Philosophical reflections on the environment began with early philosophers' invocation of a cosmology that mixed natural and supernatural phenomena. Today, the central philosophical problem posed by the environment involves not what it can teach us about ourselves and our place in the cosmic order but rather how we can understand its workings in order to make better decisions about our own conduct regarding it. The resulting inquiry spans different areas of contemporary philosophy, many of which are represented by the fifteen (...) original essays in this volume. The contributors first consider conceptual problems generated by rapid advances in biology and ecology, examining such topics as ecological communities, adaptation, and scientific consensus. The contributors then turn to epistemic and axiological issues, first considering philosophical aspects of environmental decision making and then assessing particular environmental policies, including reparations, remediation, and nuclear power, from a normative perspective. (shrink)

While cetaceans clearly show social learning in a wide variety of contexts, to label this as hides more than it reveals: we need a taxonomy of culture to tease apart the differences rather than hiding them in a catch-all category.

Research suggests that international assignment experience enhances awareness of societal stakeholders, influences personal values, and provides rare and valuable resources. Based on these arguments, we hypothesize that CEO international assignment experience will lead to increased corporate social performance (CSP) and will be moderated by the CEO's functional background. Using a sample of 393 CEOs of S&P 500 companies and three independent data sources, we find that CEO international assignment experience is positively related to CSP and is significantly moderated by the (...) CEO's functional background. Specifically, CEOs with international assignment experience and an output functional background (e.g., marketing and sales) are positively associated with greater CSP. (shrink)

J. Wackernagel and E. Löfstedt have both drawn attention to Pindar's ‘Neigung, das Futurum zu setzen bei Verben, die eine jetzt vorhandene, aber auf zukünftiges Tun abzielende Willensrichtung ausdrücken’. But they regarded this as a purely grammatical phenomenon, and did not note that the Pindaric use is practically limited to statements of the type, ‘I shall sing, glorify, testify, etc.’. It was E. Bundy who first drew attention to the conventional nature of these futures and so ended years of misunderstanding. (...) So, for example, Wilamowitz considered that P. 1.75 represented an optative with while Slotty, following Breyer, thought that N. 9. 10 was an aorist subjunctive ‘auf Grund des pindarischen Sprachgebrauches’! Postgate, following Gildersleeve, thought that 0. 8. 57 represented though the contrary would appear to be more true, cf. 0. 13. 11: and also Hoekstra sees in the future ‘den Nebenbegriff des Konnens’. (shrink)

According to a dominant line of interpretation in recent Anglophone Xunzi scholarship, Xunzi conceived of Heaven along impersonal rather than personal lines, and regarded Heaven—together with Earth—roughly as the orderly and indifferent forces of Nature, as opposed to a deity who is aware of and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; who rewards virtue and punishes vice; whose ways can be known through divination; and who can be propitiated through sacrifice.1 This general view of Xunzi's philosophy has (...) been espoused by a number of leading scholars of Chinese philosophy over the last three decades, including Angus Graham, Benjamin Schwartz, Henry Rosemont, Jr., Roger Ames, Robert Eno, P.J.... (shrink)

It is clear that Tarski's T‐scheme, ‘T”p” if and only if p’, does not hold universally. It is not expected to hold, for instance, with ambiguous sentences, or with indexical sentences. Making explicit the circumstances where it does hold, however, is not just logical housekeeping: it turns out to have more radical consequences for the whole approach to Semantics associated with Tarski than has previously been envisaged.

P.M.S. Hacker, recounting some of Wittgenstein's views, says : [T]he pervasive conception of behaviour that has informed philosophical psychology for the last three centuries has misrepresented human behaviour as 'bare bodily movement', from which it is supposed we infer, by analogy or inference to best explanation, the inner state and so on from which the behaviour might be thought to arise … But we see the pain in a person's face hear the glee in his chortles, perceive the affection in (...) the looks and gestures of lovers. In this paperIexplain how this can be, before meeting several objections. (shrink)

Criticisms have been aired before about the fear of certain Platonic abstract objects, propositions. That criticism extends to the widespread preference for an operator analysis of expressions like ‘It is true, known, obligatory that p’ as opposed to the predicative analysis in their equivalents ‘That p is true, known, obligatory’. The criticism in the present work also concerns Prior’s attitude to Platonic entities of a certain kind: not propositions, i.e., the referents of ‘that’-clauses, but individuals, i.e., the referents of Russell’s (...) ‘logically proper names’. Prior had a close knowledge of theories of individuals, including that of Russell. However, when Prior formulated his tense logic Q he presumed a non-Russellian, pre-suppositional account of individuals, such that they might exist at one time but not at another, and when they did not exist no statement could be made about them. This paper examines the correctness of such a pre-suppositional account of individuals, showing there are features of natural language it cannot account for. It is shown that the required features can be formalised in Hilbert’s epsilon calculus, and that using that calculus substantiates a Russellian understanding of ‘logically proper names’. (shrink)

We provide an alternative view of the efficient classical simulatibility of fermionic linear optics in terms of Slater determinants. We investigate the generic effects of two-mode measurements on the Slater number of fermionic states. We argue that most such measurements are not capable (in conjunction with fermion linear optics) of an efficient exact implementation of universal quantum computation. Our arguments do not apply to the two-mode parity measurement, for which exact quantum computation becomes possible.

