What are physical quantities, and in particular, what makes them quantitative? This book presents an original answer to this question through the novel position of substantival structuralism, arguing that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces.
Recent literature on causation invokes a distinction between deviant and default behavior to account for token causation. Critical examination of two prominent attempts to employ a distinction between deviants and defaults reveals that the distinction is far from clear. I clarify and develop the distinction by appeal to the notion of a modally robust process, and show how the distinction can be employed by causal process theorists to respond to cases of causation by omission. This shows that the default/deviant distinction (...) is not so much a tool for counterfactual accounts of causation, but rather for causal process theory. (shrink)
In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)
The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)
La musique occupe une place singulière au sein de la philosophie de G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716). Si les développements que ce dernier y consacre sont peu nombreux et dispersés à travers son œuvre, ils n'en dessinent pas moins les contours d'une philosophie de la musique aussi pénétrante que méconnue. Celle-ci apparait tout à la fois comme l'expression et le modèle privilégié de sa métaphysique générale, dont la portée esthétique reste largement à explorer. Une œuvre en particulier, cependant, semble avoir déjà donné (...) corps à cette esthétique musicale. Cette œuvre est celle de Jean-Sébastien Bach (1685-1750), dont l'écriture contrapuntique manifeste plus que toute autre une parenté structurelle avec la philosophie de Leibniz. À scruter l'architecture complexe de ses compositions, on peut y déceler comme un miroir de l'univers leibnizien, une expression sensible des principes mêmes de l'harmonie universelle. Au vu du contexte intellectuel dans lequel évoluait J.-S. Bach, cette parenté n'est du reste pas sans fondement historique. Il n'est ici que de mentionner l'implication du Cantor dans la société philosophique dirigée par Lorenz Mizler (1711-1778), élève de Wolff et héritier de Leibniz, à laquelle il dédia plusieurs de ses œuvres les plus hautement formelles, dont la dernière, inachevée, devait être 'L'Art de la fugue'. À travers l'étude de la conception leibnizienne de la musique, envisagée dans son rapport à la pensée musicale de J.-S. Bach, cet ouvrage explore les relations entre métaphysique et musique à la lumière du concept d'harmonie comme "unité dans la diversité. (shrink)
Toward the end of his life, the Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky turned away from his earlier work that he has become famous for only to sow the seeds for a new theory. In this theory, affect was to play a central role, there was to be a primacy of social relations, and anything mental (mind, thought, self, other, knowledge) was an event rather than a thing. This is essentially a transactional perspective. In this book, the author articulates a transactional psychology (...) of education drawing on the works of G.H. Mead, J. Dewey, G. Bateson, F. Mikhailov, and E. Il'enkov. All theoretical positions are developed out of videotaped exchanges, thereby giving concrete character to every psychological concept articulated. (shrink)
Introduction: What is the critical spirit?--Utopianism, ancient and modern, by M.I. Finley.--Primitive society in its many dimensions, by S. Diamond.--Manicheanism in the Enlightenment, by R.H. Popkin.--Schopenhauer today, by M. Horkheimer.--Beginning in Hegel and today, by K.H. Wolff.--The social history of ideas: Ernst Cassirer and after, by P. Gay.--Policies of violence, from Montesquieu to the Terrorist, by E.V. Walter.--Thirty-nine articles: toward a theory of social theory, by J.R. Seeley.--History as private enterprise, by H. Zinn.--From Socrates to Plato, by H. Meyerhoff.--Rational (...) society and irrational art, by H. Read.--The quest for the Grail; Wagner and Morris, by C.E. Schorske.--Valéry; Monsieur Teste, by L. Goldmann.--History and existentialism in Sartre, by L. Krieger.--German popular biographies; culture's bargain counter, by L. Lowenthal.--The Rechtsstaat as magic wall, by O. Kirchheimer. (shrink)
What is the proper relation between the scientific worldview and other parts or aspects of human knowledge and experience? Can any science aim at "complete coverage" of the world, and if it does, will it undermine--in principle or by tendency--other attempts to describe or understand the world? Should morality, theology and other areas resist or be protected from scientific treatment? Questions of this sort have been of pressing philosophical concern since antiquity. The Proper Ambition of Science presents ten particular case (...) studies written by prominent philosophers, looking at how this problem has been approached from the ancient world right up to the present day. Contributors: Bob Sharples, M.W.F. Stone, G.A.J. Rogers, J.R. Milton, Aaron Ridley, Christopher Hookway, Dermot Moran, Thomas E. Uebel, David Papineau, and Nancy Cartwright. (shrink)
In an earlier article (s. J Gen Philos Sci 40:341-355, 2009), I have rejected an interpretation of Aristotle's syllogistic which (since Patzig) is predominant in the literature on Aristotle, but wrong in my view. According to this interpretation, the distinguishing feature of perfect syllogisms is their being evident. Theodor Ebert has attempted to defend this interpretation by means of objections (s. J Gen Philos Sci 40:357-365, 2009) which I will try to refute in part [1] of the following article. I (...) want to show that (1) according to Aristotle's Prior Analytics perfect and imperfect syllogisms do not differ by their being evident, but by the reason for their being evident, (2) Aristotle uses the same words to denote proofs of the validity of perfect and imperfect syllogisms („apodeixis”, "deiknusthai" etc.), (3) accordingly, Aristotle defines perfect syllogisms not as being evident, but as "requiring nothing beyond the things taken in order to make the necessity evident", i.e. as not "requiring one or more things that are necessary because of the terms assumed, but that have not been taken among the propositions" (APr. I. 1), (4) the proofs by which the validity of perfect assertoric syllogisms can be shown according to APr. I. 4 are based on the Dictum de omni et nullo, (5) the fact that Aristotle describes these proofs only in rough outlines corresponds to the fact that his proofs of the validity of other fundamental rules are likewise produced in rough outlines, e.g. his proof of the validity of conversio simplex in APr. I. 2, which usually has been misunderstood (also by Ebert): (6) Aristotle does not prove the convertibility of E-sentences by presupposing the convertibility of I-sentences; only the reverse is true. (shrink)
