This book is an English version of a book published in 1984 in French, the aim of which was to give a reconstruction of Diodorus Cronus's Master Argument, together with a historical analysis of some of the central modal notions on which it draws. In preparing the English text, Vuillemin has made some changes to the logic of his reconstruction of Diodorus's Argument and added an epilogue. The Master Argument consisted of three premises: Every past truth is necessary, The impossible (...) does not follow from the possible, and Something is possible which neither is nor will be true. Diodorus claimed that these premises are inconsistent, and purported to derive the negation of the third premise, which is plausibly to be identified with the principle of plenitude, from the first two premises. (shrink)

La logique--La géométrie--Questions diverses--Considérations sur différentes sciences--Note I. Sur la géométrie projective--Note II. Éclaircissements divers (Notions de groupe, sur les notions premières, sur la classification des sciences).

Introduction EMPIRICISM DOES NOT stand in very high repute among literary theorists these days. Regarded generally as a discredited philosophical paradigm ...

In 1901 George Lincoln Burr published an article in the American Historical Review in which he summarized for American historians a new consensus among their European colleagues: the arrival of the year 1000 had not provoked any apocalyptic expectations. This position completely reversed the previous view championed in the mid-nineteenth century by historians like Jules Michelet, who had drawn a dramatic picture of mass apocalyptic expectations climaxing in the year 1000. Despite extensive advances in scholarship since 1900, medieval historians (...) continue to accept and repeat this revisionist position, a position that is methodologically jejune and that almost completely ignores the social dynamics of millennial beliefs. This paper proposes to reconsider the issue from the perspective of the more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon made possible by two generations of millennial scholarship. (shrink)

This article shows how Lamarckism was essential in the birth of the French school of molecular biology. We argue that the concept of inheritance of acquired characters positively shaped debates surrounding bacteriophagy and lysogeny in the Pasteurian tradition during the interwar period. During this period the typical Lamarckian account of heredity treated it as the continuation of protoplasmic physiology in daughter cells. Félix d’Hérelle applied this conception to argue that there was only one species of bacteriophage and Jules Bordet (...) applied it to develop an account of bacteriophagy as a transmissible form of autolysis and to analyze the new phenomenon of lysogeny. In a long-standing controversy with Bordet, Eugène Wollman deployed a more morphological understanding of the inheritance of acquired characters, yielding a particulate, but still Lamarckian, account of lysogeny. We then turn to André Lwoff who, with several colleagues, completed Wollman’s research program from 1949 to 1953. We examine how he gradually set aside the Lamarckian background, finally removing inheritance of acquired characters from the resulting account of bacteriophagy and lysogeny. In the conclusion, we emphasize the complex dual role of Lamarckism as it moved from an assumed explanatory framework to a challenge that the nascent molecular biology had to overcome. (shrink)

The year 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of a publication by William Twort, in which he first described lysis of bacterial cultures by a filterable, self-replicating agent. In 1917, Félix d’Herelle, coined the name “bacteriophage” for the proposed agent. Two Belgian teams of microbiologists were among the few to critically examine the nature of the bacteriophage at that time. Although their experimental results agreed, their interpretations did not. Richard Bruynoghe interpreted them as supportive of d’Herelle’s notion of an ultramicroscopic (...) microorganism. Jules Bordet found the proposal of a complex organism unnecessary and saw the bacteriophage as a simple endogenous bacterial enzyme endowed with capacity to induce its own secretion as well as ability to cause lysis of the bacteria. Two decades would elapse before bacteriophages were visualized and confirmed to be organized particles. However, by that time, Bruynoghe’s work, that had only been published in short notes in society proceedings, was virtually forgotten. The present paper revives his original observations and arguments, while also recognizing that Bordet’s alternative hypothesis had scientific merit. (shrink)

