Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...) comes where -- In defense of some received views -- Some assumptions that will be in play -- The laws are propositions -- The laws are true -- The logically contingent consequences of the laws are laws themselves -- At least some laws are metaphysically contingent -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- Laws of nature, laws of science, laws of theories -- The first-order conception versus the meta-theoretic conception -- What is a law of nature? -- Some examples of meta-theoretic accounts -- The virtues of the meta-theoretic conception -- Weighing the virtues and shortcomings of the meta-theoretic conception -- An epistemological argument for the meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The discoverability thesis, the governing thesis, and the first-order conception -- The main argument -- The objection from bad company -- The objection from inference to the best explanation -- The objection from bayesianism -- The objection from contextualist epistemology -- The objection from the threat of inductive skepticism -- Laws, governing, and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- What would things have to be like in order for the laws of nature to govern the universe? -- Lawhood, inevitability, counterfactuals -- What is it for a proposition to be inevitably true? -- What is it for a whole class of propositions to be inevitably true? -- What is it for lawhood to confer inevitability? -- NP and supporting counterfactuals -- The worry about context-variability -- A solution and a look ahead -- When would the laws have been different? -- Where we are now -- The God cases -- Other counterexamples to NP -- A moral-theoretic counterexample to NP -- Scientific contexts and non-scientific contexts -- Scientific God cases? -- Lewisian non-backtracking counterexamples -- Where things stand now -- How could science show that the laws govern? -- Why the law-governed world-picture must include the science-says-so thesis -- What is extra-scientific? -- How can the science-says-so thesis be true? -- NP as a consequence of the presuppositions in any scientific context -- Np as true in all possible scientific contexts -- But how could it be so? -- Attack of the actual-factualists -- Measurement and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- Measurements, reliability, counterfactuals -- A general principle that captures the relation between measurement and counterfactuals -- What we can learn about lawhood from what we have learned about the counterfactual commitments of science -- A first-order account of laws or a meta-theoretic account of laws? -- What methods are presupposed to be legitimate measurement procedures? -- Why we must adopt a meta-theoretic account of laws -- What lawhood is -- Where we are now -- The measurability account of laws -- Brief review of the case for the mal -- A note about hedged laws -- How plausible is the mal? -- What if we don't care about the law-governed world-picture? -- Newton's God and Laplace's demon -- Beyond humean and non-humean -- Two views of laws -- Humean supervenience and the meta-theoretic conception -- Alleged counterexamples to humean supervenience -- Governing and non-trivial necessity -- How the mal lets us have it all -- Humeanism? non-humeanism? -- What is the significance of the idea of the law-governed universe? -- Where in the world are the laws of nature? -- Appendix: The mal in action : a few examples -- Of scientific theories and their laws -- Newton's theory as a paradigm example -- Classical special-force laws -- Geometrical optics and one of its laws -- Local deterministic field theories. (shrink)

John Taurek has argued that, where choices must be made between alternatives that affect different numbers of people, the numbers are not, by themselves, morally relevant. This is because we "must" take "losses-to" the persons into account (and these don't sum), but "must not" consider "losses-of" persons (because we must not treat persons like objects). I argue that the numbers are always ethically relevant, and that they may sometimes be the decisive consideration.

Major shifts in the field of model theory in the twentieth century have seen the development of new tools, methods, and motivations for mathematicians and philosophers. In this book, John T. Baldwin places the revolution in its historical context from the ancient Greeks to the last century, argues for local rather than global foundations for mathematics, and provides philosophical viewpoints on the importance of modern model theory for both understanding and undertaking mathematical practice. The volume also addresses the impact (...) of model theory on contemporary algebraic geometry, number theory, combinatorics, and differential equations. This comprehensive and detailed book will interest logicians and mathematicians as well as those working on the history and philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

I describe a problem about the relations among symmetries, laws and measurable quantities. I explain why several ways of trying to solve it will not work, and I sketch a solution that might work. I discuss this problem in the context of Newtonian theories, but it also arises for many other physical theories. The problem is that there are two ways of defining the space-time symmetries of a physical theory: as its dynamical symmetries or as its empirical symmetries. The two (...) definitions are not equivalent, yet they pick out the same extension. This coincidence cries out for explanation, and it is not clear what the explanation could be. The Puzzle: Symmetries, Measurability and Invariance 1.1 The symmetries and the measurable quantities of Newtonian mechanics 1.2 The puzzle Two Easy Answers Another Unsuccessful Solution: Appeal to Geometrical Symmetries Locating the Puzzle The Relation between Laws and Measurability A Possible Solution CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

