It is often held that according to Aristotle the city is a natural organism. One major reason for this organic interpretation is no doubt that Aristotle describes the relationship between the individual and the city as a part-whole relationship, seemingly the same relationship that holds between the parts of a natural organism and the organism itself. Moreover, some scholars (most notably Jonathan Barnes) believe this view of the city led Aristotle to accept an implicit totalitarianism. I argue, however, that (...) an investigation of the various ways Aristotle describes parts and wholes reveals that for Aristotle the city has a unity (and thus a nature) quite different from that of a natural organism. (shrink)

JONATHAN BARNES HAS WRITTEN RECENTLY that "Aristotle's remarks [on property] in the Politica are too nebulous to sustain any serious critical discussion." Some scholars are more confident about successfully getting to the bottom of Aristotle's opinions concerning property, but few have dealt with the topic in any detail. In this essay I shall investigate the relevant texts on property from the Aristotelian corpus, beginning with an especially careful look at Aristotle's criticism of Plato's communism of property. I shall also (...) consider the historical and cultural context in which Aristotle was writing. The result will be, I hope, a full account of, and hence a better understanding of, Aristotle's views on property. (shrink)

In this article I suggest that perceived tension in Jonathan Mayhew's political and social thought is resolved by taking full account of the conservative (i.e. traditional) aspects of his political thought. Mayhew's social thought did contain elements that were profoundly conservative, most notably his belief in a relatively fixed social hierarchy. More, the presumption of a natural social ordering of men and the attendant emphasis on deference stands in tension with the more radical principles that characterized (...) class='Hi'>Mayhew's political theory. This tension can be reconciled, however, by his faith in a king characterized by a paternal regard for his subjects, an assumption that continued to shape colonial political thought at the start of the British-colonial crisis. I conclude by suggesting that the greater tension lies not in his political theory, but rather between his political theory and a preaching style that at times undermined the very social and political order he sought to maintain. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance, marking the collapse of Marxist politics and economics. Indeed, Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seems, all reason to take the writings of Karl Marx seriously. Jonathan Wolff argues that if we detach Marx the critic of current society from Marx the prophet of some never-to-be-realized worker's paradise, he remains the most impressive critic we have of liberal, capitalist, bourgeois society. The author shows how Marx's main (...) ideas still shed light on wider concerns about culture and society and he guides the reader through Marx's notoriously difficult writings. Wolff also argues that the value of a great thinker does not depend on his or her views being true, but on other features such as originality, insight, and systematic vision. From this perspective, Marx still richly deserves to be read. Why Read Marx Today? reinstates Marx as an important critic of current society, and not just a figure of historical interest. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 251-276 [Access article in PDF] British Geography's Republic of Letters: Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600-1800 Robert Mayhew University of Bristol Introduction: Geographies of the Republic of Letters One of the main ways in which scholars molded their self image in early modern Europe was as citizens of the "republic of letters." At the level of professed ideals the concept of (...) the republic of letters was simple: scholars would create an egalitarian world amongst themselves, where views could be expressed without the rancor of national, religious, historical, or other barriers to their exchanges. Recent studies have highlighted the impressive degree to which eighteenth-century scientists ignored war and xenophobia to exchange ideas, thereby enacting the cosmopolitan ideal of a republic of letters.1 Yet the details of this ideal have been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, in part because there were many versions of scholarly cosmopolitanism,2 but more importantly because the reality of the republic of letters was in most instances at some distance from the ideal.3 There have been debates about the chronology of the rise and fall of the republic of letters, Miller seeing it as having risen to prominence in the later sixteenth century but in terminal decline by 1720. By contrast Goldgar shifts the era of the republic of letters to 1660-1750, and most recently Brockliss has argued for the essentially healthy state of the republic of [End Page 251] letters into the era of the French Revolution.4 Such chronological debates have themselves been prompted by a major disagreement over the relationship between the republic of letters and the Enlightenment of the philosophes: was the former a mere token of the ancien régime which was destroyed by an incipiently radical Enlightenment,5 or was the ideal of egalitarian cosmopolitanism which the republic of letters championed the seedbed for such radicalism, thereby making Enlightenment philosophes a subset of the republic of letters rather than their successors?6Clearly, debates about the meaning of the republic of letters have been sparked by its status as a quasi-political republican body and the extent to which this was mere terminology or was a real spur to new forms of political association. Yet the notion of a republic also presupposes a geography: a polis, fictive or real, needs a territorial scope over which it holds sway. Concerning the geography of the republic of letters, recent scholarship has been both more consensual and less critically acute. A number of scholars have documented the extent to which the republic's cosmopolitan ideals were undermined by national antagonisms and religious schisms.7 Furthermore, feminist scholars have pointed to the complexities of female participation in this arena, their salons enabling while their gender undermined their ability to negotiate a relationship with the public sphere of the republic.8 Clearly, there was a tension between nationalism (together with other forms of parochialism such as gender discrimination) and cosmopolitanism in the political geography of the republic of letters.At a more concrete level, several studies have analyzed the geography of the republic of letters by trying to map its spatial extent in diagrams or prose. Ultee has looked at the spatial extent of Leibniz's correspondents, and Brockliss has likewise mapped Esprit de Calvet's web of communications.9 Parallel studies of scientific correspondence networks have been conducted for Albrecht [End Page 252] von Haller and the natural historians clustered around Buffon.10 In this respect perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated work has been produced by historians of science galvanized by the work of Latour.11 Thus Lux and Cook have looked to the chains of contact and epistolary exchange by which Oldenberg came to credit knowledge claims for inclusion in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, while parallel methods have been used to analyze the geography of Jesuit scholarly exchange.12Other elements of the circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe beyond correspondence have also been examined to give readings of the geography of... (shrink)