Epistemic logic has grown from its philosophical beginnings to find diverse applications in computer science, and as a means of reasoning about the knowledge and belief of agents. This book provides a broad introduction to the subject, along with many exercises and their solutions. The authors begin by presenting the necessary apparatus from mathematics and logic, including Kripke semantics and the well-known modal logics K, T, S4 and S5. Then they turn to applications in the context of distributed systems and (...) artificial intelligence. These include the notions of common knowledge, distributed knowledge, explicit and implicit belief, the interplays between knowledge and time, and knowledge and action, as well as a graded (or numerical) variant of the epistemic operators. The authors also discuss extensively the problem of logical omniscience. They cover Halpern & Moses' theory of honest formulas, and they make a digression into the realm of nonmonotonic reasoning and preferential entailment. They discuss Moore's autoepistemic logic, together with Levesque's related logic of "all I know". Furthermore, they show how one can base default and counterfactual reasoning on epistemic logic. Graduate students in philosophy or in computer science, especially those with an interest in AI, will find this book useful. (shrink)

Bioethics and feminist scholarship has explored various justice implications of nonmedical sex selection and family balancing. However, prospective users’ viewpoints have been absent from the debate over the socially acceptable bounds of nonmedical sex selection. This qualitative study provides a set of empirically grounded perspectives on the moral values that underpin prospective users’ conceptualizations of justice in the context of a family balancing program in the United States. The results indicate that couples pursuing family balancing understand justice primarily in individualist (...) and familial terms rather than in terms of social justice for women and girls or for children resulting from sex selection. Study participants indicated that an individual’s desire for gender balance in their family is ethically complex and may not be inherently sexist, immoral, or socially consequential, particularly given the social context in which they live. Our findings suggest that the social conditions that contribute to prospective users’ desires for gender balance in their families may direct them away from recognizing or engaging broader social justice concerns relating to sexism and stratified reproduction. (shrink)

By considering the experience of historians in national and regional archives, the relationship of memory to history and historical practice is discussed. The professional experience of historians is connected to wider social and psychological uses of the past, and of history in Euro pean societies, over the 200 years since official archives were inaugur ated.

Gary Kates has written an admirable and original study, which also happens to be a very good read. In a series of ‘case studies’ of eighteenth-century books, Kates shows how a significant ‘sample’...

Preview: In various guises and cultures, the theme of elevating, ennobling love is a recurrent topos in the premodern erotic theory my book traces. Freed from Plato’s problematic dualistic denigration of the body as prison of the soul and from the modern aesthetic prejudice of disinterestedness, Ars Erotica recaptures the valuable core of ennobling desire by showing how a new somaesthetic approach to sex could channel the power of eros to cultivate qualities of courtesy, grace, skill, self-mastery, and sensitivity to (...) the feelings of others, thus evoking a richer, more positive vision of sex education than we have today. (shrink)

In ‘The Authorship of Sister Peg', David Raynor relies on circumstantial evidence, unsubstantiated hypotheses, and subjective analysis in an effort to dispute my article ‘Let Margaret Sleep' and claim the authorship of Sister Peg for David Hume. This reply focusses instead on the large body of documentary and testimonial evidence that has surfaced during the past forty years, which overwhelmingly and convincingly supports the attribution of Sister Peg to Adam Ferguson. New documentary evidence includes Ferguson's emendations in Sir Walter Scott's (...) copy of Sister Peg, an 1809 letter from Ferguson to Alexander Fraser Tytler and Tytler's response to it, and information about the early publishing history of the work – as well as a letter by Hume himself about his preoccupation with another project when Sister Peg was written. While no new contemporary testimonials alleging Hume's authorship have been discovered since the publication of Raynor's edition of Sister Peg in 1982, at least nine contemporary testimonials naming Ferguson as the author are now known. This reply refutes Raynor's attempts to discredit the most famous of these testimonials – the account of Ferguson's authorship in the memoirs of Alexander Carlyle – and shows that the others cannot be reduced to Carlyle’s influence. (shrink)

