Ardon Lyon; VIII*—The Immutable Laws of Nature1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 107–126, https://doi.org/10.109.

People are organisms of a characteristic shape, with individual personalities, abilities and memories. Each of these features varies through time, but does not normally change very abruptly before death. Because these changes are only gradual, we are able to pick out one and the same individual through time, and refer to him, her or it by use of a proper name, just as we are able to refer to one and the same planet, animal or building. In particular, organisms change (...) shape only gradually, and we have every reason to believe in the possibility of our continuing to watch the spatiotemporally continuous life-history of one and the same organism. (shrink)

In this article I try to give an account of the meaning of phrases of the form ‘A causes B’ as they are most usefully used in everyday life and the applied sciences. This account covers narrower uses of such phrases, but we find that in our usage of the term, ‘A causes B’ neither entails nor is entailed by ‘A is always followed by B’. Logically necessary and sufficient conditions of this general term can be given, however, by reference (...) to particular cases of causation. The analysis of these is shown to be irreducibly counter-factual, i.e. such phrases are not definable in terms of statements describing those observable occurrences which constitute the relevant verificationary processes. Some objections to the analysis are considered, and it is tested against various examples. * Received 6.xii.65 1 This article is an expanded version of a paper read to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science at Bristol in September 1964. I have greatly benefited from criticisms and suggestions by members of the philosophy seminar of the University of Durham, especially Dr Doreen Bretherton, and also by Professor J. L. Mackie and the editor and referees of this Journal. (shrink)

I argue below for the view that non-moral truths entail moral ones. I first argue that moral claims do have truth values which are objectively true or false. I then argue that this objectivism does not entail non-relativism. I produce a simple possible worlds argument for the entailment view. I then give some examples where p entails q but many intelligent people have thought it does not, and where it does not, but many intelligent people have thought that it does. (...) I also try to evaluate a somewhat neglected argument by Hume. In the final section, I further consider some moral and meta-moral opinions. (shrink)

We argue that the size of the human population needs to be controlled whether or not people should be vegetarians. We than describe some of the varieties of human flesh eating round the world.

The gospels tell us that Judas betrayed Jesus, and that this was an incredibly wicked act. Lots of people believe that at least many of the events portrayed in the New Testament did not actually happen. I argue here that if we suppose on the contrary that they did, then Judas did not in fact act wickedly, and that the only person who acted immorally in this situation was Jesus. I refer in this article first to the wonderful story ‘Three (...) Versions of Judas’ by Borges, who draws a somewhat different conclusion from mine, and later to Amos Oz's novel Judas.Export citation. (shrink)

It's no surprise that one shouldn't pray for bad things to happen, for it's always wicked to attempt to bring about evil. But perhaps surprisingly one shouldn't pray for good things either. For if there is an Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omni-Benevolent Deity who intervenes at all in the workings of the world, then He will do whatever is best anyway, and if you pray for what He wouldn't otherwise have done then it must, perhaps unknown to you, be wrong. If (...) there is no God then He will not answer your prayers, although they might be efficacious in other ways. (shrink)

//static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Aarticle%3AS0031819100056424/resource/na me/firstPage-S0031819100056424a.jpg.

We're back! Actually, we've never been away, so what I really mean is that my fellow zombies and I are, I hope, about to announce to the world that we're here ! It's true I haven't yet asked anyone else to agree to expose themselves as I am now doing, but I'm hoping that my own public outing will encourage, or perhaps even shame others to come forward and join me.

ABSTRACTPhilosophers and others often believe that a language used to talk about usage in a particular language should not be mixed with use of that language itself. I argue below that this opinion is mistaken.

In this study William Lyons presents a sustained and coherent theory of the emotions, and one which draws extensively on the work of psychologists and physiologists in the area. Dr Lyons starts by giving a thorough and critical survey of other principal theories, before setting out his own 'causal-evaluative' account. In addition to giving an analysis of the nature of emotion - in which, Dr Lyon argues, evaluative attitudes play a crucial part - his theory throws light on the (...) motivating role of emotions in our lives, our attitudes towards our emotions and our responsibility for them. (shrink)

