Voltaire is widely known as the author of a literary masterpiece, Candide, while his reputation as a thinker rests largely on his Philosophical Letters and Philosophical Dictionary. He is equally renowned as a critic of the forces of superstition and fanaticism, and a champion of freedom of thought and belief. The works presented here, in a new English translation, are among the most important and characteristic texts of the Enlightenment, and bring together all three aspects of Voltaire: the writer, the (...) doer and the philosophe. Originating in Voltaire's campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, they are works of polemical brilliance, informed by his deism and humanism and by Enlightenment values and ideals more generally. The issues which they raise, concerning questions of tolerance and human dignity, are still highly relevant to our own times. This volume presents them together with an introduction by Simon Harvey and useful notes on further reading. (shrink)

Following the critically acclaimed _Zen at War_, Brian Victoria explores the intimate relationship between Japanese institutional Buddhism and militarism during the Second World War. Victoria reveals for the first time, through examination of the wartime writings of the Japanese military itself, that the Zen school's view of life and death was deliberately incorporated into the military's programme of 'spiritual education' in order to develop a fanatical military spirit in both soldiers and civilians. Furthermore, that D. T. Suzuki, the most (...) famous exponent of Zen in the West, is shown to have been a wartime proponent of this Zen-inspired viewpoint which enabled Japanese soldiers to leave for the battlefield already resigned to death. Victoria takes us onto the naval battlefield in the company of warrior-monk and Rinzai Zen Master Nakajima Genjô. We view the war in China through the eyes of a Buddhist military chaplain. The book also examines the relationship to Buddhism of Japan's seven Class-A war criminals who were hung by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1948. A highly controversial study, this book will be of interest, first and foremost, to students of Zen as well as all those studying the history of this period, not to mention anyone concerned with the perennial question of the 'proper' relationship between religion and the state. (shrink)

If you grade enough papers, you will find some consistent pitfalls, especially in the writing of students who are coming to philosophy for the first time. I wrote up the following tips a couple of years ago when I was a teaching assistant for an introductory philosophy class at Yale led by Daniel Greco called ‘Problems in Philosophy’. The tips were intended, then, for college students, many of them right out of high school, and most of whom had never written (...) a philosophy paper before. So the focus is on clarity and mastering the basics. With that in mind, I hope you will find these tips helpful for teaching or writing in philosophy. (shrink)

There are three conventionally held views about the relationship between mankind and nature in the Roman villa: man is master over the natural landscape; villas were positioned at vantage points so that the downward gaze of a dominus reinforced his domination; gardens offered opportunities to bring order upon nature. This article argues to the contrary that Manilius Vopiscus’ villa in Statius’ Siluae 1.3 presents a harmonious relationship between key natural features, the villa architecture and the villa proprietor himself. Nature sometimes (...) takes precedence, while the villa complements and integrates with the environment. This allows us to appreciate the nuances in Statius’ overall presentation of the relationship between mankind and nature in Book 1 and in other poems in the Siluae. (shrink)

This book brings Jacques Lacan's work on the problem of anxiety into a jarring and fruitful confrontation with phenomenology, existentialism, and the 'jargon' of authenticity. Brian Robertson masterfully upends a host of received philosophical truths - most notably, and crucially, the idea that anxiety 'lacks an object.'.

We examine the impact of an ethics education program on reporting behavior using two groups of students: fourth year Masters of Accounting students who just completed a newly instituted ethics education program, and fifth year students in the same program who did not receive the ethics program. In an experiment providing both the opportunity and motivation to misreport for more money, we design two social condition treatments – anonymity and public disclosure – to examine whether or to what extent (...) ethical values are internalized by students. We find that when participants are anonymous, misreporting rates are nearly the same regardless of ethics program participation. However, when their reporting behavior is made public to the cohort, participants who completed the ethics program misreported at significantly lower rates than those who did not receive the ethics program. The results suggest that ethics education does not necessarily result in internalized ethical values, but it can impact ethical behavior. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has adduced convincing evidence that, underlying the late medieval and early modern discourse on witchcraft and diabolism, there lay not only popular folkloric and religious beliefs, but also real practical activities by which individuals made manifest their malicious intent toward others, as well as subjective experiences of interaction with supernatural entities, some of which were interpreted as the Christian Devil. This hypothesis raises a number of hermeneutic questions concerning how the social and material conditions predicating concrete acts of (...) maleficium related to practitioners' social psychology and moral self-construction. Through the interpretive frame of Friedrich Nietzsche's antithesis of 'master' and 'slave' moralities, this paper argues that the Christian theological and cultural context of early modern Europe primed individuals to experience the constraints and stresses of everyday life in vividly moralized terms, and to strategically negotiate their own personal advantage by realigning themselves within this moral order. (shrink)

