Modality, morality and belief are among the most controversial topics in philosophy today, and few philosophers have shaped these debates as deeply as Ruth Barcan Marcus. Inspired by her work, a distinguished group of philosophers explore these issues, refine and sharpen arguments and develop new positions on such topics as possible worlds, moral dilemmas, essentialism, and the explanation of actions by beliefs. This 'state of the art' collection honours one of the most rigorous and iconoclastic of philosophical pioneers.

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

In order to avoid the problems faced by standard realist analyses of the “relation” of instantiation, Baxter and, following him, Armstrong each analyze the instantiation of a universal by a particular in terms of their partial identity. I introduce two related conceptions of partial identity, one mereological and one non-mereological, both of which require at least one of the relata of the partial identity “relation” to be complex. I then introduce a second non-mereological conception of partial identity, which allows (...) for both relata to be simple. I take these three conceptions to exhaust the plausible ways of construing two entities as being partially identical. I then argue that there is no analysis (including those offered by Baxter and Armstrong) of a universal and a particular as being partially identical consistent with any of these three conceptions that (i) is coherent, (ii) is consistently realist, (iii) does not lead to absurd consequences, and (iv) offers a “solution” to the problem of instantiation that avoids the problems with the other standard realist responses. In so arguing, I offer a criticism of the analysis of instantiation as partial identity that is independent of the standard criticism that it entails the necessity of predication. (shrink)

[Colour is king in our innate quality space, but undistinguished in cosmic circles.] Most philosophers would agree with at least the second half of Quine's dictum. It is indeed on the general view wrong to believe that, as qualities, colours are extra-mentally actual in even the humblest role. Mind-independent material things have on the general view powers to cause sensations of red or blue, but if, in [sensations of red or blue], [red] and [blue] name qualities, we are not to (...) believe that these qualities are possessed by things causing the sensations. My first thesis, defended in section 2, is that partly because we do count colours as eminent among qualities, we would on reflection want it to be true that some things have such qualities when they are not perceived. It would therefore be sad subsequently to discover the wrongness of believing that this is how things are. My second thesis, defended in sections 3 and 4, is that there is in fact no danger as yet of this kind of disappointment. So far, the philosophers have not shown that, if we believe that colour qualities exist as contents of experience, we ought not also to believe that things have these qualities when they are not perceived. One might of course deny that colour qualities exist even as contents of experience, so that the desire for them to be mind-independently exemplified evaporates on the realization that it lacks an intelligible object. Our pre-scientific concept of red, according to Armstrong, is, apart from being the concept of something falling under a determinable, [all blank or gap]. (shrink)

Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge, of which the present work is a translation, was first published in 1932; it therefore necessarily takes no account of the mass of work on the English Catholic humanists of the Renaissance, beginning with Chambers’s Thomas More, and on 17th-century English religious thought, which has appeared in the last 20 years. This may partly account for the rather old-fashioned impression which the book produces. Cassirer still understood More, Colet, and (...) Erasmus after the manner of Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers, a book which he frequently quotes. But the misunderstanding which, so it seems to the present reviewer, makes the picture given by the book as a whole a distorted one, goes rather deeper. The eminent neo-Kantian author appears to think that authentic Christian orthodoxy is Augustinianism, and Augustinianism interpreted in the manner of Jansenius or Calvin. Hence the philosophy of St. Thomas, to which he gives some fine and understanding pages, appears to him as a heroic but unsuccessful attempt to establish a Christian humanism on an Aristotelian basis which had little lasting effect ; he is led to represent such great and profoundly Catholic figures of the Renaissance as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and St. Thomas More as fundamentally unorthodox; in dealing with his main subject, the Cambridge Platonists, he presents ideas which any Catholic brought up in an enlightened Thomist tradition will naturally recognize as a normal part of his own religious and philosophical inheritance as if they were in the deepest disaccord with the teachings of orthodox Christianity; and he greatly exaggerates the opposition between the Cambridge Platonists and their Puritan contemporaries. (shrink)

In his last book, David Armstrong sets out his metaphysical system in a set of concise and lively chapters each dealing with one aspect of the world. He begins with the assumption that all that exists is the physical world of space-time. On this foundation he constructs a coherent metaphysical scheme that gives plausible answers to many of the great problems of metaphysics. He gives accounts of properties, relations, and particulars; laws of nature; modality; abstract objects such as numbers; (...) and time and mind. (shrink)

ADVANGEBOOKS - UNDERSTANDING ARGUMENTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO INFORMAL LOGIC, 9E shows readers how to construct arguments in everyday life, using everyday language. In addition, this easy-to-read textbook also devotes three chapters to the formal aspects of logic including forms of argument, as well as propositional, categorical, and quantificational logic. Plus, this edition helps readers apply informal logic to legal, moral, scientific, religious, and philosophical scenarios, too. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not (...) be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

