The authors study the impact of institutional corporate social responsibility —defined as CSR targeted at a borrowing firm’s secondary stakeholders—on bank loans. Findings suggest that higher levels of institutional CSR are associated with lower levels of interest rates and loan spreads. In addition, institutional CSR also tempers the positive impact of loan maturity and firm leverage on interest rates and loan spread. These effects were strongest among firms that demonstrated sustained performance, rather than among firms that showed mixed performance in (...) terms of their secondary stakeholder-related activities. This study indicates institutional CSR is valued by stakeholders for its risk mitigating and transaction cost reducing effects independent of technical CSR, defined as CSR targeted at primary stakeholders. (shrink)

Adopting an instrumental approach for stakeholder management, we focus on two primary stakeholder groups to investigate the relationship between employee treatment and loan contracts with banks. We find strong evidence that fair employee treatment reduces loan price and limits the use of financial covenants. In addition, we document that relationship bank lenders price both the levels and changes in the quality of employee treatment, whereas first-time bank lenders only care about the levels of fair employee treatment. Taking a contingency perspective, (...) we find that industry competition and firm asset intangibility moderate the relationship between good human resource management and bank loan costs. The cost reduction effect of fair employee treatment is stronger for firms operating in a more competitive industry and having higher levels of intangible assets. (shrink)

Much of the current imaging literature either denies the existence of wakeful non-mental imagers, views non-imagers motivationally as 'repressors' or 'neurotic', or acknowledges them but does not fully incorporate them into their models. Neurobiologists testing for imaging loss seem to assume that visual recognition, describing objects, and free-hand drawing require the forming of conscious images. The intuition that 'the psyche never thinks without an image.... the reasoning mind thinks its ideas in the form of images' (Aristotle) has a long tradition (...) in philosophical psychology, from Aristotle through the British empiricists to the British-empiricist-inspired introspection paradigm of Titchener. The massive shift in early experimental psychology to the introspective-antagonistic paradigm of Watson's behaviourism, may have sprung from the contrary intuition that no one thinks in mental images. In both cases, people seemed to assume that what is in one's own mind is in everybody's mind. A third, mediating, intuition - that some people do not think with conscious mental imagery -- seems to be confirmed by empirical studies on many levels. From the early imagery interviews of Francis Galton through many modern surveys, including my own, a consistent diversity of self-reports on ones own mental imagery abilities suggests that some 2-5% of people are very poor- or non-visual- imagers who, yet, maintain normal visual recognition abilities. Comparable estimates have been made in auditory and other imagery modalities. (shrink)

Managers often ask why their firm should have an ethics program, especially if no one has complained about unethical behavior. The pursuit of business ethics can cost money, they say. It can lose sales to less scrupulous competitors and can drain management time and energy. But as Harvard business professor Francis Aguilar points out, ethics scandals (such as over Beech-Nut's erzatz "apple juice" or Sears's padded car repair bills) can severely damage a firm, with punishing legal penalties, bad publicity, (...) and irreparably injured customer relations. Equally important if less obvious, unethical behavior can undermine a firm's organizational spirit. On the other hand, Aguilar argues, in a well run firm, ethical programs can actually enhance corporate performance, strengthening the company at every level and supercharging employee risk taking and innovation. In Managing Corporate Ethics, Aguilar shows managers how to create ethical programs within their organizations that not only discourage large-scale wrongdoing, but can contribute substantially to the achievement of corporate excellence. Aguilar's program is down-to-earth and comprehensive, and based on his extensive research on highly successful, ethical companies, both large and small. He recommends action on three fronts: first, get senior management to provide effective ethical leadership; second, set up an ethics program that promotes concern for the interests of people affected by the firm's operations and that provides safeguards against corrupting business pressures; and third, staff the company with ethical people and surround the organization with ethical advisors (including legal, financial, accounting, tax, and marketing consultants). To illuminate this three-step program, Aguilar incorporates the lessons learned in his in-depth study of ten prominent firms with proven successful ethics programs--among them Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Nucor Steel, Cray Research, ServiceMaster, and Texas Instruments. He examines Lincoln Electric's attention to compensation and job security to ensure quality products and to reduce the pressure or temptation to act unethically. He shows how General Mills, while pushing product line managers to compete aggressively, uses corporate staff units to guard against illegal or unacceptable claims (testing cake recipes, for example, to see if a product's quality fails under the less-than-perfect conditions of a normal kitchen). And he details how Armstrong World Industries uses pep talks, inspirational stories, role models, and ready access to management to promote ethical standards among employees. Throughout, Aguilar demonstrates convincingly that an ethical program pays dividends: that employees, suppliers, customers, and the community at large know when they are being treated in a positive and constructive manner, and are likely to respond in kind. Packed with real life examples of successful (and failed) ethical programs, Managing Corporate Ethics is a valuable roadmap to an often overlooked source of business success. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Recently three studies have reported on the test-retest reliability of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity; however, these studies were limited to comparatively small samples . The present study examined the temporal stability of the 7-item version of the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity over a 15-week period among a sample of 581 English children aged between 10 and 12 years. Data demonstrated that stability across the two administrations was very high ; however, there was a (...) significant change in mean scores between Time 1 and Time 2. (shrink)