This review note surveys some important aspects of a recent publication by Amos Edelheit, A Philosopher at the Crossroads: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Scholastic Philosophy. While focus over the last decades has been placed on Pico’s thought in relation to Jewish Kabbalah and mysticism, Edelheit hopes to emphasize the importance of the scholastic tradition (or, rather, the pluriform and various tradition of late medieval and Renaissance scholasticism) in Pico’s thought, and the ways in which this intellectual context places (...) this unique Renaissance thinker at a sort of ‘crossroads’. Beyond providing a brief overview of the three main parts of the text, this note examines more closely Edelheit’s study of Pico’s 900 Theses and the methodological approach which involves a reconstruction of the dialectical context for each thesis. The Latin scholastics are real conversational partners for Pico: he is versed in the 13th-century scholastic sources, is certainly familiar with contemporaneous scholastic thought, and is able to employ scholastic methods and terminology within his wider philosophical project. While scholastic philosophy was very much alive at the end of the fifteenth century, Pico’s new and inclusive approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy, never eschewing the Latin masters, departs from both scholastic and humanist trends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual LifeBrian KarafinThe Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life. Edited by Phil Cousineau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 314 + xxiv pp.A certain air of dialectical paradox hovers around the figure of Huston Smith, a seeming conjunction of opposites that constitute "Huston Smith," apprehended not so much as a real individual but (...) as a cultural phenomenon in the life of our time. In books, television shows, interviews, and innumerable public talks and workshops, not to speak of five decades of classroom performativity, "Huston Smith" dances before us as a friendly master, a bearer of secret lore that seems freely offered in his open palms. He is an esoteric metaphysician who has played the role of public intellectual in matters religious from virtually the beginning of his career in the 1950s into the twenty-first century. As a champion of the perennial philosophy contained in the revealed traditions of the past, his writing addresses itself not to the scholars of that past but to the spiritual seekers and general publics of the postmodern new age. He is a guardian of orthodoxy, a defender of the hierarchical worldview of the great chain of being, who nevertheless, perhaps out of an excess of geniality, seems always on the verge of heterodox admissions. In these senses Huston Smith stands before us asa kind of hermetic trickster figure, a psychopomp attempting to lead the post-traditional multitudes back into touch with their spiritual roots hidden in the occulted shadows of the cultural unconscious—an unconscious constituted by the sunlit world of modern science as its repressed Other. There are riches in that underworld, hermetic Huston asserts beckoningly; follow me down into this dark Light.The interviews collected and edited by Phil Cousineau are, short of some future biographical study, the best place for the uninitiated to enter into the world of Huston Smith. Those who already know Smith's corpus might find this book slightly irksome in the repetitiveness, which is inevitable in any such gathering of interviews [End Page 186] conducted by a wide assortment of journalists who often have similar if not identical questions. The Way Things Are is nonetheless valuable in bringing forth the public voice of Huston Smith on his signature range of themes: the world's religions as repositories of "forgotten truth," the ideology of scientism as standing in need of philosophical critique in order to recover that truth, and the continuing cultural implications of the clashing worldviews of religion and science, tradition and modernity.Huston Smith's biographical trajectory as discussed in many of these interviews, while known in its general outlines by many (especially since the Bill Moyers series of televised interviews), bears meditating on as a way of elaborating this sense of dialectical paradox in what is often, overly simply, seen as the sunlit and straightforward figure of Smith as contemporary religious philosopher. Born in China of Methodist missionary parents, religion dawned for Smith in the form of a benevolently evangelical Protestantism surrounded by a religious and cultural other: the world of "the East." Returning to the United States for college and with plans for a career in ministry and mission work, Smith fell in love with the discipline of philosophy, which he pursued in graduate school under the tutelage of Henry Nelson Wieman. The naturalistic theism of Wieman was soon displaced, however, by Smith's encounter with the writings of Gerald Heard, who gave expression to the mystical worldview that has been the foundation of Smith's philosophy ever since. A sense of the reality of monistic, neo-Vedantist mystical experience, as formulated by Heard's writings of the 1940s and 1950s, led Smith to an encounter with Heard's fellow exiled English mystical Vedantist and perennial philosopher Aldous Huxley. The combined influences of Heard and Huxley, inclusive of their interest in psychedelic experimentalism, shaped the spiritual perspective of the next decade of Smith's life in St. Louis, studying with a swami of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda order, beginning his academic career, and launching into his role as popularizer of comparative religion through a television series... (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on the philosophical psychology of a little-studied author, Dominic of Flanders, as elaborated upon in a work that has received no attention in the scholarly literature thus far—viz., his Expositio super libros de anima. No modern editions of Dominic’s works exist. Born in the County of Flanders during the first half of the fifteenth century, Dominic was first educated at the University of Paris, but then made his intellectual home in Italy, where he entered the Dominican Order, (...) teaching at the studia of his order, as well as at the University of Florence. This study attempts to place Dominic within the broader context of Aristotelianism to which he belongs, recognizing his place within the school of Thomism that was thriving in Italy at the time, especially in Bologna. We have provided an account of his life and works, exhaustively examining available bibliographical literature, and have situated the composition of his Expositio during his period of Bologna following his entrance into the Order. In particular, we have studied the third book of his Expositio, which takes up the philosophical topics related to cognition and intellectual understanding. We have given attention to the themes of the cognition or knowledge of particulars, as well as the theory of abstraction, which is required for universal understanding. Beyond the fact that the theory of the internal senses is taken up at the outset of Dominic’s third book, it is our contention that a treatment of the internal senses is necessary for a proper understanding of particular knowledge. Dominic is firmly rooted in the Aristotelian tradition, and so for him there is no intellectual cognition without phantasms. Further, the role of the agent intellect is both to abstract from phantasms, as well as to turn back towards phantasms. In this study, we have shown the Flemish master’s reliance upon the thought and writings of Thomas Aquinas; we also have uncovered a silent source of Dominic’s Expositio—viz., the De anima commentary of John Versoris. Versoris’ commentary has been equally unstudied in the relevant scholarly literature. This Versoris had been Dominic’s teacher at Paris. The results of this research also include an edition of Latin text of the third book of Dominic’s Expositio super libros de anima. This edition is based on the four surviving manuscripts of the work, as well as three selected early modern editions ; this edition is presented in the dissertation as an appendix. (shrink)

