Bernard Williams is one of the most influential figures in ethical theory, where he has set a considerable part of the current agenda. In this collection a distinguished international team of philosophers who have been stimulated by Williams's work give responses to it. The topics covered include equality; consistency; comparisons between science and ethics; integrity; moral reasons; the moral system; and moral knowledge. Williams himself provides a substantial reply, which shows both the directions of his own thought and also his (...) present view of earlier work of his which has been extensively discussed for twenty years. This volume will be indispensable reading for all those interested in ethical theory. (shrink)

Current psychiatric classification adopts a disorder-focused diagnostic approach, as exemplified within ICD-11 and DSM-V. Although this approach has improved reliability of categorization, its validity and utility has been questioned (Harvey, Watkins, Mansell, & Shafran, 2004; Insel et al., 2009; Sanislow et al., 2010). Limitations include high comorbidity between supposedly distinct disorders; heterogeneity within diagnoses; limited treatment efficacy; and similarities across disorders in aetiology, latent symptom structure, and underlying biology. There is also evidence of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioural processes (Harvey et al., 2004). (...) An alternative approach is therefore to focus on fundamental underlying mechanisms of psychopathology rather than observed symptom clusters. This article considers the possible benefits, hurdles, and steps towards implementation of this transdiagnostic mechanistic approach, using the example of repetitive negative thought. (shrink)

Mathematical pluralism can take one of three forms: (1) every consistent mathematical theory consists of truths about its own domain of individuals and relations; (2) every mathematical theory, consistent or inconsistent, consists of truths about its own (possibly uninteresting) domain of individuals and relations; and (3) the principal philosophies of mathematics are each based upon an insight or truth about the nature of mathematics that can be validated. (1) includes the multiverse approach to set theory. (2) helps us to understand (...) the significance of the distinguished non‐logical individual and relation terms of even inconsistent theories. (3) is a metaphilosophical form of mathematical pluralism and hasn't been discussed in the literature. In what follows, I show how the analysis of theoretical mathematics in object theory exhibits all three forms of mathematical pluralism. (shrink)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

A provocative critique of Western attitudes about the Orient, this history examines the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East from the 1700s to the present.

An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience --the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks (...) out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is. (shrink)

This is a one page handout reconstructing the paradox and identifying four solutions in the literature, as well as some concerns about them.

Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an evocation of his own response to nature and an eloquent statement of the conservation ethic. Wilson argues that our natural affinity for life―biophilia―is the very essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.

What sense could it make to describe your life as ‘unlivable’? What is it not only to be alive but to have a life that you live or lead? I answer by developing a social understanding of the pursuit of meaning in life. True to other uses of ‘meaning,’ I propose, meaning in a life is communicative. If you experience your life as ‘unlivable,’ recovery can lie in this communicative dynamic: you regain the experience of leading your life by letting (...) others remind you of meanings you have communicated to them in leading it. My argument develops an analogy between two dimensions in which you project an investment – a care, concern, love, or the like – when you form an intention or plan. Intrapersonally, you project your investment as communicatively intelligible to your own future self at ‘plan’s end.’ Interpersonally, you project it as communicatively intelligible to others who might come to love this thing that you love simply because you love it, as an expression of love for you. The normativity of meaning in your life puts rational pressure on you not only to abandon investments that you cannot communicate but to experience the meaning in investments that you retain. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

As a means of overcoming the "Third Man" argument, several commentators have developed an influential theory of the relationship between Platonic Forms and particulars based on Plato's use of "image" analogies. This essay explores the viability of this "image-analogy" hypothesis and, in particular, examines an important, but neglected, argument advanced by R. E. Allen intent on establishing an ontological distinction between an image and its object-source.

