One way to determine the quality and pace of change in a science as it undergoes a major transition is to follow some feature of it which remains relatively stable throughout the process. Following the chosen item as it goes through reinterpretation permits conclusions to be drawn about the nature and scope of the broader change in question. In what follows, this device is applied to the change which took place in logic in the mid-nineteenth century. The feature chosen as (...) the focal point is the categorical syllogism. (shrink)

There is a classic problem which confronts any attempt to assign death a value. On the assumption that death is personal annihilation, death deprives evil of a requisite subject, for no misfortune can befall something which does not exist. Recent efforts to provide a reasonable basis for counting death as a bad thing have centered on an analysis of the loss of life's goods which it brings. So long as the analysis assumes that death is a simple state, loss can (...) be explained only by reference to a realm of possible things which exist after death. An alternative analysis of death is offered in which death is defined as a limit on life. That analysis provides a basis for evaluative judgements about death, while avoiding any commitment to post-mortem existence. (shrink)

In this time of increasingly critical scrutiny of the very point of the social sciences, those negatively inclined on the issue will find an unwitting ally in Brian Fay—unless, that is, one thinks that social science is best regarded as part of a postmodern wonderland in which science, now relativized to social and political setting, is regarded as being just one means among many of gaining knowledge. If that is how science should be regarded, Fay is on the cutting edge.

The core of Livingston’s book consists of a series of four critical studies of how twentieth-century analytic philosophy dealt with what many believe to be a hard case: consciousness. What makes it hard, the thinking goes, is a perceived dissonance that arises when analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on representing the world against a background of linguistic structure, comes face to face with pure subjective content. How can the latter be accommodated within the former without ignoring some of its fundamental (...) properties? The root problem is endlessly old and much larger than the scope of Livingston’s immediate concern. While we have pure experiences — being whacked by a golf ball or swept up by a tornado — the instant we reflect on our situation, immediacy is lost and knowledge becomes unavoidably perspectival, restricted, partial — a world structured by predication. Can the former be accommodated within the latter without doing injustice to the very qualities that distinguish it? Each philosophical generation has dealt with some version of the problem, from Plato’s insistence that real knowledge demands that the mind kick the traces of earthly existence, to more recent attempts to isolate a “given” element in experience, and thereby relate phenomenal immediacy to structured propositional knowledge. (shrink)