This paper investigates a well-known case of simultaneous discovery in twentieth-century chemistry, the origins of the concept of hybridisation, in the light of Kuhn's insights. There has been no ambiguity as to who discovered this concept, when it was "rst in print, and how important it was. The full-#edged form of the concept was published in 1931 independently by two American scientists John C. Slater (1900}1976) and Linus Pauling (1901}1994), although both of them had made their ideas public earlier: (...) Slater at the American Physical Society meetings in 1930, and Pauling in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1928. Slater and Pauling both argued for the necessity of using an s orbital as well as three p orbitals in the carbon atom in order to explain carbon's four valences and the tetrahedral structure of methane. The metaphor &hybridisation' for denoting this mix of s and p orbitals was "rst used by Robert S. Mulliken and J. H. Van Vleck before gaining currency with the scienti"c community around 1935.2 The concept of hybridisation was indeed indispensable for extending the quantum-mechanical interpretation of the chemical bond as an electron pairing from diatomic molecules to polyatomic ones. To be sure, the emergence of hybridisation attests to scientists' growing interest in exploring the borderland between physics and chemistry, a trend that led to the creation of physical chemistry in the late nineteenth century and of chemical physics and quantum chemistry in the 1920s and 30s. Slater and Pauling themselves experienced and on many occasions talked about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research; and historians have legitimately illuminated their works by examining them in this broad context.3 Yet the careful analysis of their research notes and published papers reveals that Slater and Pauling were working in quite disparate disciplinary traditions, with di!erent approaches, for di!erent audiences, and towards di!erent goals. The aim of this paper is to explore their di!erent routes to a common destination*hybridisation*and thereby to explicate tensions existing between physics and chemistry amidst the institutional and conceptual overlapping of the two disciplines. (shrink)

In this book, Michael R. Slater provides a new assessment of pragmatist views in the philosophy of religion. Focusing on the tension between naturalist and anti-naturalist versions of pragmatism, he argues that the anti-naturalist religious views of philosophers such as William James and Charles Peirce provide a powerful alternative to the naturalism and secularism of later pragmatists such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Slater first examines the writings of the 'classical pragmatists' - James, Peirce, and Dewey - (...) and argues for the relevance of their views for thinking about such topics as the nature of religion and the viability of natural theology. His final three chapters engage with the religious views of later pragmatists such as Rorty and Philip Kitcher, and with current philosophical debates over metaphysical realism, naturalism, and evidentialism. His book will be of particular interest to philosophers of religion, theologians, and specialists in American philosophy. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change crisis remind us that widespread trust in the products of the scientific enterprise is vital to the health and safety of the global community. Insofar as appropriate responses to these crises require us to trust that enterprise, cultivating a healthier trust relationship between science and the public may be considered as a collective public good. While it might appear that scientists can contribute to this good by taking more initiative to communicate their work (...) to public audiences, we raise a concern about unintended consequences of an individualistic approach to such communication. (shrink)

