The second edition of Andrew Skinner's essays has been updated to take account of his latest thinking on Adam Smith's system of social and moral science and his experience of teaching Smith to a student audience. The material from the first edition has been extensively rewritten in the light of recent scholarship, and four new essays have been included. Each essay can be read as a self-contained unit, supported by a full bibliography and notes; the book as a (...) whole expounds a single coherent argument which demonstrates how Smith's works are inter-related. (shrink)

This essay examines the contrasting conceptualizations of reason in the thought of John Henry Newman and Andrew Martin Fairbairn in their articles published in The Contemporary Review in 1885. This essay articulates both Fairbairn’s charge of philosophical scepticism against Newman as well as Newman’s defense of his position and concomitantly details Fairbairn’s and Newman’s competing notions of the efficacy of reason to provide reliable knowledge of God. The positions of Fairbairn and Newman remain two of the most important perspectives (...) on the role of reason in the acquisition of knowledge about God in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian theology. (shrink)

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

Conditional information can be equally asserted in the forms if p, then q (e.g., ?if I am ill, I will miss work tomorrow?) and q, if p (e.g., ?I will miss work tomorrow, if I am ill?). While this type of clause order manipulation has previously been found to have no influence on the ultimate conclusions participants draw from conditional rules, we used self-paced reading to examine how it affects the real time incremental processing of everyday conditional statements. Experiment 1 (...) revealed that clause order interacts with presuppositional congruency as readers hypothetically represent counterfactual statements. When if p, then q counterfactuals contained a presupposition that was incongruent with prior context, these statements took longer to read than when the presupposition was congruent, but for q, if p conditionals there was no such congruency effect. Experiment 2 revealed that reading times were influenced by the subjective probability of an indicative conditional regardless of clause order, with a penalty observed for low-probability statements relative to high-probability statements in both conditional clause orders. These data reveal a dissociation whereby clause order mediates the effect of suppositional congruency on reading times, but does not mediate the effect of subjective probability. (shrink)

Tomasello's account of the origins and nature of moral obligation rightly emphasises the key roles of social relations and a cooperative sense of “we.” However, we suggest that it overlooks the complexity of those social relations and the resulting prevalence of a divided “we” in moral social groups. We argue that the social identity dynamics that arise can lead to competing obligations in a single group, and this has implications for the evolution of obligation.

This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

Abstract Previous work has found few gender differences in moral orientation among children. Two experiments were conducted with third grade children (8?year?olds) to learn if children's moral orientation would be affected by the gender of dilemma characters: all male, all female, or mixed gender. Children responded to stories in which animal characters faced a conflict. Children's suggestions as to how the characters should solve their problems were coded as expressing a concern for others (care orientation) or a focus on issues (...) of rights and justice (rights orientation). Both boys and girls showed a small but consistent preference for the care orientation, and their reasoning was not influenced by the gender of the characters. Children tended to misremember female animal story characters as male (Experiment 1), unless an illustration depicting the characters? gender accompanied the text (Experiment 2). Overall, the results point to the role of children's literature in creating stereotyped expectations about male and female story characters, and emphasise the initial similarity of boys? and girls? moral orientation in childhood. (shrink)

This volume captures the individuality, the national and personal identity, the cultural exchange, and the self-consciousness that have long been sensed as peculiarly potent in the Hellenistic world. The fields of history, literature, art, philosophy, and religion are each presented using the format of two essays followed by a response. Conveying the direction and focus of Hellenistic learning, eighteen leading scholars discuss issues of liberty versus domination, appropriation versus accommodation, the increasing diversity of citizen roles and the dress and gesture (...) appropriate to them, and the accompanying religious and philosophical ferment. The result is an arresting view of the incredible and unprecedented diversity of the Hellenistic world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions as well as differently-valenced emotions conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence (...) for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contex... (shrink)

It is now rather over a century since the marble statue of a youth in Naples was recognised as a copy of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, and the first attempt made to extract from it the mathematical principles of the Polykleitan canon. Periodic warnings uttered on the subject by such scholars as Gardner and Furtwängler failed to deter further speculation, which culminated in Anti's monumental publication of 1921. Understandably enough, this seems effectively to have checked research in the field, with (...) only one or two exceptions, for a number of years. In the past decade or so, however, the pendulum, apparently never stable for long, has swung back again: a spate of books and articles on Polykleitos and his school has appeared, including no fewer than four major attempts to recover the principles of the canon from the surviving copies of his works. Again, murmurings to the contrary have passed unheeded, the gulf between believers and unbelievers now, it seems, having become virtually unbridgeable. With this in mind, and considering that Polykleitan studies have undergone a quiet revolution in the last year or two through the identification of fragments of casts of the Doryphoros and an Amazon among those recently discovered at Baiae, it seems an opportune moment to try to restate a few principles, basic but all too often ignored, and to indicate a number of directions that further research might take. (shrink)

This chapter gives an elaboration of the will and addresses the question of whether there is an entity called “free will” or not. It looks at various cases that are seen from the perspectives of cultural anthropology. This chapter uses a literary example that takes a look at the significant consequences of using free will and shows how the cosmological dimension implicates the will of the spirits, in relation to the willed actions of people.

Kuhn and Moresi have proposed a useful taxonomy for classifying prisoners' dilemmas. This comment is concerned with K&M's observation that legal penalties for defection can transform PDs into cooperative games, and their argument that the role of the law may vary depending on how the PD is classified by their taxonomy. The purpose of this note is to support K&M's analysis by demonstrating that the law of damages, as understood by economic analysis, already performs the function that K&M assign to (...) legal penalties for defection. (shrink)