This study examines the use of a modified form of the theory of planned behavior in understanding the decisions of undergraduate students in engineering and humanities to engage in cheating. We surveyed 527 randomly selected students from three academic institutions. Results supported the use of the model in predicting ethical decision-making regarding cheating. In particular, the model demonstrated how certain variables (gender, discipline, high school cheating, education level, international student status, participation in Greek organizations or other clubs) and moral constructs (...) related to intention to cheat, attitudes toward cheating, perceptions of norms with respect to cheating, and ultimately cheating behaviors. Further the relative importance of the theory of planned behavior constructs was consistent regardless of context, whereas the contributions of variables included in the study that were outside the theory varied by context. Of particular note were findings suggesting that the extent of cheating in high school was a strong predictor of cheating in college and that engineering students reported cheating more frequently than students in the humanities, even when controlling for the number of opportunities to do so. (shrink)

Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk their responsibilities, using the language of truth-maker theory but without paying any ontological price. We argue that presentists (...) should be nefarious presentists. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

Eighteenth-century theologian_Jonathan Edwards remains a significant influence on modern religion, and this book constitutes his most important contribution to Christian thought. Edwards_raises timeless questions about desire, choice, good, and evil, contrasting the opposing Calvinist and Arminian views of free will and addressing issues related to God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency.

Many P4/WC practitioners and theorists privilege the school as a space for thinking and practicing philosophy for/with children. Despite its coercive nature, thinkers such as Jana Mohr Lone, David Kennedy, and Nancy Vansieleghem argue that P4C is a Trojan horse intended to reform the education system from within. I argue, however, that the Trojan horse argument requires us to internalize an incomplete and historically decontextualized understanding of public schools that in turn can reify histories of white supremacy within our CPIs (...) – a consequence that can be particularly harmful when practicing P4C with minority youth. To accurately adjudicate the value of public school classrooms for P4C – especially for those CPIs whose members are primarily Black, Latinx, Indigenous, or other youth of color — I contextualize the Trojan horse argument in the history of race and education in the United States. Through this historical analysis, I conclude that the reformist position becomes increasingly more untenable and that the material history of race and education in fact supports a pessimistic understanding of P4C in education. I end by reflecting on P4C’s need to rethink its privileging of schools as a primary site for philosophical inquiry and caution practitioners against using “social progress” as a justification for how and where they practice their craft. Instead, I encourage them to rethink how and where they practice P4C, based on the local historical and material conditions of the participants. (shrink)

In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that...

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a (...) way independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)

Is the brain really a computer? In particular, is our intelligence a computational achievement: is it because our brains are computers that we get on in the world as well as we do? In this paper I will evaluate an ambitious new argument to the contrary, developed in Landgrebe and Smith (2021a, 2022). Landgrebe and Smith begin with the fact that many dynamical systems in the world are difficult or impossible to model accurately (inter alia, because it is intractable to (...) find exact solutions to the differential equations that describe them—meaning we have to approximate—but at the same time they are such that small differences in starting conditions lead to big differences in final conditions, thwarting accurate approximation). Yet we manage to survive and thrive in a world full of such systems. Landgrebe and Smith argue from these premises that it is not because our brains are computers that we get on as well as we do: instead it is because of the various ways that we dynamically couple with such systems, these couplings themselves impossible to model well enough to emulate in silico. Landgrebe and Smith thus defend a dynamical systems model in the lineage of Gibson (1979), Van Gelder (1995), and Thompson (2007), though their focus is on decisively refuting the computationalist alternatives rather than developing the positive account. Here I will defend the claim that human intelligence is genuinely computational (and that whole brain emulation and others forms of AGI may be possible) against this argument. (shrink)

This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...) practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