Public administration curricula typically offer only very limited exposure to computers, despite the growing importance of computers in public management. This paper examines an approach to teaching computer management in a masters of public administration program, and relates that approach to the broader question of what public administrators need to know about computers. The approach involves instruction in computer literacy, computer applications, and management of computer resources. Instruction in these three areas appears to increase the importance students place on (...) managing computer resources and on understanding computer concepts, and to decrease the relative importance students place on managers' knowledge about specific computer applications. This shift in viewpoint appears appropriate based on interviews which suggest that practicing administrators place greater emphasis on understanding the broad issues of computer resource management, rather that on more specific computer knowledge or skill. (shrink)

When Ecce Homo was finally published in 1908, a New York Times reviewer declared that its “the most interesting portions... are those in which Nietzsche..., without delving into the depths of philosophy, shows himself primarily as a master of charming satirical prose”. The review largely consists of quotations in which Nietzsche satirizes, which is to say, mocks, Germans. The author apparently missed Nietzsche’s sarcastic report of another reviewer who characterized Thus Spoke Zarathustra “as an advanced exercise in style, and expressed (...) the wish that later on I might provide some content as well”. Over a century later, Nicholas D. More argues that Ecce... (shrink)

Marine interstitial environments are teeming with an extraordinary diversity of coexisting microeukaryotic lineages collectively called “meiofauna.” Interstitial habitats are broadly distributed across the planet, and the complex physical features of these environments have persisted, much like they exist today, throughout the history of eukaryotes, if not longer. Although our general understanding of the biological diversity in these environments is relatively poor, compelling examples of developmental heterochrony (e.g., pedomorphosis) and convergent evolution appear to be widespread among meiofauna. Therefore, an improved understanding (...) of meiofaunal biodiversity is expected to provide some of the deepest insights into the following themes in evolutionary biology: (i) the origins of novel body plans, (ii) macroevolutionary patterns of miniaturization, and (iii) the intersection of evolution and community assembly – e.g., “community convergence” involving distantly related lineages that span the tree of eukaryotes. (shrink)

In this paper I compare Timothy Williamson's knowledge rule of assertion with Ishani Maitra and Brian Weatherson's action rule. The paper is in two parts. In the first part I present and respond to Maitra and Weatherson's master argument against the knowledge rule. I argue that while its second premise, to the effect that an action X can be the thing to do though one is in no position to know that it is, is true, its first premise is (...) not: the data do not support the claim that whenever X is the thing for one to do, one is in a position to assert that it is. In the second part I consider Maitra and Weatherson's alternative hypotheses, arguing that they do not provide a better explanation of the linguistic data. I conclude, in particular, that the knowledge rule is preferable to the action rule. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of (...) antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of (...) antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it. (shrink)