Francis Collins had an impressive track record as a gene hunter (cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease) when he was appointed Director of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 1993. In June 2000, together with Craig Venter and President Bill Clinton, he presented the draft version of the human genome sequence to a worldwide audience during a famous press conference. And in 2009, President Barack Obama nominated him as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest Tfunding (...) agency for biomedical research in the world. s The In 2006, Collins published his book The Language of God,3 an autobiographical account of the HGP and its scientific, historical, and societal significance, with special attention paid to the impact of the human sequence on the way we see our world and ourselves.4 Now, by way of a sequel, he has written The Language of Life. Wherea Language of God focused on the genome sequence of mankind in general, and on the HGP as a “revolution” in biomedicine, the new book, as indicated by its subtitle, is oriented towards “the revolution in personalized medicine”, the impact of the genomics revolution on the personal lives of individuals. Before subjecting Collins’ book to a closer reading, I first of all would like to explain how I will read it and from what perspective. Why is genomics in general, and the HGP and its aftermath in particular, a subject of interest to a philosopher like me? Why did I become interested in assessing the HGP and in studying the work and views of some of its key contributors? (shrink)

Positions on the ethics of human enhancement technologies can be (crudely) characterized as ranging from transhumanism to bioconservatism. Transhumanists believe that human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, that individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves, and that parents should normally have the right to choose enhancements for their children-to-be. Bioconservatives (whose ranks include such diverse writers as Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, George Annas, Wesley Smith, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bill McKibben) (...) are generally opposed to the use of technology to modify human nature. A central idea in bioconservativism is that human enhancement technologies will undermine our human dignity. To forestall a slide down the slippery slope towards an ultimately debased ‘posthuman’ state, bioconservatives often argue for broad bans on otherwise promising human enhancements. This paper distinguishes two common fears about the posthuman and argues for the importance of a concept of dignity that is inclusive enough to also apply to many possible posthuman beings. Recognizing the possibility of posthuman dignity undercuts an important objection against human enhancement and removes a distortive double standard from our field of moral vision. (shrink)

Physical objects are such things as stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in. therefore expresses a commonsense commitment to physical realism: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone.

Positions on the ethics of human enhancement technologies can be (crudely) characterized as ranging from transhumanism to bioconservatism. Transhumanists believe that human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, that individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves, and that parents should normally have the right to choose enhancements for their children-to-be. Bioconservatives (whose ranks include such diverse writers as Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, George Annas, Wesley Smith, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bill McKibben) (...) are generally opposed to the use of technology to modify human nature. A central idea in bioconservativism is that human enhancement technologies will undermine our human dignity. To forestall a slide down the slippery slope towards an ultimately debased ‘posthuman’ state, bioconservatives often argue for broad bans on otherwise promising human enhancements. This paper distinguishes two common fears about the posthuman and argues for the importance of a concept of dignity that is inclusive enough to also apply to many possible posthuman beings. Recognizing the possibility of posthuman dignity undercuts an important objection against human enhancement and removes a distortive double standard from our field of moral vision. (shrink)

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view.

