John Woods' The Logic of Fiction, now thirty-five years old, is a ground-breaking event in the establishment of the semantics of fiction as a stand-alone research programme in the philosophies of language and logic. There is now a large literature about these matters, but Woods' book retains a striking freshness, and still serves as a convincing template of the treatment options for the field's key problems. The book now appears in a second edition with a new Foreword by Nicholas (...) Griffin and an extended bibliography covering the period 1969-2009. As Griffin notes in his Foreword, it is "surprising on looking back to discover how little was written on the semantics of fiction before John Woods' The Logic of Fiction was published in 1974. The surprise is the greater because Woods' book appeared after almost a quarter century of fierce philosophical debate about reference Fictional discourse, one would have thought, would be an important testing ground for philosophical theories of referential expressions and one, moreover, in which the standard theories would likely be tested to destruction. " " One of the great merits of Woods' book is that it takes seriously the wide-ranging demands that fiction imposes on logic and semantics, and does not try to force fiction into some pre-conceived logical mould. but thanks to Woods' pioneering efforts, we are much closer to one now than we were when he set out to write his book. His book was not the last word on the logic of fiction; it was much more important: it was nearly the first." NICHOLAS GRIFFIN is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at McMaster University. Recent publications include Russell vs Meinong: The Legacy of "On Denoting," edited with Dale Jacquette. JOHN WOODS is Director of the Abductive Systems Group at the University of British Columbia and Charles S. Peirce Visiting Professor of Logic in the Group on Logic and Computational Science, King's College London. He has two forthcoming books on fiction - an edited volume, Fictions and Models: New Essays, and a research monograph, Sherlock's Member: New Perspectives on the Semantics of Fiction, both to appear in 2010. (shrink)

The movement of families around the world is becoming increasingly common, whether involuntarily or voluntarily . Though one of the effects of globalization is the growing number of professional parents whose occupation causes them to move their families around the world on a fairly regular basis, little is known of the effects of such global mobility on the children. This paper describes a small‐scale study undertaken with 120 globally mobile Botswana‐based children between 9 and 11 years of age, which explored (...) their perceptions of what it means to belong to a home country. Findings highlighted the many different factors that influence such perceptions , as well as the need for further research to be undertaken in this increasingly important area. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

The debate about genetic modification (GM) can be seen as characteristic of our time. Environmental groups, in challenging GM, are also challenging modernist faith in progress, and science and technology. In this paper we use the case of New Zealand's Royal Commission on Genetic Modification to explore the application of science discourses as used by environmental groups. We do this by situating the debate in the framework of modernity, discussing the use of science by environmental groups, and deconstructing the science (...) discourses evident within environmental groups' submissions to the Commission. We find science being called into question by the very movement that has relied on it to fight environmental issues for many years. The environmental groups are challenging the traditional boundaries of science, for although they use science they also present it as a culturally embedded activity with no greater epistemological authority than other knowledge systems. Their discourses, like that of the other main actors in the GM debate, are thus part of the constant re-negotiation of the cultural construct of 'science'. (shrink)

Adam Smith and the philosophy of anti-history, by J. Weiss.--Towards a dissolution of the ontological argument, by A. C. Danto.--Romanticism, historicism, realism: toward a period concept for early 19th century intellectual history, by H. V. White.--History and humanity: the Proudhonian vision, by A. Noland.--Hintze and the legacy of Ranke, by M. Covensky.--Objections to metaphysics, by J. Cobitz.--The term expressionism in the visual arts, by V. H. Miesel.--Karl Löwith's anti-historicism, by B. Riesterer.--Antonio Gramsci; Marxism and the Italian intellectual tradition, by J. (...) Cammett.--Traditional Chinese historiography and local histories, by E. H. Pritchard.--From principle to principal: restoration and emperorship in Japan, by H. D. Harootunian.--National development and the evolution of the legal-rational bureaucracy: the prefectural governor in Japan, 1868-1945, by B. Silberman. (shrink)

Since the publication of _A Theory of Justice _, John Rawls has been viewed as one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In _John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order_, Patrick Hayden discusses Rawls's views regarding the nature of social justice among states. He examines Rawls's most important writings in order to assess how adequately his theory of justice is able to accommodate claims to universal human rights and shows how Rawls's work can contribute (...) to the construction of a cosmopolitan approach to issues of international justice. Beginning with Rawls's attempt to develop an account of international justice and human rights that is consistent with his earlier theory of justice as fairness, Hayden then offers a critical examination of Rawls's political philosophy and international thought which argues for a cosmopolitan variation on Rawls's 'law of peoples'. _John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order_ is a concise and detailed analysis of one of the foremost political philosophers of our time that demonstrates the importance of Rawls's work for contemporary debates regarding international relations, world politics and human rights. (shrink)

