A classicist, philosopher, and poet, Poul Martin Møller was an important figure in the Danish Golden Age. The traumatic event of the death of his wife led him to think more profoundly about the question of the immortality of the soul. In 1837 he published his most important philosophical treatise, "Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality," presented here in English for the first time. It was read and commented upon by the leading figures of the Golden Age, (...) such as Søren Kierkegaard. It proved to be the last important work that Møller wrote before his death in March of 1838 at the age of 43. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows (...) that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity. (shrink)

It is now some years since Professor D. Daiches Raphael published his interesting book, The Paradox of Tragedy , which represented one of the first serious attempts made by a British philosopher to assess the significance of tragic drama for ethical, and indeed metaphysical theory. Since then we have had a variety of books touching on related topics: for instance, Dr George Steiner's Death of Tragedy and Mr Raymond Williams’ most recent, elusive and interesting essay, Modern Tragedy. To entitle an (...) essay Theology and Tragedy might be thought to invite needless trouble for oneself; to indulge to a dangerous degree the human intellectual obsession of supposing that ‘the meaning of a word is an object’. After all, if one confines one's regard to the Greeks, one has to recognise that between the treatments of their common theme of Electra , Sophocles and Euripides are in fact doing very different things. There is no gainsaying the significance for Euripides of the postponement of the murder of Clytemnestra till after that of Aegisthus, still less of his introduction into the play of the morally upright peasant, who has had the banished Electra in his keeping, and whose simple integrity contrasts both with the corruption of the court and the obsessive preoccupation with a dreadful, supposed duty of brother and sister. The element of propaganda is unmistakable; while in Sophocles’ Electra it is altogether absent, although Dr Victor Ehrenberg in his very interesting monograph on Sophocles and Pericles has argued strongly for an element of subtle political commentary in the treatment of Oedipus in the Oedipus Tyrannus , and of Pocreon in the Antigone. These remarks may serve to show that the title does not express a blind indifference to the multiple complexity of those works which we class together as tragedies. They are inherently complex, and various in emphasis; at best we can discern a family resemblance between them, and, in an essay like this, the author runs the risk not only of selecting examples tailor-made to his thesis, but also of imposing an appearance of similarity of conception where it is at least equally important to stress differences. (shrink)

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about (...) the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this article should become plain during the reading of it, but perhaps some prior explanation is needed. Almost from the beginning of my study of the paṭiccasamuppāda I have had the notion that it could not have come into existence in the form the usual twelvefold formulation takes. For reasons which I try to make clear this twelvefold formulation is not a satisfactory statement of what it is supposed to explain, namely the reasons for each individual's continued (...) rebirths. I feel - and sadly I have to emphasize, before someone else does it for me, that in the final analysis I am relying more or less on intuition for my attitude towards the twelvefold formulation - that if one person alone had been responsible for the usually referred to formulation, and especially if that one person had been the Buddha, then those anomalies that now prevail would never have existed. (shrink)

In this article I assess the Invariance Principle, which states that only quantities that are invariant under the symmetries of our theories are physically real. I argue, contrary to current orthodoxy, that the variance of a quantity under a theory’s symmetries is not a sufficient basis for interpreting that theory as being uncommitted to the reality of that quantity. Rather, I argue, the variance of a quantity under symmetries only ever serves as a motivation to refrain from any commitment to (...) the quantity in question. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

The music ensemble has often been used as an analogy of organisation processes in general. Many versions of this analogy presuppose a specific organisation structure in the ensemble with clearly defined leader-follower relationships from which we can learn important points about successful leadership. This paper wishes to draw attention to the wide variety of organisation processes that may occur in a music ensemble, some of which are not dependent on leadership. Through the outlines of a logical analysis of a coordination (...) problem, it is argued that the music performance is in fact exemplary of a situation in which individual dedication to a goal promotes coordination in the entire group. (shrink)