In Rogues, Jacques Derrida once again examines some central concepts in political theory and ethics, in the context of the post-9/11world and the present American drive to reforge global hegemony. The book is important not only for what it says about the concepts of sovereignty, unconditionality, law, and justice, but also for engaging in an extended way with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and especially Kant. Bill Martin argues that Derrida’s thought is vitally significant for radical politics. He compares (...) Rogues, as (arguably) Derrida’s last major work (to appear before his passing in October 2004) with Sartre’s last book, Hope Now. Lastly, Martin memorializes Derrida, whom he knew as teacher and friend, as “a kind and generous man who stood for many good things,” and hereflects on the philosophical trajectory that extends from Sartre to Derrida. (shrink)

In his comments, Richard Fumerton carefully develops two fundamental concerns with my views, which he interprets sympathetically, and almost entirely correctly. Before turning to these concerns, though, I must make one point about his concise opening statement of my principal claims. As I hope is clear from my précis, perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs not simply in virtue of sharing demonstrative content with them. The key idea is that a person cannot properly grasp the objective content of these (...) experiences—that is, he cannot actually have experiences of particular things in the mind-independent world around him—without understanding that his apprehension that things are thus and so out there is in part due to the fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content as his epistemic openness to the way things objectively are. This is clearly central to my overall position. (shrink)

Realism concerning a given domain of things is the view that the things in that domain exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone.

THE P R E F A C E, Giving fome ACCOUNT of the LIFE, WRITINGS, and CHARACTER of the AUTHOR. T"\R. FRANCIS HUTCHESON was born on the 8th of ...

This is the first critical edition since the nineteenth century of Bacon's principal philosophical work in English, The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and humane - traditionally known as The Advancement of Learning.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We believe that the ordinary physical objects that we perceive continue to exist unperceived; and this is intuitively an aspect of any authentic characterization of how the world appears to us in perception. But how can experience present its objects as continuing to exist beyond that very experience of them? Here I aim to explain this phenomenon. I start with an insight from Evans (1985). Familiar attempts to implement this insight fail, in my opinion. Here I introduce, motivate, defend, and (...) elaborate an alternative approach to its implementation that, I claim, succeeds. Its key is to recognize the role of Evans’s insight in the metaphysics of perceptual experience itself. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displaying these spatial relations between its objects and us, the perceivers, perception (...) places us in the perceived world: our world and the world we perceive are one. Clearly this is not achieved by our continually perceiving ourselves along with the things around us, and thus recovering our position with respect to them. Indeed I shall argue that there are serious difficulties with the suggestion that this might be the basic mechanism for perceptual self- location. Furthermore, I shall argue that our existence as an element of the objective order cannot be inferred from the raw given in sense perception. Hence it cannot even be on the right lines as an answer to the question 'What is it for perception to represent its objects as environmental to the subject?', that it should present these objects, along with the perceiving subject himself, or along with something from which his existence in the perceived world could be deduced, in the very same frame so to speak. Nevertheless it yields him an awareness of himself as there in the wings of that scene, genuinely located with respect to the action, yet somehow not normally quite getting onto the stage. And I shall argue here, that perceptual contents succeed in being self-locating in this way in.. (shrink)

In 2011, Hibbard suggested an intelligence measure for agents who compete in an adversarial sequence prediction game. We argue that Hibbard’s idea should actually be considered as two separate ideas: first, that the intelligence of such agents can be measured based on the growth rates of the runtimes of the competitors that they defeat; and second, one specific (somewhat arbitrary) method for measuring said growth rates. Whereas Hibbard’s intelligence measure is based on the latter growth-rate-measuring method, we survey other methods (...) for measuring function growth rates, and exhibit the resulting Hibbard-like intelligence measures and taxonomies. Of particular interest, we obtain intelligence taxonomies based on Big-O and Big-Theta notation systems, which taxonomies are novel in that they challenge conventional notions of what an intelligence measure should look like. We discuss how intelligence measurement of sequence predictors can indirectly serve as intelligence measurement for agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGIs). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Possibility of Falsity The Involvement of Generality Notes References.

Wherever a government or state is concerned with the welfare of its citizens, there will probably also exist policies which compel the individual citizen to undertake or abstain from activities which affect that citizen alone. The set of theories behind such policies is collectively known as ‘paternalism’. It is not hard to understand why this term has developed strong pejorative overtones. Policies of this type appear to offend a fundamental tenet of liberal societies: namely, that the individual is best placed (...) to know what is in his or her interests. Paternalistic policies imply, and are concerned with correcting, failures of precisely this kind of judgement. And yet, at the same time, there is a popular consensus that compelling people to wear a seat belt when driving a car is a reasonable restriction of personal liberty. Paternalism may be difficult to accept in principle, but it is equally difficult to avoid in practice. Not surprisingly, the literature reveals a long heritage of debate in a wide range of academic disciplines. This debate reveals a failure to make progress in two areas in particular. First, analyses of paternalism often confuse policies which are actually concerned with correcting failures of market exchange — in particular, those concerned with insufficient or imperfect information — with those which are genuinely paternalistic. One objective of this paper will be to clarify the difference between these two kinds of policy. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mary Kalantzis was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Bill Cope is a Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They are co-authors of multiple books including Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge, forthcoming), New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Cambridge, 2008, 2012), Literacies (Cambridge 2012, 2016) and e-Learning Ecologies (2017).

