It could be safely concluded that the ultimate goal of the English translators of the Yijing is to provide English readers with the Yijing that is closest to the original/authentic meaning so that people in theWest can truly understand the essence of Chinese philosophy represented by the Yijing. (shrink)

Referring to James Legge's translation of the Liji 禮記, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's justification for legalizing same-sex marriage was based on the statement, "Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government."1 Justice Kennedy universalized and applied Confucius' comment in a way that Confucius would never have imagined it would be. Yet, Justice Kennedy's universalization fits into a legacy of Western utilizations of the wisdom of the ancient Chinese sage. Although in recent history many Europeans and (...) North Americans regard universal values as a challenge to other societies to reform, it is important to remember that, in the eighteenth century, Europeans looked to China for universal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese ReligionWhalen LaiBorrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 266 + xvi pp.For a long time, Sinology was dominated by scholars with direct or indirect missionary backgrounds, going all the way back to the founding of the discipline by James Legge. Legge occupied the first (...) university chair in the China field in Britain. Legge's vision of China has recently been placed into historical context by Norman Girardot (The Victorian Translation of China [2002]). There were other early figures whose records of Chinese beliefs and folk customs we still use. Beginning with Timothy Richard, more came around to seeing how China needed more than soul saving for the hereafter. China needed urgent sociopolitical reforms in the here and now. In time, the YMCA and the missionary schools would help chaperone in a whole generation of "modern Chinese"; some of them, though exposed to the Gospel, would, in the May Fourth Movement, pit science and democracy against any and all religions. For all that, scholars still do count on the missionary records for understanding the "old China." By exploring what the majority of these men of God saw in China—or thought they saw, since their perception could well be colored by cultural biases—this book by Eric Reinders proves quite refreshing. Instead of holding up those records as a mirror on a Chinese reality, Reinders (to wit) "reversed the light so that it would reflect upon" the Protestant missionaries themselves. For one thing, these Protestant evangelicals reported on China using rhetoric borrowed from their long-standing complaints against the Catholics. For another, they painted the Chinese "body language" in light of their own proud Victorian manners. These missionaries were no James Legge, who was tutored into classical Chinese by erudite Confucians and who then presented the Confucian Classics with appreciative classical (Latin and Greek) references. They were no Arthur Waley either, Waley being one who could "without leaving the door [as to live in China], know all the affairs of the (Chinese) world." By steeping himself in Chinese language and its written culture, Waley could render the Confucian "chun-tzu" into the familiar English "gentleman," and doing so with due sympathy for two land-owning gentry cultures. There is no such sympathy from the Protestant missionaries who lived among the common people. They purported to know the "real" (rural) China that was opened to the inland mission. The China they reported on was not found in library books, the Confucian classics, or some Mandarin's manicured garden. Theirs is not the Good Earth depicted later by Pearl Buck, either.These nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, flourishing in the heydays of the British Empire, held few illusions about the once fabled Cathay. Their reports sent home served, in the end, both God and country. As means for raising funds for their missionary efforts, the reports probably had to fan high hopes for the Gospel in relation to a very deprecating assessment of the pagan, heathen culture they encountered. The reports also reflected the hard times these zealous missionaries did have [End Page 226] to face. They were living in the backwater, among often illiterate peasants and in isolated enclaves surrounded by what they saw as a huddling mass of faceless humanity. Their frustration at learning the vernacular tongue well enough to communicate with the people led to the still popular joke about the inscrutable Chinese. But the conclusion the missionaries drew, about how the Chinese language is inherently "godless," is more theological than philological. That the many Chinese tongues (local dialects?) were deemed a living Babel assumes somehow that the Queen's English is divinely inspired. This book does not tell us often what China was really like, for so much of that reality is woefully "lost in translation."Above all, "Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies" is about how the Protestants transposed their endless bouts with Rome into seeing the errors of the Chinese way as copies of the Catholic way. The Chinese were mindless in their idolatry; they kept up blindly this ritualistic gesture with little or... (shrink)