Nietzsche holds that people lack freedom of the will in any sense that would be sufficient for ascriptions of moral responsibility; that the conscious experience we have of willing is actually epiphenomenal with respect to the actions that follow that experience; and that our actions largely arise through non-conscious processes (psychological and physiological) of which we are only dimly aware, and over which we exercise little or no conscious control. At the same time, Nietzsche, always a master of rhetoric, engages (...) in a “persuasive definition” (Stevenson 1938) of the language of “freedom” and “free will,” to associate the positive valence of these terms with a certain Nietzschean ideal of the person unrelated to traditional notions of free will. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Valla Our Contemporary:Philosophy and PhilologyBrian P. CopenhaverEven before the Italians knew what to call their Renaissance, they knew the names of its heroes, one of whom was Lorenzo Valla. Accordingly, by the time Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere published one of the first modern histories of Italian philosophy in 1834, Valla's place in the story of that subject had long been established-for Italians, at least. "He began by ridiculing (...) blind trust in Aristotle's words," wrote Mamiani,and then went on to show how the highest categories and first predicables had been based on false assumptions, proving this by the correct meaning of terms, by the usage of speakers and by arguments from common sense. Valla overthrew the classifications of Porphyry in the same way. He shows how the basic rules of logic are simple and completely self-evident.1 [End Page 507]In tribute to Salvatore Camporeale of the Order of Preachers, I shall preach a sermon about this celebrated Italian philosopher. My text is an article on Valla that Campo published in 1986, and my contention is that Valla was a remarkably original thinker who has been much underrated in the Anglophone world, in part because he has not been read often enough or carefully enough in a contemporary philosophical framework.2The Philosopher's Index is the most important general bibliography for philosophers now writing in English. The on-line version that gives nearly four thousand references in five languages for Descartes, over nine thousand for Aristotle, and nearly ten thousand for Kant turns up only forty-two for Valla; twenty-five of these are in English, but only two are in major Anglophone journals of philosophy.3 I call that underrated and understudied.The first English-language entry for Valla in the Philosopher's Index dates from 1948, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, a very influential book of readings (still in print) that presents Valla as a moral philosopher and Renaissance philosophy as not terribly important. The next entry, from 1964, refers to an equally influential book, Paul Kristeller's Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, one of whom is Valla, described by Kristeller not only as a moral philosopher but also, and more importantly, as a philosophical critic of logic and language.4 Around the same time, Hanna Gray, Jerrold Seigel, Charles Trinkaus, and others in this country had begun to study Valla's theory of language in more depth, and a few years later Camporeale's masterful book on Valla appeared in 1972.5Since Camporeale's book was then and is now the best account in any language of a brilliant philosopher, its absence from the Philosopher's Index indicates a kind of oblivion in Anglophone philosophy. In Europe and especially in Italy, by contrast, interest in Valla has been more or less continuous since his death in 1457. Mario Nizolio continued Valla's work in the sixteenth century, and both Valla and Nizolio were well known to Leibniz, who in turn [End Page 508] was the subject of an important book by Bertrand Russell in 1900.6 Russell's most popular work, however, was the History of Western Philosophy that he wrote much later, during the Second World War.7Many people have taken their bearings on the history of philosophy from Russell's exuberant History. Amazon.com still offers five editions by four publishers. And Amazon's rankings of sales of more recent accounts of the Renaissance period, the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy and the Renaissance Philosophy volume of Oxford's History of Western Philosophy, lag far behind the figures for a single edition of Russell's broader treatment (8,970 Russell; 481,085 Cambridge; 507,316 Oxford).8Despite its great success, Russell's book does not do well by our topic. His treatment of the Renaissance is like Burckhardt directed by Victor Hugo and produced by Macaulay. Cardinals poison each other while free-thinking scholars entertain princes to procure patronage. Humanism meanwhile dozes under the rubble of antiquity, too dazed by the ruins to produce original philosophy. The only philosophical good to come from philology was its odium. Incessant squabbling about which ancient... (shrink)