This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it? Occasionally I watch The Ellen DeGeneres Show. I have appreciated Ellen as a comedian since she first came on the public scene, and one part of her talk show that I enjoy is the dancing in the opening segment, where Ellen dances to music played by a DJ, and she goes up into the audience and the overwhelmingly female audience dances with (...) her. I like to dance and I enjoy watching other people dance, but the Ellen dance segment also holds a special fascination for me, as there is a style of dancing I have observed over the last twenty-five years or so, a style that might as well be called “lesbian,” and which, if you don’t .. (shrink)

Dennett’s theory of consciousness is often misread as broadly anti-realist. His aversion to ontology encourages readers to form their own interpretations, and the rhetoric he employs often seems to support the anti-realist reading. Dennett does offer defenses against the anti-realist charge, but these are piecemeal and diffuse. This paper examines Dennett’s most current expression, which proves insufficient on its own as a resolution to the ontological dispute. Drawing on related discussions in an attempt to find a resolution leads to a (...) further challenge from Schwitzgebel. Crucial distinctions between inner and outer, cause and effect, and reporting and expressing, unite in a general characterization of how a realist explanation of consciousness should bottom out. Dennett’s form of realism depends upon distinguishing the explananda of consciousness from their doomed explanans; anti-realism about the latter makes room for genuine explanation of how things seem to us. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 24-38, October 2020.

This richly annotated second edition of the now-classic pairing of Bacon’s masterpieces, New Atlantis and The Great Instauration features the addition of other works by Bacon, including “The Idols of the Mind,” Of Unity in Religion” and “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” as well a Summary of the each work and Questions for the reader. S Includes works new to the second edition, including “The Idols of the Mind,” “Of Unity in Religion,” and “Of the True Greatness (...) of Kingdoms and Estates” Updates the layout of the previous edition with a more generous interior design, making this work more student-friendly and easier to navigate in the classroom Each work is introduced and subsequently discussed, revealing the importance of Bacon’s work to his contemporaries as well as to modern readers Includes a comprehensive introduction and annotations throughout the text; as well as an appendix of Principal Dates in the Life of Sir Francis Bacon; a selected bibliography; and synopses and questions to accompany each work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet bells (...) with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