In der Forschung zum Fortleben der aristotelischen Seelenlehre in den ersten zwei Jahrhunderten nach Aristoteles' Tod lag der Schwerpunkt vor allem auf seiner Lehre vom Intellekt. Doch bilden die Kapitel uber den Intellekt nur einen kleinen Teil von Aristoteles' De anima. Die vorliegende Arbeit rekonstruiert deshalb die Seelenlehren der fruhen Peripatetiker Theophrast, Dikaiarch, Aristoxenos, Klearch, Straton und Kritolaos unter Berucksichtigung aller Seelenvermogen und pruft, inwiefern die Peripatetiker Aristoteles' Seelenlehre rezipiert und transformiert haben. Die Rekonstruktionen basieren auf ausfuhrlichen quellenkritischen Studien und (...) Uberlieferungsanalysen, da fast ausschliesslich Testimonien uber die fruhen Peripatetiker vorliegen. Die Ergebnisse geben Impulse fur die weitere Forschung zur doxographischen Uberlieferung, zu den hellenistischen Schultraditionen und zum Aristotelismus. (shrink)

Rylands Irish MS 22 is a copy of Geoffrey Keatings Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis, made by the well-known scribe Risteard Tuibear in 1710, a professionally made vernacular book, making available for circulation a widely read devotional text. In the last two pages the scribe permitted an apprentice to copy, and as a result he had to write the ending a second time more correctly. Like several other books made by Tuibear, it belonged to Muiris Ó Gormáin in Dublin in the (...) later eighteenth century and is found in his book lists from 1761 and 1772. Inside the front is the book-plate of the Duke of Sussex, and the catalogue of his library from 1827 shows that this is a book given to him by Sir William Betham a year earlier. When the Duke‘s library was auctioned, this was sold to a London dealer, reappearing in sales between 1866 and 1869. It was bought by the Earl of Crawford and came with all his manuscripts into the Rylands Library, where for its origin and history it stands out from a collection of books largely made for or by Denis Kelly, of Castle Kelly, in the mid-nineteenth century. (shrink)

Causation is a basic category, not reducible to anything else. Intentional causation is a species of causation of which we are aware when we try to move our limbs. Talk of ‘laws of nature’ is reducible to talk of the causal powers and liabilities of substances. A perfectly free agent will inevitably do only good actions – the best action or one of a number of equal best actions, if there are such.

Analyses the divine properties, which all follow from eternal omnipotence, omniscience and perfect freedom. ‘Eternal’ must be understood as ‘everlasting’. A divine individual cannot have a beginning; but in the absence of a temporal metric, there is no difference between such an individual existing for only a finite time and existing for an infinite time. A divine individual is not a logically necessary being.

Sentences can be thought of as expressing propositions or statements. The logical nominalist is right, against the logical Platonist, to hold that propositions and statements are not really existing things but mere useful fictions. A sentence is logically necessary if its negation entails a contradiction, given that its referring expressions in fact pick out the objects that they do. A sentence's entailments are a matter of the human conventions for the use of that sentence. There are kinds of necessity other (...) than logical necessity. In particular, there is what I call ‘ontological necessity’ – everlasting uncaused existence; and what I call ‘metaphysical necessary’. Something is metaphysically necessary in my sense if either it is ontologically necessary or it is inevitably caused to exist everlastingly by something ontologically necessary. (shrink)

A substance is a concrete individual thing that exists all at once. Although the world can be cut up into substances in different ways, any full description of the world will include both material objects and immaterial souls as substances. Souls have essentially mental properties, ones to which the subject has privileged access such as thoughts and sensations. The essential part of a human being is a human soul, one with a structure and a capacity for logical thought, moral belief, (...) and free will, and certain limited powers exercised through a human body. No human being is essentially human. (shrink)

Everything that happens, happens over a period of time, and never at an instant. Time must have a topology, but it only has a metric if there are laws of nature. The future is what we can causally affect; the past is what causally affects us. There are both indexical and non‐indexical temporal facts Necessarily, time has no beginning and no end.

All the divine properties follow from one essential property of having pure limitless intentional power. An individual with this property will be metaphysically necessary. Aquinas was right to hold that what binds the divine properties together was causal power, and not – as Anselm held – being the greatest conceivable being. A divine individual is simple and does not have thisness.