Questo articolo si sofferma su una curiosa lacuna nella tradizione pragmatista. Negli scritti dei pragmatisti americani classici (Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead e Lewis) pochissima attenzione è dedicata all'articolazione di una concezione delle pratiche e, più in generale, dei _pragmata_. L'autore offre uno schizzo di quella che egli ritiene essere una descrizione pragmatista delle pratiche umane. Sottolinea come per i pragmatisti stessi la teoria sia una pratica o, più precisamente, una famiglia allargata di pratiche in evoluzione, che intrattengono relazioni complesse (...) con altre pratiche. Inoltre, ritiene che una tale prospettiva sulle pratiche sia fondamentalmente in opposizione ai vari tentativi di fornire una giustificazione trascendentale per qualsiasi pratica umana. L'autore prende spunto da una breve ma suggestiva discussione sul linguaggio, la legge e la verità contenuta nel _Pragmatismo_ di William James e sviluppa le implicazioni della trattazione jamesiana di questi temi. Nel corso di questo lavoro, l'autore propone di comprendere un'opera _classica_ (come un testo filosofico o una composizione musicale) in una prospettiva strettamente storicista. L'articolo si conclude con una riflessione su quanto l'intelligenza creativa sia stata 'coscritta' dall'agenda bellicosa dei regimi nazionali o imperialistici, pur nutrendo la speranza che l'intelligenza creativa possa liberarsi in qualche misura dalla macchina bellica degli stati nazionali. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

One of the great American pragmatic philosophers alongside Peirce and Dewey, William James (1842–1910) delivered these eight lectures in Boston and New York in the winter of 1906–7. Though he credits Peirce with coining the term 'pragmatism', James highlights in his subtitle that this 'new name' describes a philosophical temperament as old as Socrates. The pragmatic approach, he says, takes a middle way between rationalism's airy principles and empiricism's hard facts. James' pragmatism is both a method of (...) interpreting ideas by their practical consequences and an epistemology which identifies truths according to their useful outcomes. Furnished with many examples, the lectures illustrate pragmatism's response to classic problems such as the question of free will versus determinism. Published in 1907, this work further develops James's approach to religion and morality, introduced in The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), both reissued in this series. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive work in psychology. In Causation with a Human Face, James Woodward integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on the interventionist treatment of causation that he developed in Making (...) Things Happen. Normative ideas discussed include proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter. Woodward also discusses the common philosophical practice-particularly salient in philosophical accounts of causation--of appealing to intuitions or judgments about cases in support of philosophical theses. He explores how, properly understood, such appeals are not different in principle from appeals to results from empirical research, and demonstrates how they may serve as a useful source of information about causal cognition. (shrink)

Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity James Tully. these ambassadors from Haida Gwaii conciliate the goods which appear irreconcilable to us? To discover the answer, and learn our way around on this strange common ground, we need to ...

Is there a world beyond the senses? Can we perceive future events before they occur? Is it possible to communicate with others without need of our complex sensory-perceptual apparatus that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years? Can our minds/souls/personalities leave our bodies and operate with all the knowledge and information-processing ability that is normally dependent upon the physical brain? Do our personalities survive physical death?

Today democracy is both exalted as the "best means to realize human rights" and seen as weakened because of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state. In this provocative book, James Bohman argues that democracies face a period of renewal and transformation and that democracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal. Democracy, he writes, should be rethought in the plural; it should no longer be understood as rule by the people, singular, with a specific territorial (...) identification and connotation, but as rule by peoples, across national boundaries. Bohman shows that this new conception of transnational democracy requires reexamination of such fundamental ideas as the people, the public, citizenship, human rights, and federalism, and he argues that it offers a feasible approach to realizing democracy in a globalized world.In his account, Bohman establishes the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy by examining in detail current theories of democracy beyond the nation-state and offers a deliberative alternative. He considers the importance of communicative freedom in the transnational public sphere, human rights as the normative basis of transnational democracy, and the European Union as a transnational polity. Finally, he examines the relationship between peace and democracy, concluding that peace requires democratization on interacting state and suprastate levels. (shrink)

Few can imagine a world without telephones or televisions; many depend on computers and the Internet as part of daily life. Without scientific theory, these developments would not have been possible. In this exceptionally clear and engaging introduction to philosophy of science, James Ladyman explores the philosophical questions that arise when we reflect on the nature of the scientific method and the knowledge it produces. He discusses whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science, (...) and considers in detail the debate between realists and antirealists about the extent of scientific knowledge. Along the way, central topics in philosophy of science, such as the demarcation of science from non-science, induction, confirmation and falsification, the relationship between theory and observation and relativism are all addressed. Important and complex current debates over underdetermination, inference to the best explaination and the implications of radical theory change are clarified and clearly explained for those new to the subject. (shrink)