This English translation of On Anger provides a newly read and supplemented Greek text of one of the most important "Herculaneum papyri," the only collection of literary texts to survive the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. On Anger is our sole evidence for the Epicurean view of what constitutes natural and praiseworthy anger, as distinguished from unnatural pleasure in vengeance and cruelty for their own sake, a view that can be shown to have influenced Latin authors like Cicero, Horace (...) and Virgil. (shrink)

Modern science began as natural philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. It was then killed off by Newton, as a result of his claim to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction. But this post-Newtonian conception of science, which holds that theories are accepted on the basis of evidence, is untenable, as the long-standing insolubility of the problem of induction indicates. Persistent acceptance of unified theories only in physics, when endless equally empirically successful disunified rivals (...) are available, means that physics makes a persistent, problematic metaphysical assumption about the universe: that all disunified theories are false. This assumption, precisely because it is problematic, needs to be explicitly articulated within physics, so that it can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. The outcome is a new conception of science—aim-oriented empiricism—that puts science and philosophy together again, and amounts to a modern version of natural philosophy. Furthermore, aim-oriented empiricism leads to the solution to the problem of induction. Natural philosophy pursued within the methodological framework of aim-oriented empiricism is shown to meet standards of intellectual rigour that science without metaphysics cannot meet. (shrink)

This paper is an essay in counterfactual epistemology. What if experience have high-level contents, to the effect that something is a lemon or that someone is sad? I survey the consequences for epistemology of such a scenario, and conclude that many of the striking consequences could be reached even if our experiences don't have high-level contents.

Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today, from countries refusing to negotiate, to politicians pandering to their base. Social media has produced a virulent world where extreme positions dominate. There is much demonization of the other side, very little progress is made, and the end result is further widening of positions. How did this happen, and what might be done (...) to address it? Walter Sinnott-Armstrong says there is such a thing as a "good" argument: Reasonable arguments can create more mutual understanding and respect, and even if neither party is convinced by the other, compromise is still possible. Think Again shows the importance of good arguments and reveals common misunderstandings. Rather than a means to persuade other people or beat them in an intellectual competition, Sinnott-Armstrong sees arguments as an essential tool for constructive interaction with others. After showing how the failure of good arguments has led us to society's current woes, he shows readers what makes a good argument. In clear, lively, and practical prose, and with plentiful examples from politics, popular culture, and everyday life, Sinnott-Armstrong explains what defines an argument, identifies the components of good arguments as well as fallacies to avoid, and demonstrates what good arguments can accomplish. Armed with these tools, readers will be able to spot bad reasoning and bad arguments, and to advance their own views in a forceful yet logical way. These skills could even help repair our tattered civic culture. (shrink)

There is an extensive literature on time travel in both philosophy and physics. Part of the great interest of the topic stems from the fact that reasons have been given both for thinking that time travel is physically possible—and for thinking that it is logically impossible! This entry deals primarily with philosophical issues; issues related to the physics of time travel are covered in the separate entries on time travel and modern physics and time machines. We begin with the definitional (...) question: what is time travel? We then turn to the major objection to the possibility of backwards time travel: the Grandfather paradox. Next, issues concerning causation are discussed—and then, issues in the metaphysics of time and change. We end with a discussion of the question why, if backwards time travel will ever occur, we have not been visited by time travellers from the future. (shrink)

Proposes a new model of contractualism based on an interpersonal, deliberative conception of practical reason which answers the twin demands of moral accuracy and explanatory adequacy.

"Rule" adopts the tradition of political philosophy begun by Socrates, refined by Xenophon and Plato. The book concentrates on something the characters call life-without-rule. What would that be? Is it a sort of utopia? How does it differ from anarchy? What makes it so appealing and what are the trade-offs?

This updated edition of Cinema in the Digital Age takes a fresh look at the state of digital cinema. It pays special attention to the ways in which nostalgia for the look and feel of analogue disrupts the aesthetics of the digital image and examines how recent films have disguised and erased their digital foundations.

This work "collects the author's work at the intersection between political philosophy and religion. Alongside his influential earlier essays, it includes nine new essays in which Wolterstorff develops original lines of argument and stakes out novel positions regarding the nature of liberal democracy, human rights, and political authority. Taken together, these positions are an attractive alternative to the so-called public reason liberalism defended by thinkers such as John Rawls"--jacket.

