A key to modern studies of 18th century Western philosophy, the Treatise considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity and morality. This abridged edition has an introduction which explain's Hume's thought and places it in the context of its times.

Introduction to the work David Hume described as the best of his many writings.

This volume offers a carefully argued, compelling theory of bioethics while eliciting practical implications for a wide array of issues including medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death. The authors' dual-value theory features mid-level principles, a distinctive model of moral status, a subjective account of well-being, and a cosmopolitan view of global justice. In addition to ethical theory, the book investigates the nature of harm and autonomous action, personal identity theory, and the (...) 'non-identity problem' associated with many procreative decisions. Readers new to particular topics will benefit from helpful introductions, specialists will appreciate in-depth theoretical explorations and a novel take on various practical issues, and all readers will benefit from the book's original synoptic vision of bioethics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

I provide a fairly systematic analysis of when quantities that are variant under a dynamical symmetry transformation should be regarded as unobservable, or redundant, or unreal; of when models related by a dynamical symmetry transformation represent the same state of affairs; and of when mathematical structure that is variant under a dynamical symmetry transformation should be regarded as surplus. In most of these cases the answer is `it depends': depends, that is, on the details of the symmetry in question. A (...) central feature of the analysis is that in order to draw any of these conclusions for a dynamical symmetry it needs to be understood in terms of its possible extensions to other physical systems, in particular to measurement devices. (shrink)

Human beings seek to transcend limits. This is part of our potential greatness, since it is how we can realize what is best in our humanity. However, the limit-transcending feature of human life is also part of our potential downfall, as it can lead to dehumanization and failure to attain important human goods and to prevent human evils. Exploring the place of limits within a well-lived human life this work develops and defends an original account of limiting virtues, which are (...) concerned with recognizing proper limits in human life. The limiting virtues that are the focus are humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty, and they are explored in relation to four kinds of limits: existential limits, moral limits, political limits, and economic limits. These virtues have been underexplored in discussions about virtue ethics, and when they have been explored it has not been with regard to the general issue of the place of limits within a well-lived human life. The account of the limiting virtues provided here, however, is intended as a counter to other prominent approaches to ethics: namely, autonomy-centered approaches and consequentialist (or maximizing) approaches. This account is also used to address a number of important contemporary issues such as genetic engineering, distributive justice, cosmopolitanism vs. patriotism, and the ethical status of growth-based economics. (shrink)

As the need arises at various points in the book, he pursues a variety of related issues and engages additional thinkers--Plato, C. S. Peirce, Darwin, ...

There has recently been a flurry of activity in the philosophy of language on how to best account for the unique features of epithets. One of these features is that epithets can be appropriated (that is, the offense-grounding potential of a term can be removed). We argue that attempts to appropriate an epithet fundamentally involve a violation of language-governing rules. We suggest that the other conditions that make something an attempt at appropriation are the same conditions that characterize acts of (...) civil disobedience. Accounting for attempts at appropriation is thus both a linguistic and socio-political endeavor. We demonstrate how these two facets of attempts at appropriation also help us understand the communicative features of civil disobedience. (shrink)

I make the case that the Universe according to unitary quantum theory has a branching structure, and so can literally be regarded as a "many-worlds" theory. These worlds are not part of the _fundamental_ ontology of quantum theory - instead, they are to be understood as structures, or patterns, emergent from the underlying theory, through the dynamical process of decoherence. That they are structures in this sense does not mean that they are in any way unreal: indeed, pretty much all (...) higher-level ontology in science, from tables to phonons to tigers, is likewise emergent. Unitary quantum theory is therefore a "many-worlds" theory without any modification of the mathematical structure of the theory: the Everett interpretation does not consist in adding worlds to the formalism, but in realising that they are there already. Our grounds for accepting the reality of those worlds is no more, but no less, than our grounds for accepting any other not-directly observable consequence of an empirically very successful theory. (shrink)

NGC 1300 (shown in figure 1) is a spiral galaxy 65 million light years from Earth.1 We have never been there, and (although I would love to be wrong about this) we will never go there; all we will ever know about NGC 1300 is what we can see of it from sixty-five million light years away, and what we can infer from our best physics. Fortunately, “what we can infer from our best physics” is actually quite a lot. To (...) take a particular example: our best theory of galaxies tells us that that hazy glow is actually made up of the light of hundreds of billions of stars; our best theories of planetary formation tell us that a sizable fraction of those stars.. (shrink)

