Is Goodness Without God Good Enough contains a lively debate between William Lane Craig and Paul Kurtz on the relationship between God and ethics, followed by seven new essays that both comment on the debate and advance the broader discussion of this important issue. Written in an accessible style by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to students and academics alike.

O presente trabalho pretende investigar as veredas da estética da crueldade construídas no romance Venenos de Deus, remédios do Diabo, de Mia Couto, a partir da hibridização, desterriorização e dos percursos das identidades diaspóricas criadas e fragmentadas nos discursos existentes na Vila Cacimba, cenário que documenta a história de Bartolomeu Sozinho, sua esposa Dona Munda, o médico Sidónio Rosa e a mulher que este ama e busca reencontrar em Vila Cacimba, Deolinda. Nesse cenário é que os textos acerca da língua (...) enquanto colonização, da suposta epidemia enquanto multietnicidade, da diáspora, das miscigenações vistas com muita resistência, e certas inversões de significados tidos como maniqueísmos e tabus, como sugere o próprio título Venenos de Deus, remédios do Diabo, desvelam estéticas da crueldade nos cruzamentos de fronteiras e nas fronteiras que se cruzam em discursos identitários. (shrink)

Has the Internet changed the pattern of social relations? More specifically, have social relations undergone any systematic change during the recent widespread diffusion of new communications technology? This question is addressed using a unique longitudinal survey that bookends the entire period of Internet diffusion in two African nations and one Indian state. We analyze data on nine professional linkages reported by a population of agricultural and environmental scientists in Kenya, Ghana, and Kerala over a sixteen-year period. Factor analysis reveals two (...) clusters of relationships, one interpretable as traditional scientific exchange, the other indicating mediated forms of collaboration. While collaboration increases in frequency, friendship declines. We interpret this shift as a consequence of communications technology that facilitates formal projects, reducing the affective dimension of professional association. (shrink)

Antoni Domènech was one of Spain’s most important political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Known primarily as a scholar of republicanism, his work on the concepts of individual liberty and rights complicates standard liberal definitions, which he believed erred in defining these terms independent of institutional context, as pre-political attributes of the individual. He argued that republicanism corrected liberalism’s abstraction by making one’s actually being able to exercise liberty and rights depend on one’s enjoying a sufficiently (...) robust set of material conditions, or on having enough property so that one could always avoid unequal social relationships. (shrink)

Encounters with art can change us in ways both big and small. This paper focuses on one of the more dramatic cases. I argue that works of art can inspire what L. A. Paul calls transformations, classic examples of which include getting married, having a child, and undergoing a religious conversion. Two features distinguish transformations from other changes we undergo. First, they involve the discovery of something new. Second, they result in a change in our core preferences. These two (...) features make transformations hard to motivate. I argue, however, that art can help on both fronts. First, works of art can guide our attempt to imagine unfamiliar ways of living. Second, they can attract us to values we currently reject. I conclude by observing that what makes art powerful also makes it dangerous. Transformations are not always for the good, and art's ability to inspire them can be put to immoral ends. (shrink)

Un hilo tenue engarza los ensayos reunidos en este volumen y un leit motiv como el de un bajo continuo surge y se oculta, jugando entre las páginas. El testimonio de Paul Valéry nos ofrece el tema del que este libro constituiría unas variaciones: ®El.