How do I live a good life, one that is deeply personal and sensitive to others? John T. Lysaker suggests that those who take this question seriously need to reexamine the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In philosophical reflections on topics such as genius, divinity, friendship, and reform, Lysaker explores "self-culture" or the attempt to remain true to one's deepest commitments. He argues that being true to ourselves requires recognition of our thoroughly dependent and relational nature. Lysaker guides readers (...) from simple self-absorption toward a more fulfilling and responsive engagement with the world. (shrink)

Previous discussions of addiction have often focused on the question of whether addiction is a disease. This discussion distinguishes that question – the disease question – from the question of whether addiction is a disability. I argue that, however one answers the disease question, and indeed on almost any credible account of addiction, addiction is a disability. I then consider the implications of this view, or why it matters that addiction is a disability. The disease model of addiction has led (...) many to see addiction as primarily a medical problem, and to make medical treatment of the addicted person the first priority in addressing addiction. Once addiction is viewed as a disability, different concerns are foregrounded. The problem of addiction resides not only in the addicted person, but also in the social environment in which the addicted person finds herself. The fundamental ethical question about addiction is not how addicted persons can be treated or otherwise changed, but how a just society can make reasonable accommodations for addicted persons. (shrink)

While there are numerous differences between the approaches taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James J. Gibson, the basic motivation of the two thinkers, as well as the internal logic of their respective views, is extraordinarily close. Both were guided throughout their lives by an attempt to overcome the dualism of subject and object, and both devoted considerable attention to their "Gestaltist" predecessors. There can be no doubt but that it is largely because of this common cause that the subsequent development (...) of their ideas is so similar. It is not my objective in what follows merely to demonstrate a similarity between two lines of thought. Instead, I will try to show that each approach gains considerably from attention to the other. There are numerous ways to begin such a project, each about as arbitrary as the next. For present purposes, I shall take as of central importance the question of the character of the perceived world, both in relation to the traditionally opposed mental and material "substances", and in relation to its identification and individuation of things vis a vis one another and vis a vis ourselves. This will implicate especially Gibson's "affordances" and Merleau-Ponty's thesis concerning the "materiality of meaning.". (shrink)

I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the world (...) and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Combinatorial Geometries and Infinitary Logics In this chapter we introduce two of the key concepts that are used throughout the text. ...

Thesis: The exclusion of organized labor/management issues from the principal arenas for business ethics study and discussions needs to be remedied. The paper develops this thesis in three steps: 1) Exclusion: A careful examination of select textbooks, journals, and conferences provides evidence as to the virtual absence of unions and such crucial organized labor/management issues as labor organizing and collective bargaining; 2) Inclusion: A series of brief arguments favoring inclusion of these issues in business ethics based on the notion of (...) privileged institutions, adversarial posturing, the societal benefits, and globalization; 3) Suggestions: Some practical, cooperative initiatives involving the academy, management and labor, such as, labor officials as guest speakers and members of business school committees, internships in labor organizations, training workshops in business ethics for labor leaders, fora for joint management/labor discussions of issues each group faces in the economy and the legislatures. (shrink)

This is the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. The Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characteriza- tion of the Humean (...) base that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments. (shrink)

I elaborate and defend an interpretation of Leibniz on which he is committed to a stronger space-time structure than so-called Leibnizian space-time, with absolute speeds grounded in his concept of force rather than in substantival space and time. I argue that this interpretation is well-motivated by Leibniz's mature writings, that it renders his views on space, time, motion, and force consistent with his metaphysics, and that it makes better sense of his replies to Clarke than does the standard interpretation. Further, (...) it illuminates the way in which Leibniz took his physics to be grounded in his metaphysics. (shrink)

