Speakers address audiences in the earliest Greek literature, but oratory became a distinct genre in the late fifth century and reached its maturity in the fourth. This book traces the development of its techniques by examining the contribution made by each orator. Dr Usher makes the speeches come alive for the reader through an in-depth analysis of the problems of composition and the likely responses of contemporary audiences. His study differs from previous books in its recognition of the richness (...) of the early tradition which made innovation difficult; however, the orators are revealed as men of remarkable talent, versatility, and resource. Antiphon's pioneering role, Lysias' achievement of balance between the parts of the speech, the establishment of oratory as a medium of political thought by Demosthenes and Isocrates, and the individual characteristics of other orators - Andocides, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus and Apollodorus - together make a fascinating study in evolution; while the illustrative texts of the orators include some of the liveliest and most moving passages in Greek literature. (shrink)

Speakers address audiences in the earliest Greek literature, but oratory became a distinct genre in the late fifth century and reached its maturity in the fourth. This book traces the development of its techniques by examining the contribution made by each orator. Dr Usher makes the speeches come alive for the reader through an in-depth analysis of the problems of composition and the likely responses of contemporary audiences. His study differs from previous books in its recognition of the richness (...) of the early tradition which made innovation difficult, however, the orators are revealed as men of remarkable talent, versatility, and resource. Antiphon's pioneering role, Lysias' achievement of balance between the parts of the speech, the establishment of oratory as a medium of political thought by Demosthenes and Isocrates, and the individual characteristics of other orators - Andocides, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus and Apollodorus - together make a fascinating study in evolution; while the illustrative texts of the orators include some of the liveliest and most moving passages in Greek literature. (shrink)

After summarizing the content of Philip Rossi’s book, The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peace-Making as the Moral Vocation of Humanity, I pose two main questions. First, does politics or religion play a more important role in Kant’s philosophy when it comes to the task of ushering humanity to the realization of its ultimate vocation, the establishment of a lasting peace for human society? I argue that Kant portrays politics as a means to a religious end, whereas Rossi tends to reverse (...) their Kantian order of priority. Second, what concrete details does Kant give in defense of his theory that establishing an ethical community is a universal duty of humankind? As Rossi tends to overlook Kant’s details, I provide an overview. Kant argues that the ethical community can only be established in the form of a church and that the rational content constituting the core of the true church consists of four requirements: universality, integrity, freedom, and unchangeableness. After challenging Rossi’s claim that Kantian hope is necessarily social, I conclude with two minor questions: Is Kant’s theory of human nature dualist or monist? and Must the church create a political form of peace that applies to all human beings? (shrink)

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid (...) picture of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

Mr Jarvis, a Christian, was asleep in bed, dreaming of the Last Judgement. In his dream, Jarvis found himself seated next to God in a great cloud-swept hall. God had just finished handing down judgement on the drunkards, who were slowly shuffling out of the exit to the left. Angels were now ushering a group of nervous-looking men through the entrance to the right. As the men were assembled before Him, God began to speak.

Priorities in Medical Research was published in 1988 by a select committee of the House of Lords. The report ushered in an era of NHS research and development that lasted from 2001 to 2006. The inquiry's origins lay in concerns about academic medicine in the United Kingdom, yet PMR gave relatively little attention to this subject. Instead the report focused critically on the disconnect between the Department of Health and the NHS in R & D. This, the committee argued, had (...) led to the neglect of research into health services and public health. To sidestep the report's unwelcome proposal for a National Health Research Agency, the department eventually grafted R & D management onto structures created as part of wider NHS reforms. The Medical Research Council successfully pursued a strategy of keeping the committee's attention away from sensitive aspects of its own programme. The final focus of PMR was shaped by an alignment between committee members with an industrial view of research and champions of health services research. The actions of the various actors involved are interpreted using elite models of the state, and the applicability of these models is critically examined. (shrink)

This paper critiques the reduction of the significance of human moral action to mere social construction and suggests two perspectives that resist this theoretical maneuver. It is argued that any school of thought within psychology that cannot provide an adequate account of ethics and moral action ultimately fails as a psychology. This paper examines the social constructionist claims of Kenneth Gergen and others, arguing that, because it undermines the possibility of a meaningful morality by ushering in a form of nihilism, (...) social constructionism fails as an adequate school of thought for psychology. By way of an alternative capable of providing a more adequate account of moral action in psychology, this paper explores the contributions of William James and Emmanuel Levinas. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a popular-science book on cosmology (the study of the origin and evolution of the universe) by British physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who have no prior knowledge of the universe and people who are interested in learning.

A comprehensive reassessment of the concept of mimesis in the history of ancient Greek aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular attention to Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, and neoplatonism. There is also a wide-ranging review of arguments pro and contra the idea of artistic mimesis from the Renaissance to modern literar theory. The book challenges standard accounts in numerous respects and builds a new dialectical model with which to make sense of the entire history of mimeticist thinking in aesthetics.