"Nietzsche is infuriatingly difficult to comprehend as he sets to tearing down every scaffold left from the old world. Beyond Good and Evil represents Nietzsche in his maturity, being written later in life. It is also some of his clearest writing since it is intentionally polemical. None of his writing is known particularly for its moderation, but Beyond Good and Evil is written as an assault on half-hearted philosophers who are still playing about with the old world. But he is (...) a particularly infuriating read for those who see the world as made and ruled by God. He is difficult to understand since he seeks to remove everything that makes such a world comprehensible. But to say this is simply to describe our age, and for this reason Nietzsche is valuable. But be warned, he will not be trifled with. Sit with him and listen as he seeks to remove every vestige of God from the world." The Worldview Guides from the Canon Classics Literature Series provide an aesthetic and thematic Christian perspective on the most definitive and daunting works of Western Literature. Each Worldview Guide presents the big picture (both the good and the bad) without neglecting the details. Each Worldview Guide is a friendly literary coach--and a treasure map, and a compass, and a key--to help teachers, parents, and students appreciate, critique, and begin to master the classics. The bite-size WGs are divided into these ten sections (with some variation due to genre): Introduction, The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Structure and Audience, Worldview Analysis, Quotables, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

In his lengthy survey of the cosmic devastation wrought by Phaethon's disastrous chariot ride, Ovid includes two catalogues detailing the scorching of the world's mountains and rivers. Ovid enlivens these lists through his usual play with sound patterns and revels in the opportunity to adapt so many Greek names to Latin prosody; for instance the opening line of the catalogue of mountains masterfully illustrates both of these features. The lists are also brimming with playful erudition. To take but a few (...) examples: a dried-up Ida belies its standard epithet πολυπῖδαξ, ‘many-fountained’ ; the sun's heat doubles the flames of volcanic Etna ; burning Xanthus is destined to burn again ; and the famous gold-bearing sands of the Tagus are melting. These features not only ‘relieve monotony’; they warrant the catalogues’ inclusion in the category of Ovid's most entertaining. (shrink)

How are the teachings of a thirteenth-century master relevant today? Twenty contemporary writers unpack Dogen's words and show how we can still find meaning in his teachings. Engaging Dogen's Zen is a practice oriented study of Shushogi (a canonical distillation of Dogen's thought used as a primer in the Soto School of Zen) and Fukanzazengi (Dogen's essential text on the practice of "just sitting," a text recited daily in the Soto School of Zen). It is also a study of the (...) entire self. Here, the principles of Soto Zen practice are unpacked and explained by leading contemporary Buddhists from the living tradition--monks, priests, academics, and community teachers. Tackling Dogen's approach to key issues, such as the preeminence of shikantaza, universal buddha nature, and what it means to be a Mahayana Buddhist, the contributors to the volume help Zen practitioners and any who are trying to deepen their lives to appreciate better the teachings of Soto Zen and make these teachings part of their lives. By revisiting what remains precious in Shushogi and Fukanzazengi, we let them breathe just as we learn to breathe in zazen. We find that Soto practice not only engages Dogen and Sakyamuni, but all of our sisters and brothers, and indeed the great earth itself. Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis. (shrink)

