This book is an interlinear translation of a religious allegory about morals and religious living in the mid-nineteenth century, written in 1842 by Jeremias Gotthelf, a pastor. This translation includes introductions to both the author and the work itself.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This volume succeeds the same authors' well-known An Introduction to Modal Logic and A Companion to Modal Logic. We designate the three books and their authors NIML, IML, CML and H&C respectively. Sadly, George Hughes died partway through the writing of NIML.

Williamson (2000) appeals to considerations about when it is natural to say that a hypothesis is consistent with one’s evidence in order to motivate the claim that all and only knowledge is evidence. It is argued here that the relevant considerations do not support this claim, and in fact conflict with it.

Review of On a COlllplex Theory of a Simple God: An Investigation in Aquinas' Philosophical Theology, by Christopher M. Hughes.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 164-188, June 2022.

It is necessary that, if the world is divided into nations, conflicts should arise in which there is no strong argument against terrorism or repression. By a strong argument I mean one that would sway all minds not blindly partisan, without moral commitments that are unusual or outlandish in the modern world and with as much aversion to violence as most people have. So I do not here consider, because it is unusual, heroic and absolute pacifism, much as I respect (...) it; on the other hand I do mention Christian moral objections applying specially to terrorism because it seems somewhat outlandish even now to ignore the Christian element in our tradition. (shrink)

Background: Professional ethical codes are an important part of healthcare. They are part of the professionalisation of an occupation, are used for regulation of the professions and are intended to guide ethical behaviour in healthcare. However, so far, little is known about the practical use of professional codes in healthcare, particularly in paramedicine. Objective: The aim of this scoping review was to determine what is known in the existing literature about health professionals’ knowledge, awareness and use of their professional codes. (...) Method: A scoping review was performed based on a six-stage framework as described by Levac et al. Six databases were searched: OVID Medline, EMBASE, EMCARE, CINAHL, ProQuest and Scopus, in September 2020. Google Scholar, Trove and Google using.gov and.org websites were also searched for grey literature. Two reviewers independently assessed study eligibility. Results: The search yielded 1162 results after duplicate removal. Thirty-nine studies remained after title and abstract review. Twenty-five articles were included after full-text review. Sixteen examined nursing, eight examined medicine and one examined both nursing and medicine. No studies were identified that examined paramedicine. Twenty-one studies were of a cross-sectional design and four studies were of a qualitative design. Conclusion: Most health professionals know the codes exist, but do not think they know the content. Despite valuing professional codes highly, healthcare professionals do not use them regularly in clinical practice. Further research is needed, and professional codes should be made useful for practice and consideration given to how codes can be written, communicated and implemented to increase their actualisation in healthcare. Research should also begin in paramedicine to identify clinician’s knowledge and use of codes in this profession. Review registration: Open Science Framework – doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/NKBY4 Ethics Statement: This article does not contain any studies involving human participants performed by any of the authors. The review followed good scientific conduct. (shrink)

The paper clarifies and defends the orthodox view that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true against recent criticisms. It argues that apparent counterexamples to orthodoxy result from uncritical reliance on a fallible heuristic used in the processing of conditionals. A comparison is developed between such counterpossibles and vacuously true universal generalizations.

In this paper I consider, in connection with dementia, two views of the person. One view of the person is derived from Locke and Parfit. This tends to regard the person solely in terms of psychological states and his/her connections. The second view of the person is derived from a variety of thinkers. I have called it the situated-embodied-agent view of the person. This view, I suggest, more readily squares with the reality of clinical experience. It regards the person as (...) embedded in a history and culture. The human person is also an embodied agent. I contend that this view encourages a more appropriate approach towards the ethical issues that arise in dementia and towards people with dementia. (shrink)