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through (...) a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

Stephen Hetherington's prominent career within epistemology has been a series of distinctive, bold, varied and provocative arguments and ideas. Bringing together Hetherington's unique body of writing for the first time, this collection features previously published as well as new material that link his approaches to key issues including knowledge, justification, fallibility, scepticism and the Gettier Problem. Advancing our understanding of the systemic nature of Hetherington's thinking, Stephen Hetherington on Epistemology presents his distinctive perspective on some of philosophy's central (...) questions about knowledge - an inviting blend of forensic detail and 'big picture' proposals. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...) be addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I argue that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out. (shrink)

Drawing on ancient writers, from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and working farmer, Mark Usher compiles in this book an anthology of Greco-Roman passages illustrating how they thought about animals and illuminating they might help us to rethink our relationships with them. Not many contemporary readers will know, for example, the compelling arguments the second century AD Greek philosopher Porphyry makes for vegetarianism, long before a plant-based diet began to garner headlines. Plutarch's serio-comic exposition of the rationality and inherent dignity (...) of non-human creatures-put on the lips of one of Circe's pigs-is so fresh that it sounds like it was formulated just yesterday. The knowledge the poet Theognis derived from Greek sponge divers about the behavior of octopods rivals our contemporary fascination with the octopus. Aristotle's introduction to the scientific study of animal morphology and behavior remains unparalleled for its elegance and insight, and it represents one of the first forays into natural history writing. Seneca, employing an ingenious etymological pun on the word animal, endeavors to show that we humans are morally inferior to our animal cousins, who instinctively know and are satisfied with their place in Nature. The Greeks and Romans, amidst all their magnificent cultural achievements and reckless, destructive behavior, lived closer than most of us to the perils and prospects of their environments. This afforded them a sensitivity to their environments and, in particular, to their fellow creatures that can perhaps help to disabuse us of our disconnectedness from animal life. This small volume demonstrates how astoundingly relevant the ancients still are in this regard. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that "modern moral philosophy" centrally involved unsupported notions of obligation and culpability. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant exhibits, for the first time, resources that modern moral philosophers had to respond to Anscombe's challenge, also enhancing our own philosophical grasp of morality and its foundations.

In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up (...) different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic eye. Being an understanding person in this sense seems to be a character-level virtue that interestingly combines moral and epistemic elements; it also seems to be a virtue particularly needed in our age of deep political division, where it is commonly said that failures of mutual understanding are partly to blame for this problem. (shrink)

Keith Augustine’s critical evaluation of the essay contest sponsored by the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) is an interesting but problematic review. It mixes reasonable and detailed criticisms of the contest and many of the winning essays with a disappointing reliance on some of the most trite and superficial criticisms of parapsychological research. Ironically, Augustine criticizes the winning essays for using straw-man arguments and cherry-picked evidence even though many of his own arguments commit these same errors.

Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. It explores what are philosophical intuitions, and why do experimental philosophers want to study them using (...) the methods of empirical science. The positive program in experimental philosophy shares the goal of the substantial part of traditional philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of important philosophical concepts. The negative program has implications for philosophical projects whose goal is conceptual analysis. There have been a number of responses to the challenge posed by experimental philosophy's negative program. The chapter also focuses on the expertise defense. (shrink)

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it stands, is ill-posed and hence has no answer in the first place. In any form in which it (...) is well-posed, it has an answer that naturalism can in principle provide. The question therefore gives the foes of naturalism none of the ammunition that many on both sides of the debate think it does. (shrink)

In this article, from the 2009 Oxford University Press collection Epistemic Value, I criticize existing accounts of epistemic normativity by Alston, Goldman, and Sosa, and then offer a new view.

Philosophical Perspectives on Art presents a series of essays devoted to two of the most fundamental topics in the philosophy of art: the distinctive character of artworks and what is involved in understanding them as art. In Part I, Stephen Davies considers a wide range of questions about the nature and definition of art. Can art be defined, and if so, which definitions are the most plausible? Do we make and consume art because there are evolutionary advantages to doing (...) so? Has art completed the mission that guided its earlier historical development, and if so, what is to become of it now? Should architecture be classified as an art form? -/- Part II turns to the interpretation and appreciation of art. What is the target and purpose of the critic's interpretation? Is interpretation primarily directed at uncovering artists' intended meanings? Can apparently contradictory interpretations of a given piece both be true? Are interpretative evaluations entailed by descriptions of a work's aesthetic and artistic characteristics? In addition to providing fresh answers to these and other central questions in aesthetics, Davies considers the nature and content of metaphor, and the relation between the expressive qualities of a work of art and the emotions of its creator. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

The long human odyssey of self-discovery has reached a crucial stage: everything we do affects everyone and everything else - and we know it. The next hundred years will bring more change than we can easily imagine: more opportunities for more people to achieve the fulfilment of a good life, and more risks that could result in catastrophic harm to the entire planet.Viewed geopolitically, the main question is whether the world-views of the world's most important and influential powers - China (...) and America (the one fundamentally Confucian, the other essentially individualist) - can be made to work together constructively.At the same time, on a deeper level, the even greater question is how the irreversible fact of urbanisation may nurture healthy and mature human individuality, such that the accumulated wisdom of the world's great cultures becomes mutually transforming and enriching.This bold and wide-ranging book explores those questions, with all the risks and opportunities they hold for generations still to com"--Publisher information. (shrink)

The field of modern day bioethics is relatively young and continues to constantly evolve in parallel with the ever increasingly complex nature of contemporary medical practice. These advances present clinicians with an array of therapeutic options that would have not seemed possible only a generation ago. Given these medical advances and the expansion of the academic and medicolegal field of bioethics, one would have thought that clinical decision making would have become easier. However paradoxically this has not proved to be (...) the case. Each advance may provide an answer to a particular clinical question which is almost immediately replaced by a whole new set of ethical problems that require consideration. (shrink)

Traces the rise and fall of successive international systems from medieval times to the present, showing how international order is created, how it is maintained, and why it breaks down.

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.