The Oxford Translation of Aristotle was originally published in 12 volumes between 1912 and 1954. It is universally recognized as the standard English version of Aristotle. This revised edition contains the substance of the original Translation, slightly emended in light of recent scholarship three of the original versions have been replaced by new translations and a new and enlarged selection of Fragments has been added. The aim of the translation remains the same: to make the surviving works of Aristotle readily (...) accessible to English speaking readers. (shrink)

This book evaluates the consequences of economic, social, environmental and cultural change on people living and working within Teesside in the North-East of England. It assesses the lived experiences, working lives, health and cultural perspectives of residents and key stakeholders in the wake of serious de-industralisation in the region. The narrative is embedded within the long-term industrial history of Stockton: an area once dominated by steel, coal and chemical industries. This past still continues to shape its future and influences the (...) ways in which that future is conceived and envisioned. The author explores a 'biography of place' analytical framework to offer a holistic view of the area, which considers the interaction between the social, economic, cultural, visual and environmental legacy of the community, which is firmly grounded in the past, present and future prospects of those who live and work there. (shrink)

"The selections are well chosen... the Introduction and headnotes are extremely clear and well written... appropriately pegged for a very introductory audience." --Steven Gerrard, Williams College.

Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.

Originally published in 1982, this was an extensive and up-to-date review of research into the psychology of deductive reasoning, Jonathan Evans presents an alternative theoretical framework to the rationalist approach which had dominated much of the published work in this field at the time. The review falls into three sections. The first is concerned with elementary reasoning tasks, in which response latency is the prime measure of interest. The second and third sections are concerned with syllogistic and propositional reasoning (...) respectively, in which interest has focused on the explanation of frequently observed logical errors. In an extended discussion it is argued that reasoning processes are content specific, and give little indication of the operation of any underlying system of logical competence. Finally, a dual process theory of reasoning, with broad implications and connections with other fields of psychology, is elaborated and assessed in the light of recent evidence. (shrink)

v. 1. Science.--v. 2. Ethics and politics.--v. 3. Metaphysics.--v. 4. Psychology & aesthetics.

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)

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

This book represents the first major attempt by any author to provide an integrated account of the evidence for bias in human reasoning across a wide range of disparate psychological literatures. The topics discussed involve both deductive and inductive reasoning as well as statistical judgement and inference. In addition, the author proposes a general theoretical approach to the explanations of bias and considers the practical implications for real world decision making. The theoretical stance of the book is based on a (...) distinction between preconscious heuristic processes which determine the mental representation of 'relevant' features of the problem content, and subsequent analytic reasoning processes which generate inferences and judgements. Phenomena discussed and interpreted within this framework include feature matching biases in propositional reasoning, confirmation bias, biasing and debiasing effects of knowledge on reasoning, and biases in statistical judgement normally attributed to 'availability' and 'representativeness' heuristics. In the final chapter, the practical consequences of bias for real life decision making are considered, together with various issues concerning the problem of 'debiasing'. The major approaches discussed are those involving education and training on the one hand, and the development of intelligent software and interactive decision aids on the other. (shrink)

Foundations of a Free Society brings together some of the most knowledgeable Ayn Rand scholars and proponents of her philosophy, as well as notable critics, putting them in conversation with other intellectuals who also see themselves as defenders of capitalism and individual liberty. United by the view that there is something importantly right—though perhaps also much wrong—in Rand’s political philosophy, contributors reflect on her views with the hope of furthering our understandings of what sort of society is best and why. (...) The volume provides a robust elaboration and defense of the foundation of Rand’s political philosophy in the principle that force paralyzes and negates the functioning of reason; it offers an in-depth scholarly discussion of Rand’s view on the nature of individual rights and the role of government in defending them; it deals extensively with the similarities and differences between Rand’s thought and the libertarian tradition (to which she is often assimilated) and objections to her positions arising from this tradition; it explores Rand’s relation to the classical liberal tradition, specifically with regard to her defense of freedom of the intellect; and it discusses her views on the free market, with special attention to the relation between these views and those of the Austrian school of economics. (shrink)

Introduction As its title indicates, this book is intended to provide an introduction to the main topics currently discussed under the rather unclear ...

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is (...) still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in Section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument. (shrink)

The five hundred years from 300 B.C. to A.D. 200 were a period during which Greek science made spectacular advances and Greek philosophy underwent dramatic changes. How much did the scientists take note of the philosophical issues bearing on their pursuits? What progress did the philosophers make with methodological and theoretical issues arising out of developments in science? What influence did philosophical criticism or philosophical ideas have on specific theories in medicine or mechanics, mathematics or astronomy? These are some of (...) the questions discussed in this series of papers by the distinguished scholars who took part in the Confe;rence Hellenistique in Paris in 1980. The result is a broad-ranging and pioneering volume which will be of importance to scholars in the history and philosophy of science and to those whose interests lie in classical philosophy. (shrink)