ABSTRACT Kierkegaard seeks to inspire transformations. His aim is to get us to devote our lives to God or the Good rather than our own personal enjoyment – to abandon the aesthetic life in favour of the ethical or religious one. Drawing on Laurie Paul and Agnes Callard’s recent work, I maintain that two obstacles stand in Kierkegaard’s way. First, transformations involve adopting a new perspective on the world, one we cannot fully grasp ahead of time. Second, transformations also (...) involve coming to care about something we do not yet care about. On my interpretation, Kierkegaard sees art, especially literature, as central to overcoming both obstacles. Good stories afford us a glimpse into what it would look and feel like to live in ways other than we currently do. In addition, they have the power to attract us to points of view we would ordinarily reject. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Paul Russell's ‘Nozick, need and charity’, published in Vol. 4, No. 2 of the Journal of Applied Philosophy develops an attack on Nozick's thesis that “the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others’’in order “to contribute to our positive understanding of the nature of distributive justice”. Against Russell the present paper argues: first, that although these kinds of use of the coercive apparatus of the state are indeed justified—even (...) if not necessarily for the reasons which he gives—such justified uses are nevertheless not mandated by any sort of justice; and, secondly, that by collapsing the distinction between justice and the less fundamental virtue of charity Russell detracts from the credit due to the charitable. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth century, French naturalists were global leaders in microbial research. Louis Pasteur advanced sterilization techniques and demonstrated that dust particles in the air could contaminate a putrefiable liquid. Pasteur’s discoveries prompted a new research program for the naturalists of the Talisman and Travailleur expeditions: to recover uncontaminated water and mud samples from the deep sea. French naturalists Adrien Certes and Paul Regnard both independently conducted experiments to address the question of whether microorganisms inhabited the oceans and (...) whether organic material in the deep sea was subject to decomposition. The experiments of Certes and Regnard have largely been omitted from histories of microbiology and marine science. However, an examination of their work is crucial for understanding the context in which marine microbiology first developed. At the end of the nineteenth century, marine microbiology emerged from the disciplinary melding of terrestrial microbial ecology, experimental physiology, and the then-nascent field of deep-sea biology. (shrink)

In recent years a number of general studies of Hume’s philosophy have appeared. It is in this rather crowded traffic that Professor Antony Flew’s David Hume must make its way.... Flew claims that “no previous study of Hume’s philosophy has made nearly enough of the fact that almost all his conclusions are, for better or for worse, conditioned and sometimes determined by an interlocking set of Cartesian assumptions”(p. 2). In this way, Flew suggests that earlier interpreters have rarely recognised (...) the “grotesquely paradoxical” nature of Hume’s Cartesian assumptions and have, therefore, “failed to point the strangeness, the often self-frustrating perversity, of some of the positions which Hume was misled to adopt later” (p. 3).... ..... In a short introductory work it is, of course, very difficult to defend particular interpretations and criticisms in much detail. Nevertheless, I find that Flew’s discussion frequently moves at an excessive speed and that too often his claims are not given the care and attention that they require. Flew certainly does have some interesting points to make and, at his best, Flew is an insightful and stimulating commentator. On the whole, however, his claims come across as thinly defended, poorly articulated and, as a result, rather unconvincing.... (shrink)

Professor Kai Nielsen is one of the most forceful proponents of the view that theological assertions have no factual reference because they are compatible with any empirical state of affairs; no evidence, it is alleged, is allowed to count as falsification of such assertions, and therefore they spuriously purport to be what they are not. In this he follows the well-known essay by Professor Antony Flew in which the same argument was advanced, and Nielsen's own most recent contribution on (...) the subject in Religious Studies should be read against the background of his earlier controversy with Professors John Hick and George Mavrodes in The Canadian Journal of Theology. In this latest article he broadens the canvas to question the significance of applying language and concepts appropriate to the realm of empirical observation to anything that is held to transcend it; and this is the substance of Part II of his paper, in which he engages in debate with Professor Ian Crombie, treading well-worn ground that has been the subject of innumerable philosophical discussions. The rest of the paper, however, is a restatement of his earlier contention, and it is with this more limited issue that I shall be concerned in what follows. For I believe that Nielsen is wrong in two quite fundamental respects: he is mistaken in supposing that theological assertions are compatible with any empirical state of affairs: he bases his critique of theological assertions on a far too uncritical appraisal of the principles of verification and falsification in the case of ordinary factual statements. If I am right, the larger questions raised in Part II will still remain open, but it is high time that the ‘verification-falsification argument’ should be shown to be unfounded. (shrink)