Two well-known ancient witnesses report that Aristophanes of Byzantium was responsible for the arrangement of Pindar's poems into seventeen book-rolls according to lyric genres. These witnesses form fr. 381 in the edition of Aristophanes’ fragments by W.J. Slater : Vit. Pind. P.Oxy. 2438.35–9 δ]ιῄρητα̣ι̣ δὲ α̣ὐ̣τ̣[ο]ῦ̣ τ̣[ὰ ποιήματα ὑπ’ Ἀριστοφάν]ους εἰς βιβλία ιζˊ· διθ̣[υ]ρά̣[μ]βων βˊ [προσοδίω]ν̣ βˊ παιάνων αˊ πα[ρ]θεν[εί]ων γ̣ˊ [ἐπινικίω]ν̣ δˊ ἐγκωμίων αˊ ἐν [ᾧ] κα̣ὶ [σκ]όλ̣[ια ±4 ὕμ]ν̣ων αˊ ὑ[π]ορχημάτων αˊ θρ̣[ήνων.| nisi aliter ind., omnia suppl. (...) Lobel | 2 Ἀριστοφάν]ους Lobel e Vit. Pind. Vat. | 3 ἐν [ᾧ] κα̣ὶ [σκ]όλ̣[ια …. de Kreij : ἐν [ᾧ] κ[αὶ σκόλιά τινα vel ἐν [ᾧ] κ[αὶ σκόλιά ἐστι Gallo : ἐν [ᾧ] καὶ [παροίνια D'Alessio | 4 αˊ post θρ̣[ήνων coni. edd., fort. recte; an θρ̣[- βˊ?Vit. Pind. Vat. page 7.14–17 Dr. ὁ δὲ ἐπινίκιος οὗ ἡ ἀρχὴ “Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ” προτέτακται ὑπὸ Ἀριστοφάνους τοῦ συντάξαντος τὰ Πινδαρικὰ διὰ τὸ περιέχειν τοῦ ἀγῶνος ἐγκώμιον καὶ τὰ περὶ τοῦ Πέλοπος, ὃς πρῶτος ἐν ῎Ηλιδι ἠγωνίσατο.A much-debated question is whether the order of the poems attested by the papyrus can be credited to Aristophanes, since an ordering principle is apparently not to be found in the list transmitted by it. Moreover, there are some disagreements with the list of Pindar's works transmitted by the Vita Ambrosiana, which is generally deemed the most authoritative catalogue of the poet's corpus, on account of its well-recognized criterion of classification: the poems are divided between those for gods and those for men, and both of these categories of songs are arranged from the most general to the most specific. This catalogue has been thought to reproduce the order established by Aristophanes in his edition of Pindar. (shrink)

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of (...) primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a 'mixed' metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or (...) was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men. (shrink)

Joe Campbell has identified an apparent flaw in van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument. It apparently derives a metaphysically necessary conclusion from what Campbell argues is a contingent premise: that the past is in some sense necessary. I criticise Campbell’s examples attempting to show that this is not the case (in the requisite sense) and suggest some directions along which an incompatibilist could reconstruct her argument so as to remain immune to Campbell’s worries.

The paper illustrates how organic chemists dramatically altered their practices in the middle part of the twentieth century through the adoption of analytical instrumentation — such as ultraviolet and infrared absorption spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy — through which the difficult process of structure determination for small molecules became routine. Changes in practice were manifested in two ways: in the use of these instruments in the development of ‘rule-based’ theories; and in an increased focus on synthesis, at the expense (...) of chemical analysis. These rule-based theories took the form of generalizations relating structure to chemical and physical properties, as measured by instrumentation. This ‘Instrumental Revolution’ in organic chemistry was two-fold: encompassing an embrace of new tools that provided unprecedented access to structures, and a new way of thinking about molecules and their reactivity in terms of shape and structure. These practices suggest the possibility of a change in the ontological status of chemical structures, brought about by the regular use of instruments. The career of Robert Burns Woodward provides the central historical examples for the paper. Woodward was an organic chemist at Harvard from 1937 until the time of his death. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (shrink)

Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)

In a previous issue of Philosophical Investigations Professor Radford provides a counterexample to the equation1: a word is on the tip of a man's tongue IFF (a) he can recognize the word and (b1) he believes he may be able to produce It (fairly soon).

Two uses of ‘if are discussed which do not involve conditions. The first is illustrated in the example ‘If he's here, I don't see him’, the second in ‘He's not a dunce, if a trifle stupid’. A third non‐conditional use, cognate with the first is also mentioned: it would be illustrated in the example ‘If he's a Dutchman, I'll eat my hat’. It is argued that recent attempts to formulate a logic of conditionals have distorted our understanding of ‘if, by (...) ignoring these uses, sometimes deliberately. Specifically, as a result, many arguments involving ‘if have been misjudged as invalid, because the expectation has been that ‘if expresses a condition. It is suggested that the traditional analysis of ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ in terms of ‘if and only if, is partly to blame for these misunderstandings. And the proper understanding of ‘if’ which emerges shows it is quite fully captured in the propositional calculus. (shrink)

One of the claims made for C. S. Peirce's existential graphs has been that they are a deductively complete formulation of first-order logic with identity. As Peirce presented them, this is true only for certain versions of first-order logic :those which do not include terms for individuals. I amend Peirce's rules here, showing, in particular, how they are capable of demonstrating that, for instance, ?Jack is in the kitchen? contradicts ?Jack is not in the kitchen?

Routley?s Formula says, for instance, that if it is believed there is a man then there is something which is believed to be a man. In this paper I defend the formula; first directly, but then by looking at work by Gensler and Hintikka against it, and at the original work of Routley, Meyer and Goddard for it. The argument ultimately reduces to a central point about the extensionality of objects in Routley, Meyer and Goddard?s intensional system, i.e. in its (...) formulation of transparency. (shrink)