The essential overview of the key philosophical ideas and controversies that have shaped the world of science.

A concise and very readable summary of Nietzsche's _Beyond Good and Evil_, geared toward students embarking on their studies and general readers. It is an ideal companion for those new to the study of this challenging and often misunderstood classic. Offers clear explanations of the central themes and ideas, terminology, and arguments Includes a glossary of difficult terms as well as helpful biographical and historical information Illustrates arguments and ideas with useful tables, diagrams, and images; and includes references to further (...) readings Forms part of a series of Guides designed specifically for A-level philosophy students by an experienced teacher and founder of the popular website Philosophy Online. (shrink)

A concise and very readable summary of Nietzsche's _Beyond Good and Evil_, geared toward students embarking on their studies and general readers. It is an ideal companion for those new to the study of this challenging and often misunderstood classic. Offers clear explanations of the central themes and ideas, terminology, and arguments Includes a glossary of difficult terms as well as helpful biographical and historical information Illustrates arguments and ideas with useful tables, diagrams, and images; and includes references to further (...) readings Forms part of a series of Guides designed specifically for A-level philosophy students by an experienced teacher and founder of the popular website Philosophy Online. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Reality, Truth and Philosophical Prejudice God, Religion and the Saint Morality, Ressentiment and the Will to Power.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Preface Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers Part Two: The Free Spirit Part Three: The Religious Nature Part Four: Maxims and Interludes Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals Part Six: We Scholars Part Seven: Our Virtues Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands Part Nine: What is Noble? From High Mountains: Epode.

This chapter contains sections titled: Life of Nietzsche Nineteenth‐century Europe Romanticism and German Idealism Pessimism German Politics The Text.

A concise and readable guide to Descartes's _Meditations_ geared toward beginner philosophy students and general readers. Offers clear explanations of the central themes and ideas, terminology, and arguments in the Meditations Features in-depth discussion of Descartes’ correspondence with his contemporaries Illustrates arguments and ideas with useful tables, diagrams, and images Includes a glossary of difficult terms as well as helpful biographical and historical information Includes references to further readings, films, and literature that contain similar philosophical themes Will form part of (...) a series of _Guides_ designed specifically for A-level philosophy students by an experienced teacher and founder of the popular website _Philosophy Online_. (shrink)

'Words of Wisdom' is an anthology of history's most memorable, uplifting or thought-provoking quotations from the greatest philosophers who have ever lived. Each of the 360 quotations is accompanied by a brief essay that tells the story of the speaker or explains the circumstances that gave rise to the quotation.

When it comes to the really important questions, who better to ask than the greatest political minds in history. What Would Marx Do? uses 40 everyday questions and problems as springboards for exploring the great questions of our time, while giving you a crash course in the theories and ideas of the greatest political philosophers of all time."--Back cover.

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

Dialogues generated over a year of weekly meetings with 8 children at a school in Edinburgh. The author and the children attempted to craft stories reflecting philosophical problems.

We consider the question of when an expansion of a first-order topological structure has the property that every open set definable in the expansion is definable in the original structure. This question has been investigated by Dolich, Miller and Steinhorn in the setting of ordered structures as part of their work on the property of having o-minimal open core. We answer the question in a fairly general setting and provide conditions which in practice are often easy to check. We give (...) a further characterisation in the special case of an expansion by a generic predicate. (shrink)

We report on an interview-based study of decision-making capacity in two classes of patients suffering from depression. Developing a method of second-person hermeneutic phenomenology, we articulate the distinctive combination of temporal agility and temporal inability characteristic of the experience of severely depressed patients. We argue that a cluster of decision-specific temporal abilities is a critical element of decision-making capacity, and we show that loss of these abilities is a risk factor distinguishing severely depressed patients from mildly/moderately depressed patients. We explore (...) the legal and clinical consequences of this result. (shrink)