THIS SURVEY WAS ORIGINALLY COMPOSED FOR (IN US TERMS) SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WHO ARE PREPARING FOR A NEWLY ESTABLISHED EXAMINATION IN PHILOSOPHY. ONE OF THE SET-BOOKS PRESCRIBED FOR THIS COURSE IS HUME’S FIRST "INQUIRY". "HUME’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION" THEREFORE CONTAINS NO MATERIAL NOT ALTERNATIVELY AVAILABLE: EITHER IN "HUME’S PHILOSOPHY OF BELIEF" (LONDON: ROUTLEDGE AND KEGAN PAUL, 1961); OR IN "DAVID HUME": "PHILOSOPHER OF MORAL SCIENCE" (OXFORD: BLACKWELL, 1986).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INCONSISTENCY WITHIN A RECONCILING PROJECT There is nothing I wou'd more willingly lay hold of, than an opportunity of confessing my errors; and shou'd esteem such a return to truth and reason to be more honourable than the most unerring judgment. Hume's words in the first sentence of its Appendix referred to Books I and II of A Treatise of Human Nature. I quote them here with a similarly (...) particular but less glorious reference to Chapter VIII of my Hume's Philosophy of Belief (London, and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Philosophical Library, 19 61). The errors to be corrected are in the first instance mine. But, if I am now right, they are also and more importantly to be found in the first Inquiry itself. Hume's purpose in Section VIII is to apply to the long disputed question concerning liberty and necessity what he takes to be his discovery that Our idea... of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of nature, where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter (Selby-Bigge, EHU 81-82). In urging what is here offered as the new and only correct interpretation of what others want to distinguish as contingent necessity and contingent impossibility, Hume is in their - and my - terms saying that there is no genuine idea of, and no such thing as, contingent necessity and contingent impossibility. There are, that is to say, no true logically contingent propositions asserting certain necessities and impossibilities whether relative or absolute. There are, on the contrary, only logical necessities and logical impossibilities; and these obtain simply as relations of ideas. They do not and cannot either characterize or determine real existence and matter of fact (EHU 25-26). Now certainly, if Hume were right in maintaining either that we cannot coherently assert, or that we never have due warrant for asserting, that any causes necessitate their effects - that they make these, that is, as a matter of fact inevitable and anything else as a matter of fact impossible - then it would become a short and easy task to effect a Compatibilist resolution of the long disputed question. For, on this assumption, nothing more than profound regularities of human behaviour, and sometimes predictabilities, ever have been or ever could be revealed, whether in the everyday experience of the banausic vulgar, or whether by the elevated investigations of the physical and the human sciences. Discoveries of this sort, however, do not and cannot prejudice the familiar realities of human action; which just requires that, in some sense, agents must always be able to do otherwise than they do. This sense - a sense which allows that both the agent who acts freely and the agent who acts under compulsion act - Hume explicates as Locke had done before him in the great chapter 'Of Power' (Essay, II (xxi) 7 ff.). Action necessarily involves a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may (EHU 95). 1. Having thus in Part I drawn Compatibilist conclusions from what is in effect his rejection of all contingent necessity and contingent impossibility, Hume proceeds in Part II to apply his findings to the theological special case: to the equally long disputed question of freewill and predestination, that is, rather than of freewill and determinism. After first considering that all reward and punishment must presuppose that the persons to be so treated are the causes of whatever it is for which they are to be rewarded or punished, Hume entertains what ironically he presents as an objection to this theory, with regard to necessity and liberty... It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to... (shrink)

Sidney Hook is considered by many to be America's most influential philosopher today. An earlier defender of Marxism, he became its most persistent critic, especially of its totalitarian and revolutionary manifestations. A student of John Dewey's pragmatism, Sidney Hook has written extensively about most of the live moral, social and political issues of the day. He has known and debated many of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Max Eastman, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Jacques Maritain, Mortimer Adler, (...) Robert Hutchins, Paul Tillich, Noam Chomsky, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Throughout his career, which spans a half a century, Sidney Hook has been a stalwart defender of the social democratic philosophy of freedom. At a time when secular humanism has been under heavy criticism from the New Right, he stands out as the leading philosophical representative of the position. Virtually all of the essays in this volume were written especially for it. The list of contributors includes Irving Kristol, Antony Flew, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Feuer, Daniel Bell, Richard Rorty, Ernest Nagel, Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, Ernest van den Haag, and others, all of whom testified that their thinking has been profoundly influenced by Sidney Hook's wisdom and insight. These original essays are wide-ranging in scope, but all are focused on Hook's philosophy or on subjects in which he has shown an abiding interest: socialism, democracy, equality, quotas, higher education, academic freedom, humanism, liberal education, natural and human rights, and pragmatism. The book also contains a complete up-to-date bibliography of the writings of Sidney Hook. (shrink)