This book is about the anatomy of emotion. It shows what distinguishes emotions from related psychological phenomena that may resemble or even contribute to them, and it considers the light that this throws on the emotional life. It reappraises the relations between thought and feeling and urges that a non-reductive approach to feeling illuminates some of the risks that emotions can bring. This is essential reading for students studying philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology and aesthetics, as well as social scientists (...) working in fields such as social anthropology. Through a detailed account of feeling, the author draws on the notion of subjectivity. This places the book in the wider context of controversies in the philosophy of mind; subjectivity, reduction and consciousness. The final chapter uniquely assesses the contrast between belief, thought and feeling developed earlier to illuminate phenomenon of false emotions. * This accessible text will appeal to students in philosophy and psychology* Inventive illustrations are wide-ranging, up-to date and imaginative* Written in a lively style with the student in mind. (shrink)

This paper is the introduction to Function, Selection, and Design, consisting of the following sections: 1. Introduction 2. The Philosophical Problem 3. Recent Prehistory: The "State of the Art" in the 1960s 4. Wright and Cummins 5. Millikan 6. The Core Consensus and the Peripheral Disagreements 7. Unconclusion.

Early 20th century debates over the possibility of ‘metaphysics’ are grounded in a set of questions and answers whose central themes are already delineated in Kant’s critical philosophy. Wittgenstein and Carnap are sympathetic to Kant’s dismissal of transcendent metaphysics, but skeptical that there could be any substantive account of the fundamental conditions of our meaning-making. By contrast, Heidegger follows Fichte and the early German Romantics in seeing answers to the problems raised by metacritique not in science, but in the non-discursive (...) forms of understanding and expression exemplified in art. This Romantic turn to art is not taken arbitrarily; it is motivated by methodological considerations that emerge within Kant’s own critical system. I take up the Kantian considerations which lead to an understanding of art as a window into the fundamental conditions of meaning-making before turning to Heidegger’s development of this line of thought. Next, I examine Carnap and Wittgenstein’s skepticism concerning the meaning of Heidegger’s philosophical terminology, focusing on what is perhaps the most problematic case: Heidegger’s talk of ‘the nothing’. I argue that this skepticism is overblown. Heidegger’s talk of the nothing is meaningful in the way that talk about figure and ground is meaningful: it serves as an ostensive indication of intersubjectively accessible structural features of our encounters with things. I conclude by drawing out the existential ramifications of the decision to speak or be silent, drawing on Audre Lorde to illustrate the place of art in making it possible for us to lead authentic lives. (shrink)

In _The Formation of Reason_, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind. Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and (...) Vygotsky Discusses foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice. (shrink)

Discovering high-level causal relations from low-level data is an important and challenging problem that comes up frequently in the natural and social sciences. In a series of papers, Chalupka etal. (2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017) develop a procedure forcausal feature learning (CFL) in an effortto automate this task. We argue that CFL does not recommend coarsening in cases where pragmatic considerations rule in favor of it, and recommends coarsening in cases where pragmatic considerations rule against it. We propose a new technique, (...) pragmatic causal feature learning (PCFL), which extends the original CFL algorithm in useful and intuitive ways. We show that PCFL has the same attractive measure-theoretic properties as the original CFL algorithm. We compare the performance of both methods through theoretical analysis and experiments. (shrink)

For this volume David Wiggins has selected and revised eleven of his essays in an area of metaphysics where his work has been particularly influential, and he has added a substantial introduction and one new unpublished essay. Among the subjects treated are substance, identity, persistence, persons, sortals, and artefacts.

Book synopsis: David-Hillel Ruben's new book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. He rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what he calls a 'prolific theory' of act individuation. He also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent (...) causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. He identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, Ruben denies that it is true. His own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. Ruben sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalisations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. He addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing. Inspiring and enlightening in its challenge to received wisdom, and in its convincing defence of some unfashionable positions, Action and its Explanation will be required reading for anyone working in this field. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

In Playing Politics with Science, David B. Resnik explores the philosophical, political, and ethical issues related to the politicalization of science and ...