Unlocking the Second Antinomy: Kant and Wolff MICHAEL RADNER But how in this business can metaphysics be reconciled with geometry, when it seems easier to mate griffins with horses than to unite transcendental philosophy with geometry?' Kant, x756 THE SECOND ANTINOMY, treating the proof and refutation of bodies as composed of simple substances, is one of the more puzzling sections of the Critique of Pure Reason. The thesis argument especially baffles commentators. Edward Caird in t 889 said: "Kant's statement (...) of this argument is very obscure."Among commen- tators of our era, T. E. Wilkerson complains: "This argument is very muddy." Jonathan Bennett remarks: "The text, however, is not clear enough for us to be sure exactly what Kant is relying on in his argument for the Thesis. "~ Nor have commentators spared the antithesis argument. No one, to my knowledge, has interpreted the text so that the thesis and antithesis arguments come out valid and constitute a genuine antinomy. Yet Kant stated on more than one occasion that all the antinomy arguments are valid. The proofs "are not deceptions, but are well-founded, under the supposition that appearances or a sensible world which comprehends them all are things in themselves" .3 In the Prolego- "Physical Monadology," in Kant's Latin Writings: Translations, Commentaries, and Notes, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck, Mary J. Gregor, Roll Meerbote and John A. Reuscher , ll6; Ak.. (shrink)
Although Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Alvin Plantinga has developed a theodicy that is fundamentally Arminian rather than Calvinistic. Anthony Flew, although the son of an Arminian Christian minister, regards the Arminian view of ‘free will’ to be both unacceptable on its own terms and incompatible with classical Christian theism. In this paper I hope to disentangle some of the involved controversy regarding theodicy which has developed between Plantinga and Flew, and between Flew and myself. The major portion of (...) this paper is devoted to showing that Plantinga's theodicy contains some serious flaws and undesirable implications. (shrink)
Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. Topics (...) discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting. (shrink)
This book investigates the relation between mathematics and philosophy in Kant with special focus on the doctrine of the magnitudes. Without doubt, Moretto, who is himself both a mathematician and a philosopher, achieves final results on this matter, because not only does he provide an immanent interpretation of all parts of Kant’s systematic construction of magnitudes, he also provides a detailed history of Kant’s development. Kant gave courses on mathematics during the first eight years of his teaching at Königsberg and (...) warmly recommended the study of mathematics to his most gifted disciples. He himself expressed a profound admiration for it. He wrote in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God that infinitesimal analysis, or, as he calls it, “higher geometry... in its account of the affinities between various species of curved lines,” reveals many of “the harmonious relations which inhere in the properties of space in general.... All these relations, in addition to exercising the understanding by means of our intellectual comprehension of them, also arouse the emotions, and they do in a manner similar to or even more sublime than that the contingent beauties of nature stir our feelings”. In On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, Kant wrote that pure mathematics “provides us with a cognition which is in the highest degree true, and, at the same time, it provides us with a paradigm of the highest kind of evidence in other cases”. Besides, the mathematician-philosophers of the Leibniz-Wolff school, J. A. Eberhard, J. C. Schwab, J. G. E. Maaß at Halle, and A. G. Kästner at Göttingen, were among the very first to move critiques against the Critique of Pure Reason by focusing on the problem of the foundation of mathematics. They defended Leibniz against Kant, which prompted Kant to start a mathematical school of his own at Königsberg, and J. Schultz, J. G. K. C. Kiesewetter, and C. G. Zimmermann were Kant’s most notable defenders. Finally, one should not forget that it was in order to introduce a completely new set of ideas concerning the philosophy of mathematics that Kant laid out not only the distinction between analytical and synthetical judgments, but also the whole of the transcendental aesthetics. In fact, Kant proposed giving foundation to rational absolute numbers by means of synthetical a priori judgments; he also considered all arithmetical judgments as synthetical a priori; and by dedicating two antinomies to infinite series he suggested analogies to the representation of infinite series of irrational numbers. (shrink)
This book evaluates Moore's contribution to the discussion of a number of epistemological problems, and arrives at the conclusion that Moore's contribution is not considerable. The author maintains that Moore was able to succeed philosophically in the refutation of Idealism, in the establishment of analytical techniques, and in his recognition of the role of common sense; but in those technical areas which were most interesting to Moore, the author finds little accomplishment, and even some confusion. For example, in considering the (...) problem of the relation between perception and an external world, Moore defends the common sense notions, but only on common sense grounds. The external world, which we know to exist with a high degree of certainty according to our common sense, we do not know to exist with any certainty at all when we approach the problem through an analysis of sense perception; and Moore will only say that we do not know that we do not know that external objects exist. Concerning the problem of truth and falsity the author finds Moore constructive but in need of revision and reconstruction, which the author obligingly attempts where necessary. Moore's position with respect to meaning and analysis is also evaluated with the same critical eye. Finally, the author shows the relative positions of common sense and ordinary language in Moore's thought.--J. J. E. (shrink)