Individualist and communitarian. Anarchist and totalitarian. Classicist and romanticist. Progressive and reactionary. Since the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been said to be all of these things. Few philosophers have been the subject of as much or as intense debate, yet almost everyone agrees that Rousseau is among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of political philosophy. This new edition of his major political writings, published in the year of the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, renews attention (...) to the perennial importance of Rousseau’s work. The book brings together superb new translations by renowned Rousseau scholar John T. Scott of three of Rousseau’s works: the _Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,_ the _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, _and _On the Social Contract. _The two _Discourses_ show Rousseau developing his well-known conception of the natural goodness of man and the problems posed by life in society. With the _Social Contract, _Rousseau became the first major thinker to argue that democracy is the only legitimate form of political organization. Scott’s extensive introduction enhances our understanding of these foundational writings, providing background information, social and historical context, and guidance for interpreting the works. Throughout, translation and editorial notes clarify ideas and terms that might not be immediately familiar to most readers. The three works collected in _The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau_ represent an important contribution to eighteenth-century political theory that has exerted an extensive influence on generations of thinkers, beginning with the leaders of the French Revolution and continuing to the present day. The new translations on offer here will be welcomed by a wide readership of both Rousseau scholars and readers with a general interest in political thought. (shrink)

Laws of nature are puzzling because they have a 'modal character'—they seem to be 'necessary-ish'—even though they also seem to be metaphysically contingent. And it is hard to understand how contingent truths could have such a modal character. Scientific essentialism is a doctrine that seems to dissolve this puzzle, by showing that laws of nature are actually metaphysically necessary. I argue that even if the metaphysics of natural kinds and properties offered by scientific essentialism is correct, there are still some (...) metaphysically contingent truths that share the modal character of the laws of nature. I argue that these contingent truths should be considered laws of nature. So even if scientific essentialism is true, at least some laws of nature are metaphysically contingent. (shrink)

In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues, first, that free-market anarchism is unstable -that it will inevitably lead back to the state; and, second, that without a certain "redistributive" proviso, the model is unjust. If either of these things is the case, the model defeats itself, for its justification purports to be that it provides a morally acceptable alternative to government (and therefore to the state). I argue, against Nozick's contention, that his "dominant protection agency" neither meets his monopoly (...) condition for statehood nor need run afowl of his redistributive requirement. This being the case, his argument against free market anarchism fails. (shrink)

There is a great deal that might be said about justice in property claims. The strategy that I shall employ focuses attention upon the initial acquisition of property -- the most sensitive and most interesting area of property theory. Every theory that discusses property claims favorably assumes that there is some justification for transforming previously unowned resources into property. It is often this assumption which has seemed, to one extent or another, to be vulnerable to attack by critics of particular (...) justifications of property. Nevertheless, this assumption is frequently left undefended by property theorists, and where it is defended, the defense is often remarkably weak. That some initial claim to property be defensible is required by any theory which holds that certain present distributions may be justified, that certain transfers of property are justified, or that restitution ought to be made for previous injustice in transfer or acquisition. The initial acquisition of property, and its justification, is crucial to the remainder of property theory. (shrink)

This essay will examine the role of cultural memory in an age of global interconnection. It will discuss how the traditional idea of culture is threatened by the “culture industry,” information technology and the media. In the West, there seems to be a loss of culture’s function as an engine of change and reform. But throughout the history of South East Asia (and especially in Indonesia) one sees a both a process of appropriation of ideas from the outside, and at (...) the same time, the maintenance of a deeper cultural identity that is resistant to complete control. It is an unconscious memory – or a cultural reflex – present within the languages and stories and rationalities. I will explain this with reading of Michel de Certeau. And I will show how the Wayang story of the “Death of Semar” is emblematic of this idea. The awareness of these old processes of appropriation and resistance are extremely important in our age of global networks of power that attempt to impose, various religious, political, financial and legal structures. (shrink)

This book contains a collection of 13 essays from leading scholars on the relationship between passionate emotions and moral advancement in Greek and Roman thought. Recognising that emotions played a key role in whether individuals lived happily, ancient philosophers extensively discussed the nature of the passions.

Where do we find ourselves? -- Not with syllables but men -- Essaying America -- Living multiplicity: a matter of course -- Emerson, race, and the conduct of life -- Reforming ethical life -- Emerson and the case of philosophy -- Abbreviations for Emerson's works.