What is the role of conscious perceptual experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge? My central claim is that a proper account of the way in which perceptual experiences contribute to our understanding of the most basic beliefs about particular things in the mind-independent world around us reveals how such experiences provide peculiarly fundamental reasons for such beliefs. There are, I claim, epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical belief. The crucial epistemological role of experiences lies in their essential (...) contribution to the subject’s understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. Part I of my book argues that this must be so; Part II explains in detail how it is so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Authorship of the Abstract Revisited John 0. Nelson More than a dozen years ago, in the pages of The Philosophical Quarterly,1 this writer contested Sraffa and Keynes' claim, advanced in the introduction to their edition ofthe Abstract? that it was Hume and not Adam Smith (as traditionally supposed) who was the author of that work. The traditional view, which might be called the Adam Smith authorship-theory, was largely (...) inspired by and seemed nailed shut by Hume's reference to a "Mr Smith" in a letter to Francis Hutcheson, datedMarch 4, 1740.3There appeared tobe goodreasonsforidentifying this "Mr Smith" with Adam Smith and then the latter with the undivulged author of the Abstract. It was known, for instance, that previous to March 4, 1740, Adam Smith had been a student of Hutcheson's and that Hutcheson was in the habit of setting his students the task of writing abstracts of newly published philosophical works.4 Since Hutcheson had originallylooked with favor on both the Treatise and its author,5 it had to seem more than likely that he had set his students the task ofwriting an abstract ofthe newly published Treatise ofHume. It was known, too, that Adam Smith was in possession of a copy ofthe Treatise soon after the date of H.6 Who, then, might be the "Mr Smith" adverted to in H's "My Bookseller has sent to Mr Smith a Copy of my Book, which I hope he has receive, as well as your Letter," except that same student of Hutcheson's, Adam Smith? What other Smith might have been known to Hutcheson, whom Hume could have wanted to refer to? No other Smith appeared to fit the bill. But why should Hume have wanted to refer in his correspondence with Hutcheson to an obscure, sixteen-year-old student ofHutcheson's, besides going to the trouble of having his bookseller send him a copy of the Treatise, unless that student had in some way made himselfnot only known to Hume but so highly regarded that Hume would want to favor him, presumably at his own expense, with a copy ofthe Treatise? The only tenable answer had to seem to be that this same student had composed such a perceptive and laudatory précis of the Treatise for Hutcheson that the latter had shown it to Hume and Hume, in the honest attempt to excite interest and sales of that languishing work, had seen to its publication as the Abstractl These are the reasonings Volume XVII Number 1 83 JOHN O. NELSON and considerations that inspired and seemed to confirm the Adam Smith authorship-theory.7 As can be perceived, these reasonings and considerations all revolve around the reference to a "Mr Smith"in H andthe identification of that Smith with Adam Smith. When, therefore, Sraffa and Keynes in the introduction to their edition oftheAbstract pointed out that there existed another Smith who might arguably be the Mr Smith referred toin H, namely, the DubUn publisher oftwo ofHutcheson's works, John Smith "at the Philosopher's Head on the Blind Quay," its major prop being seemingly knocked out from under it, the Adam Smith authorship-theory crashed—at least in the eyes of the general world—to the ground. And in thelatter's place, various ofits supporting reasons being given a lease on life, such as Hume's well-known endeavors and desires to excite interest in this first work of his, the Hume authorship-theory, so to speak, seated itself. In my previous venture into this subject, "Has the Authorship of An Abstract ofa Treatise ofHuman Nature Really Been Decided?"8 I tried, I believe with some success, to show that Sraffa and Keynes' arguments were not so unanswerable as they were generally taken to be and that, in fact, they presented various difficulties which the traditional theory avoided. But what then occasions this new excursion into these troubled waters? What more is to be said that I did not say in "Decided"? In "Decided" I presented various arguments and considerations that showed that it was unlikely either that Hume was the author of theAbstract or that the Mr Smith referred to in H... (shrink)

Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View, (CV), attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011, esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument here against this view. Ascription of personal level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise (...) of such personal level capacities depends in turn upon conscious selective attention. Yet conscious visual acquaintance with the world is the prior ground for the possibility of any such conscious selective attention. Acquaintance obtains throughout the visual field: where conscious attention is not actually directed as well as where it is. So acquaintance does not depend upon conscious selective attention. Thus, acquaintance is not sufficient for the exercise of the relevant personal level capacities. Exercise of these capacities is nevertheless necessary for personal level content. Therefore visual acquaintance cannot be understood in terms of perceptual content: basic conscious experience of the world is not a matter of anything like the predication involved in perceptual content. It is rather the relational ground for the possibility of such predication. (shrink)

La " philosophie politique " est le singulier croisement, effectué par Aristote, de deux produits de l'histoire grecque. Depuis lors, toute la pensée politique (de Machiavel à Marx, de Montesquieu à H. Arendt) se nourrit de celle d'Aristote. Il convenait d'analyser les livres fondateurs de cette pensée fondatrice pour en livrer à tous l'intention singulière et le sens universel. Les problèmes des cités où vécut Aristote ne sont sans doute pas ceux de nos Etats. Et pourtant les réflexions philosophiques d'Aristote (...) sur ces problèmes peuvent toujours éclairer nos questions. Tous les pouvoirs sont-ils du même type? Est-il naturel d'obéir? Qui doit commander? Quel est le meilleur régime? Qu'est-ce que la justice en politique? Qu'est-ce que la démocratie? Ceux-là mêmes qui ne veulent pas en entendre parler pourraient entendre quelles inquiétudes cache ce mot de " politique " " pourquoi vivre ensemble? " et " comment vivre ensemble? ". (shrink)

This article examines ancient depictions of the death of Troilus in art and literature and challenges the widespread belief that the Iliad implies an alternative version of the myth in which Troilus dies in battle. In particular, it argues that the death-in-battle interpretation is both insufficiently supported by the internal evidence and incompatible with the external evidence. Given the evident popularity of the story of Achilles’ ambush of Troilus in the Archaic period, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that (...) the poet of the Iliad knew the story of Troilus’ death by ambush. That the poem's only reference to Troilus does not contradict this story, and possibly even alludes to it, should persuade critics of the strong likelihood that the popular story of Troilus’ ambush at the fountain was also the one in the poet's mind. (shrink)