God does not need to become incarnate, i.e. human, to forgive us, but it is good that he should do so to make his forgiveness available to us by means of an atonement for our sins; and also for many other reasons – to identify with our sufferings, show us how much he loves us, and reveal truths to us. Evidence that Jesus was God Incarnate is provided by the kind of life he led, and its culmination in the Resurrection. (...) Other accounts of the ‘incarnation’ – monophysitism, Nestorianism, the Kenotic Theory, and modern humanistic Christologies – are less probable than the Chalcedonian one. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the Virgin Birth, and the Ascension of Christ. (shrink)

The Council of Chalcedon declared that one individual, Jesus Christ, had two natures – divine and human. His divine nature must be regarded as consisting of the essential divine properties plus the specific properties essential to the second member of the Trinity. The human nature must be regarded not as a substance, but as the contingent properties analysed in Ch. 1 that make someone human. New Testament and later‐Christian doctrine require that we understand the two collections of properties as instantiated (...) somewhat separately from each other, so that Christ has two minds, a divine one and a human one, the human one not being fully aware of the divine one. Although Christ could have done no wrong, he could – but did not – yield to temptation to do less than the best. (shrink)

There can be more than one divine individual if any others are dependent for their existence on a first one and if it is supremely good, act to cooperate with a second individual to share all that they have with a third individual. In that case, God will be a Trinity, three divine persons, the others deriving ultimately from one of these, ‘The Father’. The Nicene creed and other Christian doctrinal statements of the doctrine of the Trinity can be seen (...) to fit this account, if we bear in mind that the words of Greek and Latin, translated into English as ‘God’ are ambiguous between a name, ‘God’ and ‘a divine being’. We do not need the notion of relative identity to explicate the doctrine of the Trinity. (shrink)

In responding to the three creative interpretive discussions in the symposium on my book Philosophy and the Art of Writing, this paper explores the different styles of philosophical discourse and their role in the practice of philosophy as a way of life that extends beyond the discursive and that combines self-cultivation with care for others in the ethical-aesthetic pursuit of living beauty. In advocating this aesthetic model of philosophical life over a purely therapeutic model, I suggest how the former can (...) incorporate the latter's concerns for spiritual health and liberation. In developing my response to the symposiasts while elaborating on the themes of my book, I consider issues of ineffability, creative performance, embodiment, truth, heroism, vulnerability, possession, art, spirituality, love, and liberation. (shrink)

Nystrom and Puckett's pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty's political views. This is Rorty being avuncular, cranky, and straightforward: his arguments on patriotism, the political left, and philosophy—as usual, unusual—are worth pondering. This pamphlet will appeal to all those interested in Rorty's distinct brand of pragmatism and leftist politics in the United States.

Prior research has investigated how narcissistic executives affect firm policies and outcomes and how these executives influence colleagues and followers. However, almost no research exists concerning the impact of narcissistic executives on external agents. We examine the case of credit ratings—where analysts are required to assess management competence and where undue management influence is a concern—to determine whether narcissistic CEOs exert an effect on their firm’s rating. Using the size of the CEO’s personal signature to measure narcissism, we find that (...) CEO narcissism is associated with worse credit ratings. This effect is attenuated when firms face greater financial constraints, higher industry competition, and more concentrated institutional ownership. Our study contributes to the growing body of literature on CEO narcissism and suggests that these manipulative individuals are unable to exert an obvious upward influence on credit rating agencies. (shrink)

Abstract Responding to recent calls from within critical MOS and organizational ethics studies to explore questions of difference and inclusion ‘beyond unity and fixity’, this paper seeks to enrich the debate on difference and its negotiation in organizations, thereby foregrounding difference as the contested and ever-changing outcome of power-invested configurations of practice. The paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in a psychosocial day-care centre that positions itself as a ‘space of multiplicity’ wherein ‘it is normal to be different’. Highlighting the (...) context-specific challenges and struggles encompassing mental ill-health as a category of difference deviating from the norm, our paper contributes to a critical-affirmative understanding of difference. We foster an approach that values normative orientations such as ‘egalitarian difference’ and ‘difference as multiplicity’ yet avoids idealising portrayals of an ethics of difference that challenges normalcy and unconditionally favours otherness and calls for ‘radically other kinds of difference’. (shrink)