The most comprehensive study of the controversial French thinker--and of his place in the history of philosophy. As public as Foucault was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, his private life was mysterious: he tried to destroy all documents that might offer clues to his personality.

What follows is a first step towards an ontology of conscious mental processes. We provide a theoretical foundation and characterization of conscious mental processes based on a realist theory of intentionality and using BFO as our top-level ontology. We distinguish three components of intentional mental process: character, directedness, and objective referent, and describe several features of the process character and directedness significant to defining and classifying mental processes. We arrive at the definition of representational mental process as a process that (...) is the bringing into being, sustaining, modifying, or terminating of a mental representation. We conclude by outlining some benefits and applications of this approach. (shrink)

Taken in general terms, “hermeneutics” refers to the study of understanding and interpretation, and, traditionally, this study focuses on considerations of the art, method, and foundations of research in the arts and humanities. The study of hermeneutics has been developed and applied in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry, such as biblical exegesis, literary studies, legal studies, and the medical humanities. In the context of post-war Continental European thought, however, hermeneutics is brought into a novel philosophical context and, with (...) this, comes to designate a philosophical movement – or, at least, a number of related philosophers and themes – concerned with the scope and limits of phenomenology, the character of human existence, the relation of the natural sciences and humanities, as well as a range of interrelated matters in the philosophy of history, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, practical philosophy, as well as in epistemology and the theory of meaning. (shrink)

Metaphysical indeterminacy in the context of quantum mechanics is often motivated by the eigenstate-eigenvalue link. However, the sparse view of Glick illustrates why it has no such implications. Other links connecting quantum states and property ascriptions—such as those associated with the GRW theory—may introduce indeterminacy, but such indeterminacy may be viewed as merely representational and is susceptible to familiar treatments of vagueness. Thus, I contend that such links fail to provide a compelling motivation for quantum metaphysical indeterminacy.

David J. Kalupahana's Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis has, since its original publication in 1976, offered an unequaled introduction to the philosophical principles and historical development of Buddhism. Now, representing the culmination of Dr. Kalupahana's thirty years of scholarly research and reflection, A History of Buddhist Philosophy builds upon and surpasses that earlier work, providing a completely reconstructed, detailed analysis of both early and later Buddhism.

In _Thinking After Heidegger_, David Wood takes up the challenge posed by Heidegger - that after the end of philosophy we need to learn to _think_. But what if we read Heidegger with the same respectful irreverence that he brought to reading the Greeks, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and the others? For Wood, it is Derrida's engagements with Heidegger that set the standard here – enacting a repetition through transformation and displacement. But Wood is not content to crown the new (...) king. Instead he sets up a many-sided conversation between Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Nietzsche, Blanchot, Kierkegaard, Derrida and others. Derrida and deconstruction are first critically addressed and then drawn into the fundamental project of philosophical renewal, or renewal _as_ philosophy. The book begins by rewriting Heidegger's inaugural lecture, 'What is Metaphysics?' and ends with an extended analysis of the performativity of his extraordinary _Beitrage_. _Thinking after Heidegger_ will be a valuable text for scholars and students of contemporary philosophy, literature and cultural studies. (shrink)

Fondée sous les auspices du père de notre modernité philosophique Descartes, puis consolidée par des penseurs aussi importants que Leibniz, Bolzano ou Husserl, la mathesis universalis paraît représenter à elle seule l'ambitieux programme du « rationalisme classique ». Des philosophes tels que Husserl, Russell, Heidegger ou Cassirer ont pu s'accorder en ce point. Le développement de la « science moderne » aurait porté ce grand « rêve dogmatique » pour mener vers son terme le destin de la métaphysique occidentale. Pourtant (...) les recherches historiques récentes ont montré que l'idée de « mathématique universelle » existait bien avant Descartes, que ce dernier ne revendiquait d'ailleurs aucune rupture sur ce point et que sa réflexion se situait même assez clairement dans l'héritage des Anciens. Comment dès lors justifier que les Anciens, avec lesquels le programme des Classiques était censé rompre, aient pu déjà se préoccuper de « mathématique universelle »? Plus simplement encore, de quoi se préoccupaient donc ces philosophes sous ce concept? Le regain d'intérêt pour la mathesis universalis à la fin du XIXe siècle n'avait-il pas conduit paradoxalement à la perte de son sens comme problème? Cette étude a pour but de suivre ces questions jusqu'à leur origine et de montrer leur importance dans le dialogue entre mathématique et philosophie. Pages de début Remerciements Introduction La constitution de la « mathématique universelle » comme problème philosophique I. Aristote II. « Mathématique universelle » et théories mathématiques : Aristote, Euclide, Epinomis III. Le moment néo-platonicien Vers la science de l'ordre et de la mesure IV. La renaissance de la mathématique universelle V. La mathesis universalis cartésienne Conclusion Annexe I. La quaestio de scientia mathematica communi Annexe II. Essai bibliographique sur la mathesis universalis chez Descartes etLeibniz Bibliographie Index nominum Pages de fin. (shrink)