Assertions are praised as true, informative, relevant, sincere, warranted, well-phrased, or polite. They are criticized as false, uninformative, irrelevant, insincere, unwarranted, ill-phrased, or rude. Sometimes they deserve such praise or criticism. If any respect in which performances of an act can deserve praise or criticism is a norm for that act, then the speech act of assertion has many norms. So has almost any act; jumps can deserve praise as long or brave, criticism as short or cowardly. But it is (...) natural to suppose that some norms are more intimately connected to the nature of asserting than any norm is to the nature of jumping. One might suppose, for example, that someone who knowingly asserts a falsehood has thereby broken a rule of assertion, much as if he had broken a rule of a game; he has cheated. On this view, the speech act, like a game and unlike the act of jumping, is constituted by rules. Thus, not all norms for assertion are on a par. Norms such as relevance, good phrasing, and politeness are just applications of more general cognitive or social norms to the specific act of assertion. Perhaps the norm of informativeness results from a more complex interaction between a general norm of cooperativeness and the nature of assertion as a source of information. But on this view, not all norms for assertion derive from more general norms; otherwise nothing would differentiate it from other speech acts. (shrink)

The paper challenges the inferentialist account of concept possession that Paul Boghossian takes as a premise in his account of the transmission of justification by deductive reasoning in his paper 'Blind Reasoning'. Unorthodox speakers who reject the inferences in an alleged possession condition can still have the concept by understanding a word for it. In that sense, the inferences are not analytic. Inferentialist accounts of logical constants, theoretical terms (using the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis method) and pejorative expressions such as 'Boche' are examined (...) and rejected. It is suggested that epistemological questions cannot be reduced to questions in the theory of thought and meaning. (shrink)

Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalisation, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. The author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasises the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices. The author considers the following topics: the organic (...) physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalising science-based medicine, optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry. (shrink)

The paper is a critique of the widespread conception of logic as a neutral arbiter between metaphysical theories, one that makes no `substantive’ claims of its own (David Kaplan and John Etchemendy are two recent examples). A familiar observation is that virtually every putatively fundamental principle of logic has been challenged over the last century on broadly metaphysical grounds (however mistaken), with a consequent proliferation of alternative logics. However, this apparent contentiousness of logic is often treated as though it were (...) neutralized by the possibility of studying all these alternative logics within an agreed metalogical framework, typically that of first-order logic with set theory. In effect, metalogic is given the role of neutral arbiter. The paper will consider a variety of examples in which deep logical disputes re-emerge at the meta-level. One case is quantified modal logic, where some varieties of actualism require a modal meta-language (as opposed to the usual non-modal language of possible worlds model theory) in order not to make their denial of the Barcan formula self-defeating. Similarly, on some views the intended model theory for second-order logic can only be given in a second-order metalanguage—this may be needed to avoid versions of Russell’s paradox when the first-order quantifiers are read as absolutely unrestricted. It can be shown that the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness eventually forces fuzzy logical treatments of vagueness to use a fuzzy metalanguage, with consequent repercussions for what first-order principles are validated. The difficulty of proving the completeness of first-order intuitionistic logic on its intended interpretation by intuitionistically rather than just classically valid means is a more familiar example. These case studies will be discussed in some detail to reveal a variety of ways in which even metalogic is metaphysically contested, substantial and non-neutral. (shrink)

Isn't probability 1 certainty? If the probability is objective, so is the certainty: whatever has chance 1 of occurring is certain to occur. Equivalently, whatever has chance 0 of occurring is certain not to occur. If the probability is subjective, so is the certainty: if you give credence 1 to an event, you are certain that it will occur. Equivalently, if you give credence 0 to an event, you are certain that it will not occur. And so on for other (...) kinds of probability, such as evidential probability. The formal analogue of this picture is the regularity constraint: a probability distribution over sets of possibilities is regular just in case it assigns probability 0 only to the null set, and therefore probability 1 only to the set of all possibilities. (shrink)