This article endeavors to identify the strongest versions of the two primary arguments against epistemic scientific realism: the historical argument—generally dubbed “the pessimistic meta-induction”—and the argument from underdetermination. It is shown that, contrary to the literature, both can be understood as historically informed but logically validmodus tollensarguments. After specifying the question relevant to underdetermination and showing why empirical equivalence is unnecessary, two types of competitors to contemporary scientific theories are identified, both of which are informed by science itself. With the (...) content and structure of the two nonrealist arguments clarified, novel relations between them are uncovered, revealing the severity of their collective threat against epistemic realism and its “no-miracles” argument. The final section proposes, however, that the realist’s axiological tenet “science seeks truth” is not blocked. An attempt is made to indicate the promise for a nonepistemic, purely axiological scientific realism—here dubbed “Socratic scientific realism.”. (shrink)

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associations in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that female coffee organization members report high levels of household decision-making power and they are more likely than their male counterparts to report (...) control over their coffee income. These significant advances in women’s agency within the household are offset by the fact that the women experience significant time poverty as they engage in coffee production while bearing a disproportionate share of domestic labor obligations. The women coffee producers view organizational labor as a third burden on their time, after their reproductive and productive labor. The time poverty they experience limits their ability to fully participate in coffee organizational governance and consequently there are few women leaders at all levels of the coffee producer businesses. This is problematic because it limits women’s ability to fully benefit from organizational membership: when women fully participate in governance they gain valuable business and leadership skills and producer associations with active female members may also be more likely to develop and maintain programs and policies that enhance gender equity. Our findings indicate that targeted agricultural development programs to improve gender equity among agricultural smallholders should involve creative ways to ease women’s labor burdens and reduce their time poverty in order to facilitate full organizational participation. The research findings fill a gap in existing studies of agricultural global value chains (GVCs) by demonstrating how the certified coffee GVC depends on women’s under and un-paid labor not only within the household but also within producer organizations. (shrink)

This innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature of validity, (...) assessing deductive arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments, and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including testimony, including the evaluation of news and other information sources, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation. The treatment of probability uses frequency trees and a frequency approach more generally, and argument reconstruction is taught using argument maps; these methods have been shown to improve students’ reasoning and argument evaluation. (shrink)

In this study William Lyons presents a sustained and coherent theory of the emotions, and one which draws extensively on the work of psychologists and physiologists in the area. Dr Lyons starts by giving a thorough and critical survey of other principal theories, before setting out his own 'causal-evaluative' account. In addition to giving an analysis of the nature of emotion - in which, Dr Lyon argues, evaluative attitudes play a crucial part - his theory throws light on the (...) motivating role of emotions in our lives, our attitudes towards our emotions and our responsibility for them. (shrink)

A short discussion piece arguing that the neuropsychological phenomenon of double dissociations is most revealing of underlying cognitive architecture because of the capacities that are spared, more than the capacities that are lost.

We present nested sequent systems for propositional Gödel-Dummett logic and its first-order extensions with non-constant and constant domains, built atop nested calculi for intuitionistic logics. To obtain nested systems for these Gödel-Dummett logics, we introduce a new structural rule, called the linearity rule, which (bottom-up) operates by linearising branching structure in a given nested sequent. In addition, an interesting feature of our calculi is the inclusion of reachability rules, which are special logical rules that operate by propagating data and/or checking (...) if data exists along certain paths within a nested sequent. Such rules require us to generalise our nested sequents to include signatures (i.e. finite collections of variables) in the first-order cases, thus giving rise to a generalisation of the usual nested sequent formalism. Our calculi exhibit favourable properties, admitting the height-preserving invertibility of every logical rule and the (height-preserving) admissibility of a large collection of structural and reachability rules. We prove all of our systems sound and cut-free complete, and show that syntactic cut-elimination obtains for the intuitionistic systems. We conclude the paper by discussing possible extensions and modifications, putting forth an array of structural rules that could be used to provide a sizable class of intermediate logics with cut-free nested sequent systems. (shrink)

Difficult to know and impossible to forget, Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He published only one book in his lifetime - a masterpiece that moulded the evolution of philosophy and baffled his teachers. Spanning most of his life, from his early encounters with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge to a final trip to New York via the Russian Front, Wittgenstein: The Crooked Roads tracks the journeys of a tortured soul. William Lyons, Professor Emeritus of (...) Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin, has written a moving and philosophically acute journey through successive decades of Wittgenstein's career. The play received its world premiere on 19 April 2011 at the Riverside Studios. (shrink)