James Van Cleve examines the main topics from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, such as transcendental idealism, necessity and analyticity, space and time, substance and cause, noumena and things-in-themselves, problems of the self, and rational theology. He also discusses the relationship between Kant's thought and that of modern anti-realists, such as Putnam and Dummett. Because Van Cleve focuses upon specific problems rather than upon entire passages or sections of the Critique, he makes Kant's work more accessible to the serious (...) student and scholar. (shrink)

John Locke's theory of property is perhaps the most distinctive and the most influential aspect of his political theory. In this book James Tully uses an hermeneutical and analytical approach to offer a revolutionary revision of early modern theories of property, focusing particularly on that of Locke. Setting his analysis within the intellectual context of the seventeenth century, Professor Tully overturns the standard interpretations of Locke's theory, showing that it is not a justification of private property. Instead he shows (...) it to be a theory of individual use rights within a framework of inclusive claim rights. He links Locke's conception of rights not merely to his ethical theory, but to the central arguments of his epistemology, and illuminates the way in which Locke's theory is tied to his metaphysical views of God and man, his theory of revolution and his account of a legitimate polity. (shrink)

Referring to Reichlin’s reflections, the author analyzes the aporias arised in the debate on euthanasia, proposes to establish some general principles (e.g. inviolability of human life, the prohibition of extend unnecessary suffering, the principle of autonomy) and a method of application of them to controversial cases. The combinatorial ethics that emerges can probably solve the aporias and can harmonize the common sense (about the possibility of euthanasia in extreme cases) with Catholic doctrine – specifically referring to the Natural Moral Law (...) theory – in an attempt to integrate the results of combinatorial ethics with the principles established in this doctrine. The conclusions, although admittedly provisional, are translated into indications for an hypothetical legislator, in order to overcome the legislative aporia. In the final part, analyzing the religious aporia, the author proposes to include some forms of euthanasia in a total rethinking of the meaning of death, starting with the teachings of Christian faith. Basandosi sulle riflessioni di Massimo Reichlin e James Rachels, l’Autore intende analizzare le principali aporie che emergono nella riflessione etica sull’eutanasia – quella filosofico-metodologica, deontologica, legislativa e religiosa. Attraverso quest’analisi, l’Autore propone di riprendere alcuni principi generali (tra cui l’indisponibilità della vita, il divieto di prolungare sofferenze inutili e il principio di autonomia), fornendo poi un metodo d’applicazione ai casi concreti. L’etica combinatoria che emerge da questa impostazione, riesce in buona misura a risolvere le aporie analizzate, armonizzando alcune intuizioni comuni (circa la liceità dell’eutanasia in casi particolarissimi ed estremi) con la dottrina cattolica corrente in materia. Nel confronto con la morale cattolica, in particolare, viene analizzata e discussa la teoria della legge morale naturale, nel tentativo di integrare i risultati dell’etica combinatoria con i principi affermati in questa dottrina. Le conclusioni teoretiche, anche se dichiaratamente provvisorie, si traducono poi in indicazioni praticate per un ipotetico legislatore, nel tentativo di superare l’ultima grande aporia, quella legislativa. Nella parte conclusiva, analizzando l’aporia religiosa, l’Autore propone di iscrivere la liceità di alcune forme di eutanasia all’interno di un complessivo ripensamento del significato della morte, partendo dal dato di fede cristiano, nel tentativo di superare la “logica della rimozione” che sembra caratterizzare la nostra contemporaneità. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

This book aims to pinpoint the connection feelings have with behaviour - a connection that, while clear, has never been fully explained. Following William James, Laird argues that feelings are not the cause of behavior but rather its consequences; the same goes for behaviour and motives and behaviour and attitudes. He presents research into feelings across the spectrum, from anger to joy to fear to romantic love, that support this against-the-grain view. Laird discusses the problem of common sense, self-perception (...) theory, the association between feelings and higher cognitive processes, and also the literature on facial expression, posture, and gaze. (shrink)

Following up on his previous book, _Violence and Phenomenology_, James Dodd presents here an expanded and deepened reflection on the problem of violence. The book’s six essays are guided by a skeptical philosophical attitude about the meaning of violence that refuses to conform to the exigencies of essence and the stable patterns of lived experience. Each essay tracks a discoverable, sometimes familiar figure of violence, while at the same time questioning its limits and revealing sites of its resistance to (...) conceptualization. Dodd’s essays are readings as much as they are reflections; attempts at interpretation as much as they are attempts to push concepts of violence to their limits. They draw upon a range of different authors—Sartre, Levinas, Schelling, Scheler, and Husserl—and historical moments, but without any attempt to reduce them into a series of examples elucidating a comprehensive theory. The aim is to follow a path of distinctively episodic and provisional modes of thinking and reflection that offers a potential glimpse at how violence can be understood. (shrink)