In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers -- William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan -- address a variety of conceptual issues raised in Noam Chomsky's work. Distinguished list of critics: William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan. Includes Chomsky's substantial new replies and responses to each (...) essay. The best critical introduction to Chomsky's thought as a whole. (shrink)

Offering a unique and wide-ranging examination of the theory of knowledge, the new edition of this comprehensive collection deftly blends readings from the foremost classical sources with the work of important contemporary philosophical thinkers. Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches, 3/e, offers philosophical examinations of epistemology from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus); medieval philosophy (Augustine, Aquinas); early modern philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant); classical pragmatism and Anglo-American empiricism (James, Russell, Ayer, Lewis, Carnap, Quine, (...) Rorty); and other influential Anglo-American philosophers (Chisholm, Kripke, Moore, Wittgenstein, Strawson, Putnam). Organized chronologically and thematically, Human Knowledge, 3/e, features exceptionally broad coverage and nontechnical selections that are easily accessible to students. An ideal text for both undergraduate and graduate courses in epistemology, it is enhanced by the editors' substantial general introduction, section overviews, and up-to-date bibliographies. The third edition offers expanded selections on contemporary epistemology and adds selections by Thomas Reid, Richard Rorty, David B. Annis, Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, Ernest Sosa, Barry Stroud, and Louise M. Antony. Human Knowledge, 3/e, offers an unparalleled introduction to our ancient struggle to understand our own intellectual experience. (shrink)

Hume's compatibilist arguments are generally understood to be arguments about the logic of our notion of moral freedom. It would be illogical to hold an agent responsible for an action with which he is entirely unconnected. Accordingly, it would be illogical to hold an agent responsible for an action which was either uncaused or caused by factors external to the agent. It is logically necessary that a responsible action is one that has been determined by the will of the agent. (...) In short, while it is reasonable to hold an agent who has liberty of spontaneity responsible it is not reasonable to hold an agent responsible for actions that are due to indifference or external violence. This is the gist of what I shall call the 'orthodox' interpretation of Hume's 'reconciling project'. -/- This paper argues that these claims are seriously mistaken. Hume introduces 'the experimental method of reasoning' into this controversy in order to put an end to 'this long disputed question'. His arguments relating to 'liberty' and 'necessity' describe the 'regular mechanism' that governs the operation of our moral sentiments and relies on description rather than on 'logic' or 'conceptual analysis'. In important respects, therefore, Hume's 'general strategy' is very different from that of compatibilism as ordinarily understood (i.e. as per the 'orthodox' or classical interpretation). ________ Replies include: -/- * Antony Flew, "Paul Russell on Hume's `reconciling project' "; Mind 93 (372):587-588 (1984) -/- * Paul Russell, "Hume's `reconciling project': A reply to Flew"; Mind 94 (376):587-590 (1985) -/- . (shrink)

My discussion in this paper proceeds in four stages. First, Iprovide a brief description of Nozick’s entitlement theory and I raise some general questions about it. Secondly, I argue, contrary to Nozick, that we are justified in distributing some goods on the basis of need. More specifically, I argue that we must distinguish between the claim that goods ought to be distributed on the basis of need and the claim that goods which are essential needs ought to be distributed on (...) the basis of need. In the third section I consider the objection that such distributions will inevitably lead to the violation of individuals’ property rights. I argue that individuals are obliged to be charitable and that this obligation places limits on what they are entitled to. What charity requires of us, I maintain, we have no rights over and we must relinquish. In the fourth and final section I point out the general significance of these arguments. _______________ Replies include : -/- * Antony Flew, Meeting Needs: charity or justice?: Journal of Applied Philosophy 5 (2): 225-231. 1988. -/- * Tony Skillen, "Flew on Russell on Nozick: uncharitable interpretations of justice and unjust views of charity"; Journal of Applied Philosophy 7 (1): 87-89. 1990. (shrink)