I try in this essay to accomplish two things. First I offer some first thoughts toward a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Second, I'll address one critical argument that has become pretty common over the years. While versions of the argument can be traced back at least to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, I'll (...) focus on a formulation given it by Jeremy Waldron. The basic idea is that the only sound arguments for private property rights lead to the conclusion that society has an obligation to insure that every citizen possess private property. In Waldron's formulation, what is justifiable is a general, rather than a special, right to private property. I shall try to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. (shrink)

This volume explores the theological thought of John Mair, a significant 16th-century Parisian scholar. It includes articles exploring his positions on humanism and scholasticism, faith and theology, the Trinity and Incarnation, ethics and casuistry, and justification and sacraments.

Functionally, religion is what is held as sacred, that is, as untouchable. In the United States, taxes and military manpower are untouchable and, therefore, beyond objection by particular religions. The courts, too, are untouchable in determining what is and what is not religion. Despite these severe limitations on religious freedom, sometimes religion has broken the national consensus - most notably in the abolitionist movement of 1829-1865 and in the civil rights movement of 1959-1964. Such acts of religious freedom have been (...) the dynamism of profound social change. (shrink)

The growth of esports as a recognized, organized, competitive activity in North America and Europe has evolved steadily from one of the most prominent sport industries in several Asian countries. Esports, which is still pursuing a widely accepted governance structure, has struggled to control the factors that typically act as a breeding ground for sport corruption. Within the esports industry, there is alleged widespread use of both prescription and off-label use of stimulants, such as modafinil, methylphenidate, and dextroamphetamine. Anti-doping policy (...) implementation in this environment may result in either the abuse of the Therapeutic Use Exemptions system or excluding too many competitors who have a legitimate need for these medications. In this paper, we contextualize esports and substance use within this emerging industry. Subsequently, we outline the specific challenges faced by esports organizations in crafting policies to address PEDs—one of the industry’s most pressing issues. Furt... (shrink)

As complicated an affair as it may be to give a fully acceptable general characterization of professional codes of ethics that will capture every nuance, one theme that has attracted widespread attention portrays them as contrivances whose primary function is to secure certain obligations of professionals to clients, or to the external community. In contrast to such an "externalist" characterization of professional codes, it has occasionally been contended that, first and foremost, they should be understood as internal conventions, adopted among (...) professionals as a device for securing the "interests" of the professionals themselves. In what follows, I will argue that both of these lines are incomplete. As important as service to the community and the interests of professionals may be in the full understanding of the multiple role that "codes of ethics" play in many professions, it is equally important to see them as expressive of the romance of a profession. Professional codes should be understood not only in terms of their utility to the community, or in terms of their utility to practitioners, but as expressions of callings. Analyses of professional codes of ethics that do not take into consideration their role in evoking the romance of a professional calling are thus not entirely adequate. Professional standards and codes can be fully understood only if one appreciates that they are designed to contribute to and evoke feelings of dignity, self-worth-and, for better or for worse, even the superiority--of the professionals themselves; the code may seem to them to express essential features of what the profession really is. (shrink)

A law about frequencies would be a law of nature that imposes a constraint on one or more (actual, global) frequencies. On any of the leading philosophical approaches to laws of nature, there could be laws about frequencies. Hypotheses that posit laws about frequencies turn out to behave very similarly to hypotheses that posit corresponding laws about probabilities or chances -- they make the same predictions, provide similar explanations, and are confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence in the same ways. (...) This makes it interesting to consider the possibility of interpreting probabilistic laws from scientific theories as laws about frequencies. This is surprising proposal, but I argue that the resulting view (which I call 'nomic frequentism') is able to overcome all of the standard objections to frequentist interpretation of objective probabilities. (shrink)

György Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. _Soul and Form_ was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For (...) this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of _Soul and Form_, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

This paper explores Church's Thesis and related claims madeby Turing. Church's Thesis concerns computable numerical functions, whileTuring's claims concern both procedures for manipulating uninterpreted marksand machines that generate the results that these procedures would yield. Itis argued that Turing's claims are true, and that they support (the truth of)Church's Thesis. It is further argued that the truth of Turing's and Church'sTheses has no interesting consequences for human cognition or cognitiveabilities. The Theses don't even mean that computers can do as much (...) as peoplecan when it comes to carrying out effective procedures. For carrying out aprocedure is a purposive, intentional activity. No actual machine does, orcan do, as much. (shrink)