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

We provide a new interpretation of Zeno’s Paradox of Measure that begins by giving a substantive account, drawn from Aristotle’s text, of the fact that points lack magnitude. The main elements of this account are (1) the Axiom of Archimedes which states that there are no infinitesimal magnitudes, and (2) the principle that all assignments of magnitude, or lack thereof, must be grounded in the magnitude of line segments, the primary objects to which the notion of linear magnitude applies. Armed (...) with this account, we are ineluctably driven to introduce a highly constructive notion of (outer) measure based exclusively on the total magnitude of potentially infinite collections of line segments. The Paradox of Measure then consists in the proof that every finite or potentially infinite collection of points lacks magnitude with respect to this notion of measure. We observe that the Paradox of Measure, thus understood, troubled analysts into the 1880’s, despite their knowledge that the linear continuum is uncountable. The Paradox was ultimately resolved by Borel in his thesis of 1893, as a corollary to his celebrated result that every countable open cover of a closed line segment has a finite sub-cover, a result he later called the “First Fundamental Theorem of Measure Theory.” This achievement of Borel has not been sufficiently appreciated. We conclude with a metamathematical analysis of the resolution of the paradox made possible by recent results in reverse mathematics. (shrink)

Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance (...) frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out their common themes. One common theme is that the view that one should live up to one's own principles looks less attractive when people have terrible principles, or when following their own principles would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another common theme is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses. It can be hard to know what action or belief complies with one's principles. And now we can ask, in such a case should a person do what they think their principles require, or what their principles actually require? Both answers lead to problems, and the best way to avoid these problems is to simply say people should follow the correct principles. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its (...) qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers (...) from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are (...) avoided. This includes the conflict between eternalism and the semantics of tense, the embedding problems for contextualism about epistemic modals and taste claims, and the conflict between direct reference and the semantics of bound pronouns (and monstrous operators). After presenting the theoretical picture which distinguishes assertoric content from compositional semantic value, some objections to the picture are addressed. In so doing, the objection from King (2003) stemming from apparent complications with the interaction of temporal expressions and attitude reports is assessed and shown to be non-threatening. (shrink)

This article argues that, in public and policy contexts, the ways in which many scientists talk about uncertainty in simulations of future climate change not only facilitates communications and cooperation between scientific and policy communities but also affects the perceived authority of science. Uncertainty tends to challenge the authority of chmate science, especially if it is used for policy making, but the relationship between authority and uncertainty is not simply an inverse one. In policy contexts, many scientists are compelled to (...) talk about uncertainty but do not wish to imply that uncertainty is a serious challenge to the authority of scientific knowledge or to its substantial use in policy making. "Boundary-ordering devices, " the contextual discursive attempts to reconcile uncertainty and authority in science, depend critically for their success on their "dual" interpretation: at a general level across a boundary and differently on either side of it. The authors empirically identify a range of such boundary-ordering devices in the climate field. (shrink)

"Brian Orend's The Morality of War promises to become the single most comprehensive and important book on just war for this generation. It moves far beyond the review of the standard just war categories to deal comprehensively with the new challenges of the conflict with terrorism. It thoughtfully reviews every major military conflict of the past few decades, mining them for implications of the evolving tradition of just war thinking. It concludes with a critical engagement with the major alternatives (...) to just war thinking: pacifism and 'realism.' It is, in short, the most comprehensive and thoughtful assessment of all aspects of just war since Michael Walzer's classic Just and Unjust Wars." - Martin L. Cook, United States Air Force Academy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most theorists agree that our social order includes a distinctive legal dimension. A fundamental question is that of whether reference to specific legal phenomena always involves a commitment to a particular moral view. Whereas many philosophers advance the ‘positivist’ claim that any correspondence between morality and the law is just a function of political circumstance, natural law theorists insist that law is intrinsically moral. Each school claims the crucial advantage of consistency with our folk concept. Drawing on the notion (...) of dual character concepts, we develop a set of hypotheses about the intuitive relation between a rule’s moral and legal aspects. We then report a set of studies that conflict unexpectedly with the predictions by legal positivists. Intuitively, an evil rule is not a fully-fledged instance of law. (shrink)