This book is an easy to read, yet comprehensive introduction to practical issues in research ethics and scientific integrity. It addresses questions about what constitutes appropriate academic and scientific behaviors from the point of view of what Robert Merton called the “ethos of science.” In other words, without getting into tricky questions about the nature of the good or right (as philosophers often do), Koepsell’s concise book provides an approach to behaving according to the norms of science and academia without (...) delving into the morass of philosophical ethics. The central thesis is that: since we know certain behaviors are necessary for science and its institutions to work properly (rather than pathologically), we can extend those principles to guide good behaviors as scientists and academics. The Spanish version of this book was commissioned by the Mexican National Science Foundation (CONACyT) and is being distributed to and used by Mexican scientists in a unique, national plan to improve scientific integrity throughout all of Mexico. Available now in English, the examples and strategies employed can be used throughout the English speaking research world for discussing issues in research ethics, training for scientists and researchers across disciplines, and those who are generally interested in ethics in academia. (shrink)

Aristotle's claims that 'man is a political animal' and that political community 'exists for the sake of living well' have frequently been celebrated by thinkers of divergent political persuasions. The details of his political philosophy, however, have often been regarded as outmoded, contradictory, or pernicious. This book takes on the major problems that arise in attempting to understand how the central pieces of Aristotle's political thought fit together: can a conception of politics that seems fundamentally inclusive and egalitarian be reconciled (...) with a vision of justice that seems uncompromisingly hierarchical and authoritarian? Riesbeck argues that Aristotle's ideas about the distinctive nature and value of political community, political authority, and political participation are coherent and consistent with his aristocratic standards of justice. The result is a theory that, while not free of problems, remains a potentially fruitful resource for contemporary thinking about the persistent problems of political life. (shrink)

The Phaedo is acknowledged to be one of Plato's masterpieces, showing him both as a philosopher and as a dramatist at the height of his powers. For its moving account of the execution of Socrates, the Phaedo ranks among the supreme literary achievements of antiquity. It is also a document crucial to the understanding of many ideas deeply ingrained in western culture, and provides one of the best introductions to Plato's thought. This new edition is eminently suitable for readers new (...) to Plato, offering a readable translation which is accessible without the aid of a commentary and assumes no prior knowledge of the ancient Greek world or language. (shrink)

The answer I offer in this Article is that crimes against humanity assault one particular aspect of human being, namely our character as political animals. We are creatures whose nature compels us to live socially, but who cannot do so without artificial political organization that inevitably poses threats to our well-being, and, at the limit, to our very survival. Crimes against humanity represent the worst of those threats; they are the limiting case of politics gone cancerous. Precisely because we cannot (...) live without politics, we exist under the permanent threat that politics will turn cancerous and the indispensable institutions of organized political life will destroy us. That is why all humankind shares an interest in repressing these crimes. The theory that I aim to defend here consists of two propositions: that "humanity" in the label "crimes against humanity" refers to our nature as political animals, and that these crimes pose a universal threat that all humankind shares an interest in repressing. (shrink)

The structure and style of philosophy has evolved in response to philosophy's confrontation with its own limits. Are these limits real or are they just phantoms haunting the philosophical project? How do philosophy and philosophers attempt to overcome these limits, or at least come to terms with them? In "Philosophy at the Limit" David Wood pursues this theme in modern philosophers from Hegel to Derrida including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer. He focuses on questions of philosophical style, problems with (...) dialogue and in direct communication, the structural closure of philosophical texts, and performative strategy in philosophy. "Philosophy at the Limit" is an accessible discussion of some of the complex issues that empower continental philosophy. It may appeal to students of philosophy and contemporary thought at every level, and to the general reader interested in the heart of the current debates in European thought. (shrink)