This paper defends an orthodox model of the linguistic intuitions which form a central source of evidence for generative grammars. According to this orthodox conception, linguistic intuitions are the upshot of a system of grammatical competence as it interacts with performance systems for perceiving and articulating language. So conceived, probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions allows us to investigate the competence–performance distinction empirically, so as to determine the grammars that speakers are competent in. This model has been attacked by Michael Devitt in (...) his recent book and a series of papers. In its place, Devitt advances a model of linguistic intuitions whereby they are speakers’ theory-laden judgements about the properties of languages. In this paper, I try to make clear the rationale behind the orthodox model and the inadequacies of Devitt's model. (shrink)

With the waves of reform occurring in mental health legislation in England and other jurisdictions, mental capacity is set to become a key medico-legal concept. The concept is central to the law of informed consent and is closely aligned to the philosophical concept of autonomy. It is also closely related to mental disorder. This paper explores the interdisciplinary terrain where mental capacity is located. Our aim is to identify core dilemmas and to suggest pathways for future interdisciplinary research. The terrain (...) can be separated into three types of discussion: philosophical, legal and psychiatric. Each discussion approaches mental capacity and judgmental autonomy from a different perspective yet each discussion struggles over two key dilemmas: whether mental capacity and autonomy is/should be a moral or a psychological notion and whether rationality is the key constitutive factor. We suggest that further theoretical work will have to be interdisciplinary and that this work offers an opportunity for the law to enrich its interpretation of mental capacity, for psychiatry to clarify the normative elements latent in its concepts and for philosophy to advance understanding of autonomy through the study of decisional dysfunction. The new pressures on medical and legal practice to be more explicit about mental capacity make this work a priority. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely viewed as an important feature of contemporary business. It is characterized by the notion that organizations ought to voluntarily recognize and, where possible, practically mitigate the social impacts of its business activities, and that doing so allows organizations to meet the expectations of affected stakeholders. However, CSR initiatives are almost universally tethered to the idea that corporations exist to serve their own performance objectives, and that these will ultimately take precedence over wider macro-social considerations. (...) The present paper proposes that this conception of CSR mirrors the underlying neurological tension between the domains of analytic reasoning and empathic or socioemotional reasoning, and the neural correlates of each. Using the opposing domains hypothesis, it is proposed that CSR, as it is currently conceived of and practiced, is antithetical to social and ethical reasoning at the level of the brain, can increase the scope for dehumanization, and demands calling the ethical dimensions of CSR into question. (shrink)

Theoria, EarlyView. -/- In his recent book Thin Objects, Øystein Linnebo (2018) argues for the existence of a hierarchy of abstract objects, sufficient to model ZFC, via a novel and highly interesting argument that relies on a process called dynamic abstraction. This paper presents a way for a nominalist, someone opposed to the existence of abstract objects, to avoid Linnebo's conclusion by rejecting his claim that certain abstraction principles are sufficient for reference (RBA). Section 1 of the paper explains Linnebo's (...) argument for RBA. It offers a reading of Linnebo's work upon which he has two arguments for RBA: one deductive and one abductive, and argues that whilst the deductive argument is unsound the abductive one is prima facie plausible. The nominalist must therefore find a way to respond to the abductive argument. Section 2 outlines just such a response, by offering an alternative explanation of the cases Linnebo wishes to argue from. Most interestingly, it shows that abstraction in Linnebo's most difficult case (the “reference to ordinary bodies” case) can be achieved using mereological means, rather than relying on RBA. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jc Beall has employed what he calls ‘shriek rules’ in a putative solution to the long-standing ‘just false’ problem for glut theory. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, I distinguish the ‘just false’ problem from another problem, with which it is often conflated, which I will call the ‘exclusion problem’. Secondly, I argue that shriek rules do not help glut theorists with either problem.