Isn't probability 1 certainty? If the probability is objective, so is the certainty: whatever has chance 1 of occurring is certain to occur. Equivalently, whatever has chance 0 of occurring is certain not to occur. If the probability is subjective, so is the certainty: if you give credence 1 to an event, you are certain that it will occur. Equivalently, if you give credence 0 to an event, you are certain that it will not occur. And so on for other (...) kinds of probability, such as evidential probability. The formal analogue of this picture is the regularity constraint: a probability distribution over sets of possibilities is regular just in case it assigns probability 0 only to the null set, and therefore probability 1 only to the set of all possibilities. (shrink)

What we call “the evidential argument from evil” is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra’s early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe’s evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil—in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical (...) theism more responsive to the type abductive atheology pioneered by Draper. In particular, we suggest a moderate form of skeptical theism may be able to resist Draper’s abductive atheology. (shrink)

Experiment, instrumentation, and procedures of measurement, the body of practices and technologies forming the technical culture of science, have received at most a cameo appearance in most histories. For the history of science is almost always written as the history of theory. Of course, the interpretation of science as dominated by theory was the main pillar of the critique, launched by Kuhn, Quine, Hanson, Feyerabend, and others, of the positivist and logical empiricist traditions in the philosophy of science. Against Carnap, (...) Hempel, Nagel, and Popper, who accorded observation reports an independent status either as a source of inductive support or as a basis for the falsification of scientific theories, Hanson and Kuhn emphasized the theory-ladenness of observation. They made this central point – that all observation is shaped by reference to theory – the cornerstone of a full-blown philosophy of science by buttressing it with two additional lines of argument: First, theories are always underdetermined by the data, several theories being compatible with the same set of data. Hence, choice between theories is never a matter of empirical support, but always turns around conceptual issues. Second, statements derived from theory never confront nature alone; they are always clothed in a web of interrelated beliefs. Thus, theories, their associated observation languages, and the entire technical culture they support must be accepted or rejected as wholes. (shrink)

1 Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN. [email protected].

Many advocates of non-classical logic for reasons external to mathematics claim that their proposed revisions are consistent with the use of classical logic within pure mathematics. Doubts are raised about such claims, concerning the applicability of pure mathematics to natural and social science. -/- .

Consumer concern for “ethical products”, or ethical aspects of the goods which they purchase, is a subject of increasing interest and research,which is here illustrated by an examination of the Fair Trade movement, with special reference to coffee as an indicative commodity. Kate Bird, is currently Lecturer in the Development Administration Group, School of Public Policy, Birmingham University, Birmingham B15 2TT, England, having previously worked abroad and written her MSc dissertation at Wye College on fair trade in coffee products. Dr (...) Hughest holds the Sainsbury Chair in Agribusiness and Food Marketing at Wye College, University of London, Wye, Ashford, Kent TN25 5AH, England (email: D.Hughes@wye.ac.uk), where he is also Director of the Food Industry Management Group. He has wide international experience of food management issues. (shrink)

Most of our knowledge is inexact, and known by us to be so. An example of such known inexactness will be described in some detail. The description seems to entail a contradiction. However, the paradoxical reasoning rests on an assumption. It will be suggested that the description is correct and this assumption false. Its failure will be explained by means of a picture of inexact knowledge in which the notion of a margin for error is central. This picture suggests diagnoses (...) of other paradoxical arguments: Surprise Examinations, backwards inductions about Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and the Heap. (shrink)

Perennial philosophers' hopes are unlikely victims of swift, natural deduction. Yet anti-realism has been thought one. Not hoping for anti-realism myself I here show it, lest it be underestimated, to survive the following argument, adapted from W. D.Hart pp. 156, 164-5; he credits first publication to Fitch).