More than any other textbook, Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking has defined the structure and content of the critical thinking course at colleges and universities across the country--and has done so with a witty writing style that students enjoy. Now in full-color, the eighth edition brings the concepts of critical thinking to life in vivid detail, with current examples relevant to today's students.

Philosophy is typically identified with the textual practices of reading and writing and oral dialogue. It has also claimed to be an entire way of life, an art of living dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and thus to the practices that such pursuit should entail. This chapter probes to what extent philosophy as a practice or art of living requires a literary or more generally textual form. It also considers why it should not confine itself to the limits of (...) discourse. It argues that if philosophy requires more than words, there is a twofold challenge for philosophy as a way of life. It is not enough to compose texts and refine our language with logical and literary skill; we must also take real pains, in practicing philosophy, to give careful composition to our character, behavior, and bearing, and to refine them through harmonizing grace and attractive style. (shrink)

After briefly noting key contemporary critiques of aesthetic experience, this article revisits its original account in Plato’s theory of aesthetic experience as the madness of divine possession and then Aristotle’s response of defending art’s rationality as poiesis, which largely dominates the ensuing aesthetic tradition. I subsequently explore how the mysterious notion of possession continues to surface in important modern accounts of aesthetic experience (e. g. in Theodor W. Adorno, T. S. Eliot, John Dewey) and explain how the supernatural idea of (...) possession could find a naturalistic explanation that integrates the concepts of artworld, habitus and atmosphere. The article then exemplifies this naturalistic explanation through an analysis of the possession experience pertaining to performance art as documented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold. (shrink)

Propaganda in all its forms is the culture of a mass society. The media transmits propaganda to form public opinion and recreate the human being. Reversing the Western ideal of a rational and free individual, the media creates a childish conformist ensconced in the peer group, who acts unconsciously.

If technology is the single most important factor in explaining the organization of modern societies, it is likewise the key to understanding the modern personality. The technological personality is the psychological counterpart to the technological society.Technology indirectly destroys the basis of a common morality and so leaves human relationships vague, insincere, and potentially dangerous. The technological personality possesses a façade of extroverted cheerfulness to conceal and compensate for an inner core of loneliness and fear of others. At the same time (...) the technological personality allows one to internalize technological stimuli, thus creating a shield against certain kinds of stress, it reinforces and deepens loneliness. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce qu’une norme? Y a-t-il des relations logiques entre les normes? Sur quoi repose la validité d’un système normatif? Qu’est-ce que la validité déontique? Les verbes performatifs peuvent-ils agir sur le monde? Quelles sont les différentes façons d’agir en fonction d’une règle? Que sont les règles constitutives? Et qu’est-ce que la vérité? Ce sont là quelques-unes des questions que posent les essais d’Amedeo Giovanni Conte rassemblés dans cette anthologie. Ces essais offrent quelques-unes des contributions les plus originales et les plus (...) significatives de la philosophie du langage normatif. Amedeo Giovanni Conte (Pavie, 1934-Cava Manara, 2019), professeur émérite de l’Université de Pavie, membre de l’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, fut l’un des philosophes les plus originaux du droit italien. Parmi ses œuvres : Saggio sulla completezza degli ordinamenti giuridici (1962), les trois volumes de Filosofia del linguaggio normativo (1989-2001), Filosofia dell’ordinamento normativo (1997), Sociologia filosofica del diritto (2011) et Adelaster : Il nome del vero (2016). (shrink)

This comprehensive study of probability considers the approaches of Pascal, Laplace, Poisson, and others. It also discusses Laws of Large Numbers, the theory of errors, and other relevant topics.