SUMMARYThe nineteenth-century Orientalist and ethnologist, John Crawfurd, publicly rejected Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1868. Crawfurd was a leading advocate of polygenesis but also a supporter of racial equality. In 1820 he published his History of the Indian Archipelago, where he advocated granting household suffrage to all races in the British colonies. After finishing a career in the East India Company in 1828 he became the foremost expert on South-East Asia in Britain. Crawfurd became a regular writer on ethnology (...) and Asian affairs for the Examiner newspaper and in the 1860s he was President of the Ethnological Society of London. Accounts of nineteenth-century anthropology in Britain characterise debate around race as falling into two camps: advocates of monogenesis and advocates of polygenesis. In the United States of America, advocates of polygenesis were often associated with advocates of slavery and racial inequality. Recent research has demonstrated that Charles Darwin’s hatred of slavery drove him to write Origin of the Species to demonstrate the unity of the human species and reject the polygenesis position. This paper explores Crawfurd’s ideas and demonstrates that a belief in polygenesis in the nineteenth century did not necessarily equate with a belief in racial inequality. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of those aspects of Karl Polanyi's social and political thought that relate to environmentalism and 'green' politics today. I discuss whether or not he prefigured the degrowth movement, before focusing on his understanding of the New Deal (1933-1939). At the time of writing, the prospect appears likely of a return, at a global scale, of economic slump, mass unemployment and ecological crisis, the background conditions to which Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was responding (...) on the national scale. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from this comparison for possible Green New Deals. (shrink)

In ‘Thinking Beyond the Lockdown’, Panagiotis Sotiris argues that lockdowns are repressive and should be opposed. In this response I take issue with his analysis. He posits the existence of a ‘lockdown strategy’ which has little relation to reality. He identifies lockdowns with neoliberalism, flirts with the Great Barrington project, and calls for anti-lockdown resistance – without so much as a glance at the right-wing libertarian camps that are also staked out on this terrain. On these points, and in respect (...) of his interpretation of Foucault, I offer a rebuttal. (shrink)

Generalising work of Berenstein, Dolich and Onshuus (Preprint 145 on MODNET Preprint server, 2008) and Günaydın and Hieronymi (Preprint 146 on MODNET Preprint server, 2010), we give sufficient conditions for a theory TP to inherit N I P from T, where TP is an expansion of the theory T by a unary predicate P. We apply our result to theories, studied by Belegradek and Zilber (J. Lond. Math. Soc. 78:563–579, 2008), of the real field with a subgroup of the unit (...) circle. (shrink)

Computational simulations have provided evidence that the use of linguistic cues as group markers plays an important role in the development of linguistic diversity shortcite. Other simulations, however, have contradicted these findings. Similar disagreements exist in sociolinguistics. This paper describes an experimental study in which participants played an anonymous economic game using an instant-messenger-style program and an artificial ‘alien language’. The competitiveness of the game and the frequency with which players interacted were manipulated. Given frequent enough interaction with team-mates, players (...) were able to use linguistic cues to identify themselves. In the most competitive condition, this led to divergence in the language, which did not occur in other conditions. This suggests that both frequency of interaction and a pressure to use language to mark identity play a significant role in encouraging linguistic divergence over short periods, but that neither is suffi cient on its own. (shrink)

Computational simulations have provided evidence that the use of linguistic cues as group markers plays an important role in the development of linguistic diversity shortcite. Other simulations, however, have contradicted these findings. Similar disagreements exist in sociolinguistics. This paper describes an experimental study in which participants played an anonymous economic game using an instant-messenger-style program and an artificial ‘alien language’. The competitiveness of the game and the frequency with which players interacted were manipulated. Given frequent enough interaction with team-mates, players (...) were able to use linguistic cues to identify themselves. In the most competitive condition, this led to divergence in the language, which did not occur in other conditions. This suggests that both frequency of interaction and a pressure to use language to mark identity play a significant role in encouraging linguistic divergence over short periods, but that neither is suffi cient on its own. (shrink)

This volume collects thirteen papers by one of the leading philosophers of his generation, who died prematurely in 1980.