Certain puzzling cases have been discussed in the literature recently which appear to support the thought that knowledge can be obtained by way of deduction from a falsehood; moreover, these cases put pressure, prima facie, on the thesis of counter closure for knowledge. We argue that the cases do not involve knowledge from falsehood; despite appearances, the false beliefs in the cases in question are causally, and therefore epistemologically, incidental, and knowledge is achieved despite falsehood. We also show that the (...) principle of counter closure, and the concomitant denial of knowledge from falsehood, is well motivated by considerations in epistemological theory--in particular, by the view that knowledge is first in the epistemological order of things. (shrink)

For a long time before the ‘climategate’ emails scandal of late 2009 which cast doubt on the propriety of science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, attention to climate change science and policy has focused solely upon the truth or falsity of the proposition that human behaviour is responsible for serious global risks from anthropogenic climate change. This article places such propositional concerns in the perspective of a different understanding of the relationships between scientific knowledge and public policy issues (...) from the conventional ‘translation’ model, in which prior scientific research and understanding is communicated and translated into corresponding policies — or not, if it remains disputed and overly uncertain. Explaining some of the key contingencies and bases for uncertainty in IPCC climate projections and human influences, I show how social and technical analysis of climate science is not about denial of the scientific propositional claims at issue, but about understanding the conditional and essentially ambiguous epistemic character of any such knowledge, however technically sophisticated and robust it may be. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is entirely plausible that existing scientific representations of climate change and its human causes may understate the risks induced by prevailing social-economic processes rather than exaggerate them. As the article shows, the public meanings given to climate science, and to ‘the climate problem’, and thus also the public culture which that knowledge is supposed to inform, are themselves already in key respects presumed and imposed by the science and its framing. This gives rise to perverse effects on public readiness to take informed democratic responsibility for ‘the global climate problem’, and associated cross-cutting issues which existing scientific framings of public policy erase from view. (shrink)

Kaplan (1989a) insists that natural languages do not contain displacing devices that operate on character—such displacing devices are called monsters. This thesis has recently faced various empirical challenges (e.g., Schlenker 2003; Anand and Nevins 2004). In this note, the thesis is challenged on grounds of a more theoretical nature. It is argued that the standard compositional semantics of variable binding employs monstrous operations. As a dramatic first example, Kaplan’s formal language, the Logic of Demonstratives, is shown to contain monsters. For (...) similar reasons, the orthodox lambda-calculus-based semantics for variable binding is argued to be monstrous. This technical point promises to provide some far-reaching implications for our understanding of semantic theory and content. The theoretical upshot of the discussion is at least threefold: (i) the Kaplanian thesis that “directly referential” terms are not shiftable/bindable is unmotivated, (ii) since monsters operate on something distinct from the assertoric content of their operands, we must distinguish ingredient sense from assertoric content (cf. Dummett 1973; Evans 1979; Stanley 1997), and (iii) since the case of variable binding provides a paradigm of semantic shift that differs from the other types, it is plausible to think that indexicals—which are standardly treated by means of the assignment function—might undergo the same kind of shift. (shrink)

In the first full-length analysis of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Brian R. Clack presents a fresh and innovative interpretation of Wittgenstein's conception of religion. While previous commentators have tended to sideline the Remarks on Frazer, Clack shows how the key to Wittgenstein's thought on religion lies in these remarks on primitive magico-religious observances. This book shows that Wittgenstein neither embraces expressivism, as it is generally assumed, nor straightforwardly denies instrumentalism. Focusing instead on Wittgenstein's suggestion that magic is (...) somehow akin to metaphysics, a view of ritual as the spontaneous expression of human beings is presented. (shrink)