Most of the world's religions hold a belief in some form of life after death. The editors of this major anthology seek a global perspective on the importance of these beliefs, based on religion, psychical research, and the natural sciences. Eleven chapters explore the afterlife teachings of religions around the world. In order to emphasize the diversity beliefs - even across particular belief systems - some contributors write from within the traditions, while others offer critical and alternate views. The chapters (...) cover afterlife beliefs in African religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism while raising a number of important questions. Is a belief in an afterlife necessary to provide meaning to the here and now? Can science provide the means of affirming such beliefs? A further four contributions address these questions directly, and critique the belief systems from the perspectives of philosophy and psychical research. The final chapter highlights the importance of research into states of consciousness during near-death and other mystical experiences. Taken as a whole, the book constitutes the most valuable resource on the subject to date. The editors conclude that in some respects, a global perspective does emerge - particularly that human beings are more than just our bodies, but are "composed of a physical and nonphysical element." The contributors are all prominent international scholars, including Kofi Asare Opoku, Daniel Cohn-Sherbok, Thomas McGowan, Sulayman S. Nyang, Salih Tug, Mariasusai Dhavamony, R. Balasubramanian, Saeng Chandra-Ngarm, Bruce R. Reichenbach, Antony Flew, Arthur S. Berger, David Lorimer, and the editors themselves. (shrink)

_Mini-set E: Radical Politics/The Socialist Tradition_ re-issues works by H B Acton, George Brenkert, Tom Campbell, Antony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, Athar Hussain, Amlan Datta, J Jupp, Dennis Kavanagh, Norman MacKenzie, Patricia Pugh and Paul Thomas among others which discuss the history of socialism and the marxist and anarchist traditions.

Offering a unique and wide-ranging examination of the theory of knowledge, the new edition of this comprehensive collection deftly blends readings from the foremost classical sources with the work of important contemporary philosophical thinkers. Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches, 3/e, offers philosophical examinations of epistemology from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy ; medieval philosophy ; early modern philosophy ; classical pragmatism and Anglo-American empiricism ; and other influential Anglo-American philosophers. Organized chronologically and thematically, Human Knowledge, 3/e, features exceptionally broad (...) coverage and nontechnical selections that are easily accessible to students. An ideal text for both undergraduate and graduate courses in epistemology, it is enhanced by the editors' substantial general introduction, section overviews, and up-to-date bibliographies. The third edition offers expanded selections on contemporary epistemology and adds selections by Thomas Reid, Richard Rorty, David B. Annis, Richard Feldman and Earl Conee, Ernest Sosa, Barry Stroud, and Louise M. Antony. Human Knowledge, 3/e, offers an unparalleled introduction to our ancient struggle to understand our own intellectual experience. (shrink)

Following are two short contributions to the book, _Criminal Law Conversations_: commentaries on Paul Robinson's discussion of "Empirical Desert" and Antony Duff & Sandra Marshal's discussion of the sharing of wrongs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scuba technology, underwater cameras, and documentarians revealed a long-hidden underwater world to the public. At this time oceanographic science was growing exponentially. Historians of the marine sciences have focused their studies of the period on institutional and military partnerships, and on the scientist-administrators who shaped oceanographic research institutions (such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the British National Institute of Oceanography). Underwater habitat development during the 1960s and 1970s, however, (...) deserves greater attention than it has yet received, as it highlights a peculiar confluence of military, scientific, and popular interest, characteristic of the period, in the colonization of the seafloor. Existing accounts have focused on American habitats, notably Sealab and Tektite, since these were the largest and best funded. But this approach overemphasizes a Cold War narrative in which the sole protagonists of the habitat programs were the United States and the Soviet Union. At least 65 habitats were built between 1962 and 1991. Some were state-sponsored, with significant programs run by French, German, Japanese, and Canadian teams. This essay takes as a case study the Canadian Sublimnos habitat as well as the underwater exploration programs it helped launch in Newfoundland (Lora-I) and in the Arctic (Sub-Igloo). The Canadian case demonstrates that technological expertise and public enthusiasm for underwater exploration should not be solely understood with reference to Cold War interests of the two superpowers. Rather, the international range of habitat programs of the 1960s and 1970s reveals an expanding interest in the vertical underwater dimension that was fueled by numerous national scientific aims and territorial claims. (shrink)