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 277-278 [Access article in PDF] John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, editors. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals Division, 2001. Pp. xiii + 376. Cloth, $39.00. Paper, $25.00. Some twenty years ago, when I submitted a dissertation proposal to explore connections between theologies of creation and views of scientific (...) knowledge in the seventeenth century, my doctoral committee was not initially enthusiastic—my idea might make a good dissertation in religion, but was it really history of science? I doubt I would have a similar experience today. Not only has the "warfare" thesis of science and religion been laid permanently to rest, historians have begun seriously to question whether it makes sense even to treat "religion" and "science" in an essentialist manner as separate ways of thinking that do not ordinarily interact. Many detailed case studies demonstrating a variety of fascinating, often important connections between science and religion have appeared from leading scholars in the past two decades. This trend continues in the latest volume of Osiris, which contains sixteen essays documenting various ways in which religious beliefs have influenced the actual content and presentation of science.The volume opens with two companion essays laying out the terrain. First, Brooke engages the new methodological and conceptual problems that confront historians following the demise of the "warfare" thesis. Then Stephen Wykstra offers criteria for sorting out the various roles for metaphysical and religious beliefs (which he distinguishes) in shaping scientific knowledge. The case studies begin with E. Jamil Ragep's essay on medieval Islamic astronomy, arguing that religion sometimes had a constructive role—a rather novel claim for Islamic science, he points out. Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch show how early modern Jewish exegetical practices influenced David b. Solomon Gans's interpretations of astronomical texts, and quite possibly his interpretation of nature also. A Christian astronomer is next, as Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein detail how Johannes Kepler's theology contributed directly to the discovery of scientific laws. Maurice A. Finnocchiaro then reviews various accounts of the Galileo affair, finding far more conflict in the subsequent historiography of the events than in the trial itself.Moving from astronomy to natural philosophy, Margaret G. Cook's essay on Robert Boyle examines the web of connections between theology, the mechanical philosophy, and [End Page 277] "the Aristotelian philosophy that he sought to replace." She demonstrates that Boyle used the classical art/nature distinction "to interpret the biblical account of the Creation and to argue that chemical techniques offered experimental confirmation that the world, created by art, worked by the same mechanical principles as artificial objects, not by the inherent agency of Aristotelian nature" (136). Margaret J. Osler also writes about Boyle. Contrary to the traditional view that final causes were expunged from science by the mechanical philosophy—a view that originated in the "positivism and scientific optimism" of the postwar period (168)—she proves that final causality remained central to the thought of Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The essay by Stephen D. Snobelen presents substantial evidence that the famous General Scholium, appended to the second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia, was a carefully worded declaration of Newton's heterodox theology. "A Trinitarian," Snobelen concludes, "could not have written the General Scholium" (186). He also shows the degree to which Newton's theology shaped his overall natural philosophy, decisively debunking the late Richard S. Westfall's view that such influences could not be found.The final seven essays are mainly devoted to nineteenth-century science. Michael J. Crowe documents several ways in which Christian beliefs about divine goodness and the Incarnation affected astronomy. Martin Fichman shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's theism—not merely a vague spiritualism, as traditional accounts claim—"shaped the cognitive content of his mature evolutionary synthesis, which included a theoretical reconceptualization of the scope of natural selection" (227). In a revisionist account of Charles Darwin's philosophy of "nature," Phillip R. Sloan challenges the received view that... (shrink)

It is customary to draw a distinction between statements unconfirmable in practice and statements unconfirmable in principle. It may be impossible, for example, to confirm the statement “The star most distant from us in the universe has recently doubled in size,” but this impossibility is not of a logical kind. We could conceive of tests which would either confirm or disconfirm the statement, even if in fact we cannot carry them out. In contrast, the statement ‘Everything has recently doubled in (...) size’ cannot be confirmed for logical reasons, or so some philosophers have claimed. If everything were to double in size, including the very measuring rods used to detect expansions, it would be logically impossible, so the argument runs, to either confirm or disconfirm the above statement. (shrink)

Michael Faraday’s laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Earth’s heat and make claims over the existence of subterranean electrical currents. Yet securing philosophical claims cultivated (...) in mines proved challenging for Fox, with metropolitan audiences, including Faraday, loath to give credit to the results of these underground experiments. This article explores how Fox developed a way of modeling his mine experiments, using clay samples, to communicate knowledge from industrial Cornwall to urban centers of elite science. It argues that the mine was an epistemologically complex venue of scientific activity, at once seeming to provide a way of examining nature directly, without recourse to laboratory contrivance, while simultaneously being a place where knowledge claims were hard to verify without access to these physically challenging locations. In exploring Fox’s work, this study contributes to a growing literature of spatial investigation that takes the vertical as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Any study of the philosophical literature dealing with the cluster of topics generally identified as ‘functional description’, ‘functional analysis’, and ‘teleological explanation’ naturally raises the problem of confirming, disconfirming, or at least relating the alternative logical models proposed by philosophers to the actual usage of biologists. A close examination of current biological literature reveals that acceptance or rejection of what philosophers or sociologists might call a ‘functionalist’ perspective or approach is not significant for the division of biologists into schools or (...) factions. It is certainly not the case that a functionalist perspective distinguishes the wholistic or organismic faction from the molecular biologists. In fact, molecular biologists shift back and forth from ‘functional’ to simple causal perspectives with considerable indifference. This is particularly true of the literature based upon the so-called operon hypothesis developed by the Nobel laureates Jacob and Monod. (shrink)

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to (...) stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

The so-called ergodic hierarchy (EH) is a central part of ergodic theory. It is a hierarchy of properties that dynamical systems can possess. Its five levels are egrodicity, weak mixing, strong mixing, Kolomogorov, and Bernoulli. Although EH is a mathematical theory, its concepts have been widely used in the foundations of statistical physics, accounts of randomness, and discussions about the nature of chaos. We introduce EH and discuss its applications in these fields.