Adult preconceptions about the mental life of children tend to discourage a child’s philosophical bent. By exposing the underpinnings of adult views of childhood, Matthews clears the way for recognizing the philosophy of childhood as a legitimate field of inquiry and conducts us through influential models for understanding what it is to be a child.

The English cases -- Cases concerning marriage -- Cases concerning ecclesiastical fasts -- Appendix: List of faculties.

‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.’ This paper is an attempt to follow Russell’s advice by using a puzzle about the contingent a priori to test and explore certain theories of reference and modality. No one could claim that (...) the puzzle is of any great philosophical importance by itself, but to understand it, one has to get clear about certain aspects of the theory of reference; and to solve it, one has to think a little more deeply than one is perhaps accustomed about what it means to say that a statement is contingent or necessary. (shrink)

Assessment of decision-making capacity can be difficult in acquired brain injury particularly with the syndrome of organic personality disorder. Clinical neuroscience may help but there are challenges translating its constructs to the decision-making abilities considered relevant by law and ethics. An in-depth interview study of DMC in OPD was undertaken. Six patients were purposefully sampled and rich interview data were acquired for scrutiny using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Interview data revealed that awareness of deficit and thinking about psychological states can be (...) present. However, the awareness of deficit may not be “online” and effectively integrated into decision-making. Without this online awareness of deficit the ability to appreciate or use and weigh information in the process of deciding some matters appeared absent. We argue that the decision-making abilities discussed are: necessary for DMC, threatened by ABI, and assessable at interview. Some advice for practically incorporating these abilities within assessments of DMC in patients with OPD is outlined. (shrink)

Let T be a complete geometric theory and let $$T_P$$ T P be the theory of dense pairs of models of T. We show that if T is superrosy with "Equation missing"-rank 1 then $$T_P$$ T P is superrosy with "Equation missing"-rank at most $$\omega $$ ω.

Thanks to Barton Palmer and John McMillan for these thoughtful commentaries. We found much to agree with and it is striking how so many of the issues relating to decision-making capacity assessment find resonances outside of an English jurisdiction. California and New Zealand are clearly grappling with a very similar set of issues and the commentaries speak to the international nature of these discussions.We will pick up on some main points the commentaries raise.As Palmer notes, DMC law is vulnerable to (...) the criticism that it does not attend to the authenticity of a decision. In ordinary language, this is the idea that someone is deciding while “not their self” or that it is the “illness speaking.” There is a... (shrink)

Much of the literature exploring the intersection between Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy and architecture have focused on abstract theory, experimental projects and practices at the margins of the profession. But, one may ask, what of the mainstream, commercial practices that produce the offices, housing, shops, schools and community buildings that we see and engage with in our day-to-day lives? What of the everyday design decisions made by professional architects and technicians sitting at their desks and drawing boards? Are these to be excluded (...) from architecture's engagement with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy? As I will show in this paper, Deleuze and Guattari's proposals for the strata and the machinic assemblage are drawn from their underlying attempt to expand Hjelmslev's planar composition from a tool used to analyse language to a conceptual framework used to analyse the formation and evolution of all things. There is nothing within the conceptual framework of the strata/machinic assemblage to suggest, therefore, that they should not be used to analyse such practices. With this in mind, this article considers how these concepts can be translated through and help provide new insight into a real-world design sequence taken from mainstream, commercial architectural practice. In doing so it will show how such practices can offer Deleuzo-Guattarian scholars a more nuanced insight into this conceptual framework and the concepts that form it. (shrink)

‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.’ This paper is an attempt to follow Russell’s advice by using a puzzle about the contingent a priori to test and explore certain theories of reference and modality. No one could claim that (...) the puzzle is of any great philosophical importance by itself, but to understand it, one has to get clear about certain aspects of the theory of reference; and to solve it, one has to think a little more deeply than one is perhaps accustomed about what it means to say that a statement is contingent or necessary. (shrink)