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

Designed for use by philosophy students, this 2006 book provides an accessible, yet technically sound treatment of modal logic and its philosophical applications. Every effort has been made to simplify the presentation by using diagrams in place of more complex mathematical apparatus. These and other innovations provide philosophers with easy access to a rich variety of topics in modal logic, including a full coverage of quantified modal logic, non-rigid designators, definite descriptions, and the de-re de-dictio distinction. Discussion of philosophical issues (...) concerning the development of modal logic is woven into the text. The book uses natural deduction systems and also includes a diagram technique that extends the method of truth trees to modal logic. This feature provides a foundation for a novel method for showing completeness, one that is easy to extend to systems that include quantifiers. (shrink)

This article defends the use of interventionist counterfactuals to elucidate causal and explanatory claims against criticisms advanced by James Bogen and Peter Machamer. Against Bogen, I argue that counterfactual claims concerning what would happen under interventions are meaningful and have determinate truth values, even in a deterministic world. I also argue, against both Machamer and Bogen, that we need to appeal to counterfactuals to capture the notions like causal relevance and causal mechanism. Contrary to what both authors suppose, counterfactuals (...) are not "unscientific" - a substantial tradition within statistics and the causal modelling literature makes heavy use of them. (shrink)

This book on modal logic is especially designed for philosophy students. It provides an accessible yet technically sound treatment of modal logic and its philosophical applications. Every effort is made to simplify the presentation by using diagrams instead of more complex mathematical apparatus. These and other innovations provide philosophers with easy access to a rich variety of topics in modal logic, including a full coverage of quantified modal logic, non-rigid designators, definite descriptions, and the de-re de-dicto distinction. Discussion of philosophical (...) issues concerning the development of modal logic is woven into the text. The book uses natural deduction systems, which are widely regarded as the easiest to teach and use. It also includes a diagram technique that extends the method of truth trees to modal logic. This provides a foundation for a novel method for showing completeness that is easy to extend to quantifiers. This second edition contains a new chapter on logics of conditionals, an updated and expanded bibliography, and is updated throughout. (shrink)

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? (...) In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein's exile (...) was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre and Centre for Philosophy, Justice and Health, UCL, First Floor, Charles Bell House, 67–73 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EJ, UK. Tel.: +44 (0)20 7679 9417; Fax: +44 (0)20 7679 9426; Email: james-gs.wilson{at}ucl.ac.uk ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract This paper aims to shed some light on the difficulties we face in constructing a generally acceptable normative framework for thinking about public health. It argues that there are three factors (...) that combine to make theorising about public health difficult, and which when taken together defeat simplistic top-down and bottom-up approaches to the design of public health policies. The first factor is the problem of complex systems, namely that the distribution of health both affects and is affected by the distribution of other goods. The second is the difficulty of defining the goals of public health: we still need to get clear about what we should mean by health in this context, and what the goals of public health should be. The third is that we stand in need of an account of how important health is relative to the importance of other goods that a just society should be trying to secure for its citizens. The paper argues that these problems should lead us to abandon the search for a ‘one-size fits all’ normative framework for thinking about public health. Rather, different approaches will be appropriate at different levels of abstraction. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, James D. Ingram believes political theorists have, in their approach to this project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, Ingram confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on (...) their implementation. Ingram argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. In this book, Ingram provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities. (shrink)

This article attempts to make sense of Oakeshott's enigmatic comment in 'On Human Conduct' that it was perhaps injudicious of Hegel to use the word state in the Philosophy of Right for his conception of a bounded association. But the article does not confine itself to making sense of Oakeshott's meaning: it compares Oakeshott's conception of societas to Hegel's conception of der Staat, Oakeshott's conception of philosophy as an unconditional consideration of conditional objects with Hegel's conception of philosophy as a (...) reflexive consideration of the rationality immanent within unconditional objects, and Oakeshott's avoidance of divinity with Hegel's involvement in it. It is part of the purpose of this article to illustrate the suggestion that conceptions of God and conceptions of the state are closely related in the thought of both philosophers -- and possibly in all philosophy: and that the problem of the state is therefore a problem as much religious as secular. (shrink)