In this paper I am going to try to indicate my notion concerning the nature and subject-matter of psychology. I am a behaviorist. I hold that psychology does not seek descriptions and intercommunications concerning immediate experience per se. Such descriptions and attempts at direct intercommunications may be left to the arts and to metaphysics. Psychology seeks, rather, the objectively stateable laws and processes governing behavior. Organisms, human and sub-human, come up against environmental stimulus situations and to these stimulus situations they, (...) after longer or shorter intervals of time, behave. The laws and processes determining this their behavior are stateable in objective terms. Even in the cases where the organism is oneself, these determining causal factors can and must—for the purposes of psychology—be stated objectively. It is true that in these latter instances, in which the animal in question is oneself, one may in one's rôle, not of a psychologist, but of an artist or a metaphysician, attempt to describe and convey to another man one's own facts of immediate experience. But such a description and report of immediate experiences, except in so far as this report is itself a form of behavior and therefore like all other behaviors the basis for an investigation of the objective laws and processes underlying it, essentially new to the picture. Experience qua experience, while of concern and interest to the man in the street, the philosopher and the poet, does not enter as such into the laws and equations of psychology,—in so far, at any rate, as psychology is to be considered as a science. (shrink)

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 (...) million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

Can nature be restored to a pristine state through deliberate action? Must the preservation of wilderness always subordinate the interests of humans to those of other species? Can indigenous peoples be entrusted with the guardianship of their own wild resources? This collection of international writings tackles tough questions like these as it expands wilderness conservation beyond its American roots. One of the first anthologies to consider wilderness as a global issue, it takes a stand against the notion that wilderness is (...) a northern colonialist conceit and is irrelevant to the plans of third world countries. Contributions from all over the planetÑ Nepal, Borneo, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, South Africa, India, and the United StatesÑ show instead that wilderness has an important place in the environmental thought and policy of any nation, industrial or developing. The World and the Wild boldly advances the idea that our concept of wilderness must expand to take in new vistas. It breaks fresh ground in global environmentalism and is essential reading for anyone concerned with development issues related to conservation. Contents Foreword: Whither World Wilderness? / Vance G. Martin Introduction: Wilderness in the Rest of the World / David Rothenberg How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle? / Pramod Parajuli The Unpaintable West / Zeese Papanikolas Restoring Wilderness or Reclaiming Forests? / Sahotra Sarkar For Indian Wilderness / Philip Cafaro and Monish Verma In the Dust of Kilimanjaro / David Western Why Conservation in the Tropics Is Failing / John Terborgh "Trouble in Paradise": An Exchange / David Western and John Terborgh Zulu History / Ian Player Bruno Manser and the Penan / William W. Bevis Roads Where There Have Long Been Trails / Kathleen Harrison Volcano Dreams / Tom Vanderbilt Recycled Rain Forest Myths / Antonio Carlos Diegues The Park of Ten Thousand Waterfalls / Dan Imhoff Mapping the Wild / Edward A. Whitesell Earth Jazz / Evan Eisenberg They Trampled on Our Taboos / Damien Arabagali. (shrink)

A structure is automatic if its domain, functions, and relations are all regular languages. Using the fact that every automatic structure is decidable, in the literature many decision problems have been solved by giving an automatic presentation of a particular structure. Khoussainov and Nerode asked whether there is some way to tell whether a structure has, or does not have, an automatic presentation. We answer this question by showing that the set of Turing machines that represent automata-presentable structures is ${\rm{\Sigma (...) }}_1^1 $-complete. We also use similar methods to show that there is no reasonable characterisation of the structures with a polynomial-time presentation in the sense of Nerode and Remmel. (shrink)

Three different notions of concepts are outlined: one derives from Leibniz, while the other two derive from Frege. The Leibnizian notion is the subject of his "calculus of concepts" (which is really an algebra). One notion of concept from Frege is what we would call a "property", so that when Frege says "x falls under the concept F", we would say "x instantiates F" or "x exemplifies F". The other notion of concept from Frege is that of the notion of (...) sense, which played various roles within Frege's theory. This notion of concept can be generalized and, as such, accounts for our intuitive talk of "x's concept of ...", where the ellipsis can be filled in with a name for individual, a property, or a relation, etc. After outlining these three notions, I then discuss how (axiomatic) object theory offers a distinct, precise regimentation of each of the three notions. (shrink)