Consumer concern for “ethical products”, or ethical aspects of the goods which they purchase, is a subject of increasing interest and research,which is here illustrated by an examination of the Fair Trade movement, with special reference to coffee as an indicative commodity. Kate Bird, is currently Lecturer in the Development Administration Group, School of Public Policy, Birmingham University, Birmingham B15 2TT, England, having previously worked abroad and written her MSc dissertation at Wye College on fair trade in coffee products. Dr (...) Hughest holds the Sainsbury Chair in Agribusiness and Food Marketing at Wye College, University of London, Wye, Ashford, Kent TN25 5AH, England (email: D.Hughes@wye.ac.uk), where he is also Director of the Food Industry Management Group. He has wide international experience of food management issues. (shrink)

The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. N.B. Prof Williamson is now based at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

Until recently, many philosophers took Causal Decision Theory to be more successful than its rival, Evidential Decision Theory. Things have changed, however, with a renewed concern that cases involving an extreme form of decision instability are counterexamples to CDT :392–403, 1984; Egan in Philos Rev 116:93–114, 2007). Most prominent among those cases of extreme decision instability is the Psychopath Button, due to Andy Egan; in that case, CDT recommends a seemingly absurd act that almost certainly results in your death. This (...) renewed attention to decision instability has spurned an array of modifications to and rejections of CDT. I argue, however, that the Psychopath Button and its ilk are no counterexamples to CDT. That is, given the causalist’s commitments in Newcomb Problems, they already have the tools to justify CDT’s verdict in Egan-style cases of extreme decision instability. I first argue that there is no reason to think the Psychopath Button is a counterexample to CDT; in particular, many philosophers have placed too much weight on pre-theoretic intuition in Egan-cases, and apart from pre-theoretic intuition, arguments against CDT in cases of extreme decision instability are flawed. My second claim is that the causalist can provide good reasons for following CDT in cases of extreme decision instability. I present a new case, the Two Button Defense, that highlights precisely why the causalist can reasonably follow CDT in even the Psychopath Button. CDT therefore stands as a viable decision theory, without need for modification, restriction, or rejection. (shrink)

Nietzsche consistently valorizes artistic falsehoods. On standard interpretations, this is because art provides deceptive yet salutary fictions that help us affirm life. This reading conflicts, however, with Nietzsche’s insistence that life-affirmation requires untrammeled honesty. I present an alternative interpretation which navigates the interpretive impasse. With special attention to the influence of Friedrich Schiller, the paper argues for three claims: (1) Nietzsche does not hold that art is false because it “beautifies,” but because it produces mere semblances of, its objects; (2) (...) these semblances are essentially non-deceptive; (3) he values artistic illusions because they dispose us positively to illusion more generally. Such ‘evaluative reorientation,’ I argue, is not merely consistent with, but integral to, achieving Nietzsche’s ideal of honesty. (shrink)

This study considers the philosophical arguments against that Extended Conciliar Christology and argues that none of them succeed in showing the doctrine to be false, or incoherent, or inconsistent.

Samuel Clarke was one of Spinoza's earliest and fiercest opponents in England. I uncover three related Clarkean arguments against Spinoza's metaphysic that deserve more attention from readers today. Collectively, these arguments draw out a tension at the very heart of Spinoza's rationalist system. From the conjunction of a necessary being who acts necessarily and the principle of sufficient reason, Clarke reasons that there could be none of the diversity we find in the universe. In doing so, Clarke potentially reveals an (...) inconsistent triad in Spinoza. Responses to this inconsistency map onto a deep division in the contemporary Spinoza literature. I conclude that Clarke's arguments provide a new approach to the recently revived debate over acosmic interpretations of Spinoza and point to new interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Terminological debates are often circular and unproductive, so it is a pleasure to investigate the terminology of LeRon Shults, who argues with clarity, defines his terms, and offers reasons for preferring one term over another. I would not, however, waste the readers' time if my aim were merely to challenge some of Shults's nomenclature. When one sets out, as does Shults, to intervene in the process of theogonic reproduction, terminological and metaphorical choices matter a great deal insofar as the semiotic (...) tools one deploys carry emotional and affective baggage that can deeply influence the efficacy of the hoped-for intervention. As I argue below, there is much to commend... (shrink)