This article explores yet another paradox – aside from the privacy paradox – related to the datafication of media: citizens trust least the media they use most It investigates the role that daily life plays in shaping the trust that citizens place in datafied media. The study reveals five sets of heuristics guiding the trust assessments of citizens: characteristics of media organisations, old media standards, context of use and purpose, experiences of datafication and understandings of datafication. The article discusses the (...) use of these heuristics and the value that everyday life holds in assessing trust in datafied media. It concludes that, guided by a partial ‘structure of perception’ and enticed into trusting datafied media in the context of their daily lives, citizens may be highly concerned by the datafication of media but use them nevertheless. (shrink)

There exists a common view that for theories related by a ‘duality’, dual models typically may be taken ab initio to represent the same physical state of affairs, i.e. to correspond to the same possible world. We question this view, by drawing a parallel with the distinction between ‘interpretational’ and ‘motivational’ approaches to symmetries.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains the purpose of the transcendental deduction of the categories by referring to the practice of legal deduction (KrV, A 84/B 116). However, he does not elaborate the details of the analogy and the reader is left to fill in the blanks concerning legal deductions and their supposed similarities with transcendental deductions. In this paper, I suggest we use judicial imputation to clarify Kant’s analogy between transcendental and legal deductions. My claim is that (...) the core of the analogy is not the similarities between the acquisition of property and that of concepts but rather similarities in the application of a law to a deed. (shrink)

Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.

The concept ‘hereditary breast cancer’ is commonly used to delineate a group of people genetically at risk for breast cancer—all of whom also having risk for other cancers. People carrying pathogenic variants of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are often referred to as those having predisposition for ‘hereditary breast cancer’. The two genes, however, are when altered, associated with different risks for and dying from breast cancer. The main risk for dying for carriers of both genes is from ovarian cancer. (...) These biological facts are of philosophical interest, because they are the facts underlying the public debate on BRCA1/2 genetic testing as a model for the discussion of how to implement genetic knowledge and technologies in personalized medicine. A contribution to this public debate describing inherited breast cancer as ‘biological citizenship’ recently printed in Med Health Care and Philos illustrated how fragmented and detached from the biological and socio-political facts this debate sometimes is. We here briefly summarize some of the biological facts and how they are implemented in today’s healthcare based on agreed philosophical, ethical and moral principles. The suggestion of a ‘biological citizenship’ defined by hereditary breast cancer is incorrect and ill-advised. ‘Identity politics’ focusing hereditary breast cancer patients as a group based on a bundle of ill-defined negative arguments is well known, but is supported neither by scientific nor philosophical arguments. To those born with the genetic variants described, the philosophical rule of not doing harm is violated by unbalanced negative arguments. (shrink)

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that (...) in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon. (shrink)

The central insight of Darwin's Origin of Species is that evolution is an ecological phenomenon, arising from the activities of organisms in the 'struggle for life'. By contrast, the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which rose to prominence in the twentieth century, presents evolution as a fundamentally molecular phenomenon, occurring in populations of sub-organismal entities - genes. After nearly a century of success, the Modern Synthesis theory is now being challenged by empirical advances in the study of organismal development and (...) inheritance. In this important study, D. M. Walsh shows that the principal defect of the Modern Synthesis resides in its rejection of Darwin's organismal perspective, and argues for 'situated Darwinism': an alternative, organism-centred conception of evolution that prioritises organisms as adaptive agents. His book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This paper challenges the role individual autonomy has played in debates on moral neuroenhancement (MN). It shows how John Hyman’s analysis of agency as consisting of functionally integrated dimensions allows us to reassess the impact of MN on practical agency. I discuss how MN affects what Hyman terms the four dimensions of agency: psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical. Once we separate the different dimensions of agency, it becomes clear that many authors in the debate conflate the different dimensions in the (...) concept they call ‘autonomous agents’. They contend that, for example, reason-giving and previous autonomous acts are relevant to agency as such, when in fact they capture only one aspect of functionally integrated agency. This paper reconsiders MN in light of the functional integration of reason and emotions in practical agency. To illustrate the impact of MN on different aspects of agency, I consider examples from legal practice, which show that autonomy cannot be our sole focus when evaluating the moral implications of MN. (shrink)