This essay uses the philosophy and theology of John Paul II to argue that re-enchanting the world requires various modes depending on whether disenchantment is due to religious beliefs being deemed false or irrelevant. The former is countered through philosophical arguments for God's existence and the plausibility of religious belief, the latter through accepting the human condition and the connection between self-fulfillment and adherence to the laws of life, reason, other-centered love, and God-centered spirituality. These laws, especially as embodied (...) in Christianity, facilitate the familial love of God that is so necessary for re-enchanting the world. (shrink)

The crisis of democracy unfolding in the United States was identified by John Paul II as due to misunderstanding the relationship of truth and freedom. This crisis has grown worse due to a libertinism that sees objective moral truths as impositions on both free choice and fulfilling relationships, that identifies self-fulfillment with a self-creation in which one creates one’s own values, that seeks to build democracies apart from moral objectivity, and that dismisses the relevance of God for living well. (...) I argue that democracy cannot survive these libertine errors and that they cannot be successfully countered by utilitarianism, Rawls’s political liberalism, or democratic proceduralism. Survival requires adopting the Thomistic personalism formulated by Aquinas and developed by Karol Wojtyła as indispensable for understanding those lived experiences through which one encounters the ethical moment of self-determination, achieves moral objectivity, avoids loneliness by loving truly, and seeks—via collaboration with women exercising their feminine genius for discerning the welfare of others—the common good, without which democracies collapse into atheistic tyranny. (shrink)

The first in a new series with Australian Catholic University, this collection of essays deals with two important themes. 'Faith' and 'reason' are heavily weighted words. They point to elemental aspects of human existence. The papers and discussions presented strive to clarify and corelate these basic activities or dimensions of human beings. In all the complexities of the possible relationships and interweaving of faith and reason, two kinds of questions keep recurring. One the one hand, what is the value of (...) human intelligence, and how is it endorsed and supported by faith' On the other hand, what is the distinctive intelligence or rationality of faith, and how does it relate to the perennial search for wisdom represented in it various philosophical forms' Contributors include: Marilyn McCord Adams, Raimond Gaita, John Haldane, John McDermott SJ, Kevin Hart, and Anthony Kelly CSsR. (shrink)

This article revisits John Wilson’s “first steps” in moral education—a conceptual analysis of morality—and what he calls an education in morality. Education in morality focuses on morality as a form of life with a specific domain in which it aims to initiate students, and on education as a growth-oriented, progressive activity. Arendt’s conception of natality in education is then used to show how it provides a catalyst for growth, discovery, and tradition-trumping newness, and acts as a stepping-stone to public (...) action as morality and recognition of the plurality of human life. It becomes clear that the inherent sociability of morality forces the consideration of it as a public and social act. Education in morality must preserve the potential for the capacity to contribute to the development of morality and concurrently develop that capacity through the production of plurality that follows and the negotiations necessary for its preservation. Morality, then, must not be taught as a static set of immutable principles, but rather as an inclusive, adaptive process by and through which groups govern their associations. (shrink)

This book review argues that Knasas's overview of Thomism is insightful and that it's application to the problem of tolerance is superb.

Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:Introduction to Schizoanalysis ISBN - 9780415113182Patrick Hayden, Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricismof Gilles Deleuze, Studies in European Thought XV ISBN - 9780820438566.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of HistoryMichael John Kooy*Romantic historiography is widely understood in methodological terms as a subjectively determined treatment of the human past, according to which historical knowledge is grounded in imaginative activity. That ambition was amply fulfilled in Scott’s historical novels, as Georg Lukacs once demonstrated. 1 Writing in broader terms, Hayden White characterized that whole creative enterprise as an “effort at palingenesis,” the striving (...) to recreate or relive the past in individual consciousness. 2In more recent years, as the approach to the period has become more historicist, criticism has begun to separate the historical and the aesthetic aspects of this romantic sensibility, usually emphasizing one at the expense of the other. The result has been a standoff in critical thinking about the way Romanticism represents the past. One side is occupied by some new historicists who claim to find a precedent for their own methodology among prominent figures of the period. Heyne, Wordsworth, and Keats, it turns out, not only were engaged actively in their own contemporary history, but they also demonstrated in their sophisticated evocation of the past the impossibility of overcoming historical difference by reference to natural law. 3 Arguments advanced on the other side of the controversy insist that the Romantics were not nearly such good historicists as supposed. In these accounts, often allied to post-structuralism, the aesthetic absolutism implicit in the high romantic argument is undiminished by the burgeoning historical consciousness in the period. Indeed, Romanticism’s aesthetic [End Page 717] retrieval of the past appears to be an instance of how subjectivity, rather than admit its own historicity, again asserts mastery over the object through its own self-will. 4Each of these accounts commands a considerable following, and a peace between them seems unlikely, indeed undesirable. On one matter they do agree, though, and that is in their distrust of Coleridge. His historiography—the notion that ideas make history and that the way to get at these ideas is aesthetically—is too idealist for today’s historicists and too monumentally subjective for the post-structuralists. I think both judgments are hasty. Coleridge, more than most contemporaries, reflected for many years upon the difficulties that arose in his own attempts to interpret historical knowledge (which appeared as a subjective, aesthetic construct) in systematic terms (as the reflection of natural order); and a good look at the record will show that his thought is not quite so anti-historical as some believe, and his subjective approach not nearly so absolutist.The goal of this essay is to rehabilitate Coleridge’s idea of history, considering what it tells us about Romanticism and how it foreshadows current debates about methodology. 5 More specifically, I want to show how in different contexts Coleridge treats, with varying degrees of success, history as an ideational field that is both created and then interpreted by an inquiring subject. First, at the literary and cultural level, history is conceived as the object of imaginative reconstruction, where subjectivity provisionally orders the mass of material according to an idea found nowhere within history itself. Here the anti-positivist bias of Coleridge’s idealist historiography dominates a project that is, both in orientation and achievement, not so much cognitive as aesthetic. Secondly, at the level of religion, history is conceived in mythic terms, the past being revealed only symbolically to the discerning inquirer who must interpret the Christian mythos as recorded in the inspired biblical account of the nation of Israel. Here it is the application of certain interpretive or hermeneutic strategies that determines success or failure. Finally, as a single idea, history is conceived as the process of humanity seeking consciousness of itself, and this Coleridge expresses in a narrative of universal proportions, beginning in apostasy and ending in grace. Here teleology dominates, but as Coleridge discovers, this providential [End Page 718] history is a story that cannot be fully told, thought, or even, it turns out, imagined. It can only be postulated as an idea of reason or, in religious terminology, held as an article of faith. In a curious return to aesthetics Coleridge argues that for the grand historical narrative, just as for art... (shrink)

In a number of places over the last few years Hayden White has attacked a view of history which I shall call the common-sense position and which runs as follows. Although moral and aesthetic assessments play some role in the writing of history, historians are to a large extent concerned with making true statements about the past and with giving correct explanations pf past events, and these central activities can and ought to be assessed by empirical standards, which on (...) the whole are not dissimilar to those employed in the sciences. For White, historical accounts are more like literary fictions than like scientific accounts. They are to be assessed ultimately by appeal to pragmatic, moral, and aesthetic considerations rather than to empirical ones. My aim in this paper is mainly critical. I shall examine a number of claims and arguments which White puts forward in opposition to the common-sense position and argue that they do nothing to undermine it. I shall concentrate mainly on his article "The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact" (in Clio, Vol. Ill, No. 3, June, 1974), although I shall be making some reference to his book Metahistory (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973). (shrink)

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White’s influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be (...) worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran’s anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half-century of White’s published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White’s essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such. (shrink)

Those familiar with the life and work of James Hayden Tufts tend to associate him with John Dewey, with whom he wrote both the 1908 and 1932 editions of _Ethics. _Yet as James Campbell here demonstrates, Tufts played a singular and important role in American philosophy from 1892, when he began teaching at the newly opened University of Chicago, until his retirement in 1930. During this period, he, along with Dewey and George Herbert Mead, was instrumental in the (...) birth of a new school of philosophy, the Chicago School, which developed a powerful and compelling social pragmatism. Campbell presents selected writings covering Tufts’s long and productive career. Arranged chronologically, they represent the full range of Tufts’s thought, from his concept of justice as the key value for harmonious community life to his views on religion and the question of evolution. A carefully annotated bibliography of all of Tufts’s writings completes the volume. (shrink)