In the middle decades of the twentieth century phenomenology grew from a local philosophy in a few German towns into a movement that spanned Europe. In Converts to the Real, Edward Baring uncovers an unexpected force behind this prodigious growth: Catholicism. Participating in a tightly-knit transnational community, Catholics helped shuttle ideas between national traditions that were otherwise inward-looking and parochial. In the first half of the twentieth century, they wrote many of the first articles and books introducing phenomenological ideas (...) to new contexts. They even organized the rescue of Edmund Husserl's manuscripts out of Nazi Germany in 1938. But the Catholic fascination with phenomenology was intermixed with a profound anxiety. Catholics worried that phenomenological ideas might prove dangerous to the faith, a possibility exemplified by the intellectual trajectory of Martin Heidegger, whose movement away from the Church was facilitated by his reading of Husserl. Converts to the Real uncovers a surprising genealogy for post-war European thought, with important implications for our understanding of the process of secularization and for the set of schools and ideas we now call "continental philosophy."--. (shrink)

In this highly accessible book, a distinguished philosopher says current focus on the brain conceals the real powers of the mind. Edward Pols revisits one of the basic topics of philosophy: what is the distinction between mind and body and what is the relation between them? He disagrees fundamentally with the many contemporary philosophers who concentrate on the findings of neurophysiology and cognitive science and so look only to the brain for the causes and explanation of mind. Pols concedes (...) the importance of such scientific studies but maintains that they focus on the infrastructure of mind and ignore the momentous difference between the infrastructure and mind itself. Pols calls upon the reader to attend to mind itself as a concrete and experientially available reality. This kind of attention, he argues persuasively, reveals mind to be at once causally dependent on the brain and causally effective on the physical processes of the brain and the world. Pols also examines the hierarchical view of mind and causality first proposed by Plato and Aristotle, the supersession of that view by the received scientific doctrine of causality, and the mistaken denial of the power of the mind to know an independent reality—a denial that resulted from the philosophical doctrines about knowing developed in the era that began with Descartes and ended with Kant. (shrink)

This book is a treatise on time and on background independence in physics. It first considers how time is conceived of in each accepted paradigm of physics: Newtonian, special relativity, quantum mechanics (QM) and general relativity (GR). Substantial differences are moreover uncovered between what is meant by time in QM and in GR. These differences jointly source the Problem of Time: Nine interlinked facets which arise upon attempting concurrent treatment of the QM and GR paradigms, as is required in particular (...) for a background independent theory of quantum gravity. A sizeable proportion of current quantum gravity programs - e.g. geometrodynamical and loop quantum gravity approaches to quantum GR, quantum cosmology, supergravity and M-theory - are background independent in this sense. This book's foundational topic is thus furthermore of practical relevance in the ongoing development of quantum gravity programs. This book shows moreover that eight of the nine facets of the Problem of Time already occur upon entertaining background independence in classical (rather than quantum) physics. By this development, and interpreting shape theory as modelling background independence, this book further establishes background independence as a field of study. Background independent mechanics, as well as minisuperspace (spatially homogeneous) models of GR and perturbations thereabout are used to illustrate these points. As hitherto formulated, the different facets of the Problem of Time greatly interfere with each others' attempted resolutions. This book explains how, none the less, a local resolution of the Problem of Time can be arrived at after various reconceptualizations of the facets and reformulations of their mathematical implementation. Self-contained appendices on mathematical methods for basic and foundational quantum gravity are included. Finally, this book outlines how supergravity is refreshingly different from GR as a realization of background independence, and what background independence entails at the topological level and beyond. (shrink)

Many philosophers, including direct reference theorists, appeal to naively to 'modes of presentation' in the analysis of belief reports. I show that a variety of such appeals can be analyzed in terms of a precise theory of modes of presentation. The objects that serve as modes are identified intrinsically, in a noncircular way, and it is shown that they can function in the required way. It is a consequence of the intrinsic characterization that some objects are well-suited to serve as (...) modes that present individuals and while others are well-suited to serve as modes that present properties (though such modes do not `determine' the objects they present---there is no necessary connection between a mode m and the individual x or property F that it presents). Moreover, it is also a consequence that the modes for properties and individuals can be organized into complexes that are structurally identical to Russellian propositions having the represented properties and individuals as constituents. Not only is the relationship between modes and Fregean senses and modes of presentation explored in the paper, but also the idea that the theory of modes of presentation developed in the paper can serve as a theory of concepts. (shrink)

After defining a standard modal language and semantics, we offer some clear examples of logical and analytic truths that are not necessary. These examples: (a) are far simpler than the ones cited in the literature, (b) show that a popular conception of logical truth in modal languages is incorrect, and (c) show that there are contingent truths knowable ``a priori'' that do not depend on fixing the reference of a term.