Rousseau coined the term perfectibilité to name what he claimed was the faculty that distinguished human beings from other animals. Although Rousseau himself largely associated perfectibility with the tendency of the human race to become corrupt, later thinkers adopted his term but then transformed it into a concept denoting the human capacity for progress. This article has two goals. The first goal is to analyse Rousseau’s discussion of perfectibilité in order to identify a specifically Rousseauean of perfectibilité. I identify three (...) related features of Rousseau’s perfectibilité: the ambiguous status of both instinct and freedom, the unique malleability of human nature, and the fact that perfectibilité operates on both the levels of the individual and the species. The second goal is to examine the transformation of this specifically Rousseauean conception in the thought of one of the thinker largely responsible for giving it a very different direction, Condorcet. (shrink)

Stanislaw Lesniewski’s interests were, for the most part, more philosophical than mathematical. Prior to taking his doctorate at Jan Kazimierz University in Lvov, Lesniewski had spent time at several continental universities, apparently becoming relatively attached to the philosophy of one of his teachers, Hans Comelius, to the chapters of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic that dealt specifically with semantics, and, in general, to studies of general grammar and philosophy of language. In these several early interests are already to (...) be found the roots of the work that was to occupy Lesniewski’s life: a search for a definitive doctrine of what sorts of things there are in the world, or better, of what language must be like if it is adequately and efficiently to represent the world. (shrink)

It is a standard view that the concept of chance is inextricably related to the technical concept of credence . One influential version of this view is that the chance role is specified by (something in the neighborhood of) David Lewis's Principal Principle, which asserts a certain definite relation between chance and credence. If this view is right, then one cannot coherently affirm that there are chance processes in the physical world while rejecting the theoretical framework in which credence is (...) defined, namely the Bayesian framework. This is surprising; why should adopting a theory that says there are chances at work in nature put any particular constraints on our theorizing about epistemology and rational choice? It is quite plausible that in order for anything to count as the referent of our concept chance , it would have to be related to epistemic rationality in a certain way—roughly, it is rational to have more confidence that something will happen the greater you think its chance is. But this commonsensical idea does not seem to be inherently committed to any particular theoretical approach to rationality, so why should we think that adopting the Bayesian approach is a prerequisite for thinking coherently about chance? I propose and defend a replacement for the Principal Principle which makes no use of the concept of credence. I also argue that this replacement is advantageous for the project of theorizing about the nature of chance. (shrink)

My objective is to offer at least a rough sketch of a new model for understanding time. Since many people are quite content with the model they have, I will try to show why a new model might be desirable or necessary. The exposition will be broken down into three parts. In the first part, I’ll try to show that no one has ever experienced time as such. In the second part, I shall argue that one good reason for this (...) is that there is no such thing as time as such. Finally, in the third part, I’ll try to reassemble what’s left of the conception of time after all this demolition, and I’ll offer a positive model (albeit rather vague) of what I prefer to call “temporality”. The exposition will follow lines familiar to contemporary students of time, but will, I hope, lead to conclusions that are at least modestly novel. (shrink)

Individualist and communitarian. Anarchist and totalitarian. Classicist and romanticist. Progressive and reactionary. Since the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been said to be all of these things. Few philosophers have been the subject of as much or as intense debate, yet almost everyone agrees that Rousseau is among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of political philosophy. This new edition of his major political writings, published in the year of the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, renews attention (...) to the perennial importance of Rousseau’s work. The book brings together superb new translations by renowned Rousseau scholar John T. Scott of three of Rousseau’s works: the _Discourse on the Sciences and Arts,_ the _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, _and _On the Social Contract. _The two _Discourses_ show Rousseau developing his well-known conception of the natural goodness of man and the problems posed by life in society. With the _Social Contract, _Rousseau became the first major thinker to argue that democracy is the only legitimate form of political organization. Scott’s extensive introduction enhances our understanding of these foundational writings, providing background information, social and historical context, and guidance for interpreting the works. Throughout, translation and editorial notes clarify ideas and terms that might not be immediately familiar to most readers. The three works collected in _The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau_ represent an important contribution to eighteenth-century political theory that has exerted an extensive influence on generations of thinkers, beginning with the leaders of the French Revolution and continuing to the present day. The new translations on offer here will be welcomed by a wide readership of both Rousseau scholars and readers with a general interest in political thought. (shrink)