John Dewey’s Ethics, which he co-authored with James Hayden Tufts, is now available as an online text in the public domain. Indeed, unrestricted access copies are obtainable on the Internet for both editions of the Ethics: the first edition of 1908 and the much revised second edition of 1932. This should be welcome news for teachers, because the book represents a cornucopian instructional resource. The Ethics constitutes an ambitious and comprehensive work that is organized into three distinct parts, (...) which respectively treat the historical and cultural background of Western mores, the main currents of Western moral theory, and the ethical aspects of several modern social problems. Given the text’s wide sweep... (shrink)

This book provides a wide-ranging, systematic, and comprehensive approach to the moral philosophy of John Dewey, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. It does so by focusing on his greatest achievement in this field: the Ethics he jointly published with James Hayden Tufts in 1908 and then republished in a heavily revised version in 1932. The essays in this volume are divided into two distinct parts. The first features essays that provide a running commentary (...) on the chapters of the 1932 Ethics written by Dewey. Each chapter is introduced, situated within a historical perspective, and then its main achievements are highlighted and discussed. The second part of the book interprets the Ethics and demonstrates its contemporary relevance and vitality. The essays in this part situate the Ethics in the broader interpretive frameworks of Dewey's philosophy, American pragmatism, and 20th-century moral theory at large. Taken together, these essays show that, far from being a mere survey of moral theories, the 1932 Ethics presents the theoretical highpoint in Dewey's thinking about moral philosophy. This book features contributions by some of the most influential Dewey scholars from North America and Europe. It will be of keen interest to scholars and students of American pragmatism, ethics and moral philosophy, and the history of 20th-century philosophy. (shrink)

Founded in 1894 at a peak of social and industrial turmoil, the Chicago school of pragmatist philosophy is emblematic of the progressive spirit of early twentieth-century America. The Chicago pragmatists under the leadership of John Dewey pursued a close critique of the modern workplace, school, and neighborhood which provided a theoretical base for the progressive reform agenda. Andrew Feffer here provides a richly textured group portrait of Dewey and his colleagues George Herbert Mead and James Hayden Tufts against (...) the backdrop of Chicago's social history. In this nuanced intellectual biography of the Chicago pragmatists, Feffer retraces the story of their personal involvement in reform movements and examines how they revised contemporary political rhetoric and social theory in order to reestablish the foundations of democracy in productive and rewarding work. Drawing on liberal Christian reformist as well as philosophical idealist traditions, the pragmatists advanced a radically humanistic social theory that attacked the regimentation of factory life and demanded the democratization of industry and education. Feffer also gives an account of certain elitist and anti-democratic assumptions of pragmatist theory; he shows, in particular, how progressive reformers inherited the pragmatists' mistrust of the political impulses of the industrial workers they championed. (shrink)

Although "the Socratic method" is commonly understood as a style of pedagogy involving cross-questioning between teacher and student, there has long been debate among scholars of ancient philosophy about how this method as attributed to Socrates should be defined or, indeed, whether Socrates can be said to have used any single, uniform method at all distinctive to his way of philosophizing. This volume brings together essays by classicists and philosophers examining this controversy anew. The point of departure for many of (...) those engaged in the debate has been the identification of Socratic method with "the elenchus" as a technique of logical argumentation aimed at refuting an interlocutor, which Gregory Vlastos highlighted in an influential article in 1983. The essays in this volume look again at many of the issues to which Vlastos drew attention but also seek to broaden the discussion well beyond the limits of his formulation. Some contributors question the suitability of the elenchus as a general description of how Socrates engages his interlocutors; others trace the historical origins of the kinds of argumentation Socrates employs; others explore methods in addition to the elenchus that Socrates uses; several propose new ways of thinking about Socratic practices. Eight essays focus on specific dialogues, each examining why Plato has Socrates use the particular methods he does in the context defined by the dialogue. Overall, representing a wide range of approaches in Platonic scholarship, the volume aims to enliven and reorient the debate over Socratic method so as to set a new agenda for future research. Contributors are Hayden W. Ausland, Hugh H. Benson, Thomas C. Brickhouse, Michelle Carpenter, John M. Carvalho, Lloyd P. Gerson, Francisco J. Gonzalez, James H. Lesher, Mark McPherran, Ronald M. Polansky, Gerald A. Press, François Renaud, and W. Thomas Schmid, Nicholas D. Smith, P. Christopher Smith, Harold Tarrant, Joanne B. Waugh, and Charles M. Young. (shrink)