Since the end of World War II, most guidelines governing human research seem to have relied on the principle of respect for autonomy as a key, though not sole, criterion in assessing the moral validity of research involving human participants.1 One explanation for this apparent reliance on respect for autonomy may be that respect for autonomy, made effective through the practice of obtaining informed consent, functions as a useful proxy when dealing with competent adults for the more complex principle of (...) respect for human dignity that underpins much of the moral discourse in this area. If this explanation holds, then assessment of the moral licitness of research involving human individuals whose autonomy is limited in some way requires a deeper analysis of the ‘thicker’ concepts of human dignity, since we cannot rely on respect for autonomy to do the work of respect for human dignity where autonomy (understood as a capacity to consent based on adequate information) is not present, is limited or is compromised. (shrink)

In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology, remorse, and (...) a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it to earth and make it a human trait. (shrink)

Human Dignity in Contemporary Ethics develops a holistic and relevant understanding of human dignity for ethics today. Whilst critics of the concept of human dignity call for its dismissal, and many of its defenders rehearse the same old arguments, this book offers an alternative set of methodological assumptions on which to base a revitalized and practical understanding of human dignity, which at the same time overcomes the challenges that the concept currently faces. The Component Dimensions of Human Dignity model enables (...) human dignity to serve both as a descriptive category that explains moral choices, and as a normative criterion that helps to evaluate moral behaviour. A consideration of two cases--violent crime and physician-assisted suicide--demonstrates how the model offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of both moralism and moral relativism, while still leaving space for relativity in ethics. By using an approach that should be acceptable to both religious and secular perspectives alike, this book offers a unique way out of the 'dignity talk' that currently plagues ethics. (shrink)

Mathematics is a powerful tool for describing and developing our knowledge of the physical world. It informs our understanding of subjects as diverse as music, games, science, economics, communications protocols, and visual arts. Mathematical thinking has its roots in the adaptive behavior of living creatures: animals must employ judgments about quantities and magnitudes in the assessment of both threats (how many foes) and opportunities (how much food) in order to make effective decisions, and use geometric information in the environment for (...) recognizing landmarks and navigating environments. Correspondingly, cognitive systems that are dedicated to the processing of distinctly mathematical information have developed. In particular, there is evidence that certain core systems for understanding different aspects of arithmetic as well as geometry are employed by humans and many other animals. They become active early in life and, particularly in the case of humans, develop through maturation. Although these core systems individually appear to be quite limited in application, in combination they allow for the recognition of mathematical properties and the formation of appropriate inferences based upon those properties. In this overview, the core systems, their roles, their limitations, and their interaction with external representations are discussed, as well as possibilities for how they can be employed together to allow us to reason about more complex mathematical domains. (shrink)

This book uncovers the lost history of Christianity's encounters with Pythagorean ideas before the Renaissance. David Albertson skillfully examines ancient and medieval theologians, particularly Thierry of Chartres and Nicholas of Cusa, who successfully reconceived the Trinity and the Incarnation within the framework of Greek number theory. David Albertson challenges modern assumptions about the complex relationship between religion and science.

I argue that the metaphysical import of the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been overstated: correctly understood, it does not require either rejection of gauge invariance or any novel form of nonlocality. The conclusion that it does require one or the other follows from a failure to keep track, in the analysis, of the complex scalar field to which the magnetic vector potential is coupled. Once this is recognised, the way is clear to a local account of the ontology of electrodynamics ; (...) I sketch a possible such account. (shrink)

In Kierkegaard’s Instant, David J. Kangas reads Kierkegaard to reveal his radical thinking about temporality. For Kierkegaard, the instant of becoming, in which everything changes in the blink of an eye, eludes recollection and anticipation. It constitutes a beginning always already at work. As Kangas shows, Kierkegaard’s retrieval of the sudden quality of temporality allows him to stage a deep critique of the idealist projects of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. By linking Kierkegaard’s thought to the tradition of Meister Eckhart, (...) Kangas formulates the central problem of these early texts and puts them into contemporary light—can thinking hold itself open to the challenges of temporality? (shrink)