Causation appears to present us with an interpretative difficulty. While arguably a redundant relation given fundamental physics, it is nevertheless apparently pragmatically indispensable. This chapter revisits certain arguments made previously by the author for these claims with the benefit of hindsight, starting with the role of causal models in the human sciences, and attempting to explain why it is not possible to straightforwardly ground such models in fundamental physics. This suggests that further constraints, going beyond physics, are needed to legitimate (...) such models. These supplementary constraints could be reified, but that would seem to conflict with the completeness of physics. A response is to emphasize the practical role of causal talk, and the author suggests that a fictionalist approach might be worth exploring. After clarifying fictionalism as a general approach, they carry out in some detail the project of clarifying what a fictionalist attitude to causation would involve. (shrink)

The notion of multiple location plays an important role in the characterization of endurantism. Several authors have recently offered cases intended to demonstrate the incoherence of multiple location. I argue that these cases do not succeed in making multiple location problematic. Along the way, several crucial issues about multiple location and its use by endurantists are clarified.

The question "What can justify criminal punishment ?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers a variety of answers to that question-answers that try to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers that try to (...) identify some beneficial consequences in terms of which punishment might be justified; as well as abolitionist answers telling us that we should seek to abolish, rather than to justify, criminal punishment. This book begins with a critical survey of recent trends in penal theory, but goes on to develop an original account (based on Duff's earlier Trials and Punishments) of criminal punishment as a mode of moral communication, aimed at inducing repentance, reform, and reconciliation through reparation-an account that undercuts the traditional controversies between consequentialist and retributivist penal theories, and that shows how abolitionist concerns can properly be met by a system of communicative punishments. In developing this account, Duff articulates the "liberal communitarian" conception of political society (and of the role of the criminal law) on which it depends; he discusses the meaning and role of different modes of punishment, showing how they can constitute appropriate modes of moral communication between political community and its citizens; and he identifies the essential preconditions for the justice of punishment as thus conceived-preconditions whose non-satisfaction makes our own system of criminal punishment morally problematic. Punishment, Communication, and Community offers no easy answers, but provides a rich and ambitious ideal of what criminal punishment could be-an ideal of what criminal punishment cold be-and ideal that challenges existing penal theories as well as our existing penal theories as well as our existing penal practices. (shrink)

I argue that any broadly dispositional analysis of probability will either fail to give an adequate explication of probability, or else will fail to provide an explication that can be gainfully employed elsewhere (for instance, in empirical science or in the regulation of credence). The diversity and number of arguments suggests that there is little prospect of any successful analysis along these lines.

Recently, many philosophers have been interested in using locative relations to clarify and pursue debates in the metaphysics of material objects. Most begin with the relation of exact location. But what if we begin instead with the relation known as weak location – the relation an object x bears to any region not completely bereft of x? I explore some of the consequences of pursuing this route for issues including coincidence, extended simples, and endurance, with an eye to evaluating the (...) prospects for taking weak location as our fundamental locative relation. (shrink)

I sketch a new constraint on chance, which connects chance ascriptions closely with ascriptions of ability, and more specifically with 'CAN'-claims. This connection between chance and ability has some claim to be a platitude; moreover, it exposes the debate over deterministic chance to the extensive literature on (in)compatibilism about free will. The upshot is that a prima facie case for the tenability of deterministic chance can be made. But the main thrust of the paper is to draw attention to the (...) connection between the truth conditions of sentences involving 'CAN' and 'CHANCE', and argue for the context sensitivity of each term. Awareness of this context sensitivity has consequences for the evaluation of particular philosophical arguments for (in) compatibilism when they are presented in particular contexts. (shrink)

Recently, Cody Gilmore has deployed an ingenious case involving backwards time travel to highlight an apparent conflict between the theory that objects persist by perduring, and the thesis that wholly coincident objects are impossible. However, careful attention to the concepts of location and parthood that Gilmore’s cases involve shows that the perdurantist faces no genuine objection from these cases, and that the perdurantist has a number of plausible and dialectically appropriate ways to avoid the supposed conflict.