Supplements the background theory of indeterministic time with a standard deontic logic, representing what ought to be the case. Taken together with the formal notion of action introduced in the previous chapter, the framework now allows us to speak about what it ought to be that the agent does, and to explore the possibility that this notion should be identified with the notion of what the agent ought to do. Examples are developed to show that the two notions should not (...) be identified. (shrink)

An analogy is developed between action in an indeterministic setting and choice under uncertainty, as it is studied in decision theory. Various dominance relations among actions are explored, and used both to provide a semantic account of what agents ought to do and to formulate a notion of dominance act utilitarianism. The ideas are related to problems involving independence, conditionals, and sure‐thing reasoning.

In general we think of reasoning as a way of moving from some body of evidence to a belief that is drawn as a conclusion from it. But is it possible for reasoning to conclude in action, i.e., in a person’s intentionally doing one thing or another? In PRACTICAL SHAPE Jonathan Dancy answers 'Yes', on the grounds that "when an agent deliberates well and then acts accordingly, the action done is of the sort most favoured by the considerations rehearsed, taken (...) as a whole—just as when an agent reasons well and then believes accordingly, the belief formed ... is of the sort most favoured by the considerations rehearsed, again taken as a whole" (Dancy 2018, p. 29). I critique this supposed parallelism between reasoning to action and reasoning to belief, arguing in two ways that in practical reasoning the action that is one’s conclusion need not be meant to be, or to be of a sort, that is most favored by the considerations that one reasons from. I then go on to explain why this should be: that in practical reasoning the correct conclusion to draw is not supposed to have been determined in advance, because this is a form of reasoning by which we create truth through acting rather than reflecting a truth that is independently so. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy is centered on forming a concept of lived time or durée, which he saw as a process of continuous variation and flux. He believed that the study of time should be the foundation of philosophy. By studying time, we find an integration of concrete, infinite, qualitative multiplicity within consciousness that we should use to understand the essence of reality. I show that his insights into the reality of duration come directly from a metaphysical or phenomenological interpretation of (...) integral and differential calculus. Drawing on the recently published lectures from 1902–1905, I show how An Introduction to Metaphysics schematizes the methodology of Matter and Memory and Time and Free Will by means of this mathematical analogy. To Bergson, the concepts of calculus are not mere metaphors; they unleash certain metaphysical implications that problematize the mind's relation to movement, life, consciousness, time, and consequently, reality itself. (shrink)

This chapter defines the neutral value for extending life. This is the level of a person’s temporal wellbeing at which it is just worth the person’s continuing to live: extending the life is equally as good for the person as not extending it. The chapter examines and rejects the view that extending a person’s life is normally ethically neutral. This view is analogous to the neutrality intuition about adding a person to the population. It implies that every level of wellbeing (...) is neutral. It may be attributed to Epicurus, who argues that death generally does not harm the person who dies. The chapter considers Epicurus’ arguments. (shrink)

This chapter considers and rejects three approaches to incorporating the neutrality intuition into a theory of value. The first is to suppose that betterness might be intransitive. The second is to suppose that betterness might be conditional in a particular sense. The third is to suppose that betterness can only be understood relative to a particular population.

This chapter defines a quantitative notion of a person’s temporal wellbeing. It uses the same methods as the previous chapter. It gives an account of intertemporal comparisons of wellbeing. It also defines a zero for temporal wellbeing.

This chapter considers how far what one ought to do when facing a decision of life and death is determined by the goodness of the distribution that will result. It defines, examines and assesses the principles of teleology and consequentialism in ethics. It compares normative theory with axiology. It considers how far a person’s lifetime wellbeing depends on all the wellbeing that comes to the person at times within her life, and how far the goodness of the world depends on (...) the wellbeing of the people. It introduces the idea of pattern goods such as equality and longevity. (shrink)

This chapter opens the question of aggregating wellbeing across time to determine the value of a single person’s life. It explains the imperfect analogy between this sort of aggregation and aggregation across time to determine the overall value of a world. It assesses the principle of temporal good, the analogue of the principle of personal good. It shows there are plausible grounds for doubting the principle, which derive from various putative pattern goods. Nevertheless, this chapter eventually adopts the principle of (...) temporal good as a default position. From this default position, it derives a same-lifetime addition theorem, which says that wellbeing is aggregated within a life additively. (shrink)