According to Fumerton in his "How Does Perception Justify Belief?", it is misleading or wrong to say that perception is a source of justification for beliefs about the external world. Moreover, reliability does not have an essential role to play here either. I agree, and I explain why in section 1, using novel considerations about evil demon scenarios in which we are radically deceived. According to Fumerton, when it comes to how sensations or experiences supply justification, they do not do (...) so on their own, and instead only do so only in conjunction with support for background beliefs about how the sensations or experiences are best explained. Here I disagree. In section 2, I first clarify the question of whether sensations or experiences provide justification on their own. I then respond to Fumerton’s arguments that use considerations about concept-possession and about how to close possible gaps between experience and truth. In section 3, I develop my main concern about his positive view, where that concern also brings out some of the merits of the view that experiences do justify beliefs about the external world on their own. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

Historically, there has been great deliberation about the limits of human knowledge. Isaac Newton, recognizing his own shortcomings, once described himself as “a boy standing on the seashore... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all underscored before me.” In _Ignorance,_ Nicholas Rescher presents a broad-ranging study that examines the manifestations, consequences, and occasional benefits of ignorance in areas of philosophy, scientific endeavor, and ordinary life. Citing philosophers, theologians, and scientists from Socrates to Steven Hawking, Rescher seeks to uncover (...) the factors that hinder our cognition. Rescher categorizes ignorance as ontologically grounded, or epistemically grounded. He then defines the basis of ignorance: inaccessible data; statistical fogs; secreted information; past data that have left no trace; future discoveries; future contingencies; vagrant predicates; and superior intelligences. Such impediments set limits to inquiry and mean that while we can always extend our existing knowledge-variability here is infinite-there are things that we will never know. Cognitive finitude also hinders our ability to assimilate more than a certain number of facts. We may acquire additional information, but lack the facility to interpret it. More information does not always increase knowledge; it may point us further down the path toward an erroneous conclusion. In light of these deficiencies, Rescher looks to the role of computers in solving problems and expanding our knowledge base, but finds limits to their reasoning capacity. As Rescher's comprehensive study concludes, ignorance itself is a fertile topic for knowledge, and recognizing the boundaries of our comprehension is where wisdom begins. (shrink)

Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and complex human activity. This book discusses the nature of liturgical activity and the various dimensions of such activity. Nicholas Wolterstorff focuses on understanding what liturgical agents actually do and shows religious practice as a rich area for philosophical reflection.

Navigating the ambiguity of invasiveness: is it warranted? Authors De Marco and colleagues have presented a new model on the concept of invasiveness, redefining both its technical definition and practical implementation. 1 While the authors raise valid critiques regarding the discrepancy in definitions, I cannot help but wonder about the purpose of redefining terms for which little confusion, if any, exists? This commentary seeks to scrutinise the rationale supporting the new model in the absence of significant clinical confusion and to (...) explore the implications for clinical practice. What are we trying to solve? Initially, one may notice there is no mention of clinical relevancy, confusion among patients or whether the discrepancy in terms is causing miscommunication. It seems reasonable that some clinical confusion may exist, but so too does a similar imbalance of terms when speaking technically across the specialties; take depression and its definition... (shrink)

A doctrine of intelligent design through evolution is not going to find many friends. It is destined to encounter opposition on all sides. Among scientists the backlog of evolution will have little patience for intelligent design. Among religiousists, many who form intelligent design have their doubts about evolution. In the general public s mind there is a diametrical opposition between evolution and intelligent design: one excludes the other. This book will argue that this view of the matter is not correct, (...) and that in actuality one can regard evolution itself as a pathway to intelligent design. We would do well to go beyond The Origin of Species and taking as our guide such works as W. Wentworth Thomson s On Growth and Form acknowledging that evolutionary adaptation can result in solutions of a sort that intelligence could readily ratify. Accordingly, what the present book seeks is a naturalization of Intelligent Design that sees such design as itself the result of natural and evolutionary processes.". (shrink)

A famous Kant scholar once distinguished two faces of the critical philosophy, one facing the past and less interesting and the other looking forward to the future and still fruitful (Strawson 1966). Rawls's work also has two faces and many of his readers look toward the past, wishing, for instance, that Rawls had been able to provide principles of justice that have the ontological status of categorical imperatives. I thank Andrew Valls for inviting me to clarify points where I diverge (...) from many Rawls scholars. Although this is an academic debate, I believe that the stakes are huge: namely, the future of liberalism in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural world. My response will elaborate how I read Rawls, why I engage Islamic political thought, and how liberals living in Europe or North America may converse with fellow citizens such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, who orient themselves politically by the Qur'an rather than, say, the United States Constitution. (shrink)

The real significance of this book lies in the fact that it tells us more about the everyday life of black South Africans. It delves into the essence of black family life and the secret anguish of family members who often battle to cope. A secret torment for some, a proud responsibility for others, 'black tax' is a daily reality for thousands of black South Africans. In this thought-provoking and moving anthology, a provocative range of voices share their deeply personal (...) stories.With the majority of black South Africans still living in poverty today, many black middle-class households are connected to working-class or jobless homes. Some believe supporting family members is an undeniable part of African culture and question whether it should even be labelled as a kind of tax.Others point to the financial pressure it places on black students and professionals, who, as a consequence, struggle to build their own wealth. Many feel they are taking over what is essentially a government responsibility.The contributions also investigate the historical roots of black tax, the concept of the black family and the black middle class.In giving voice to so many different perspectives, Black Tax hopes to start a dialogue on this widespread social phenomenon. (shrink)

The ‘interpretive turn’ in twentieth-century hermeneutics rests on the general ontological claim that human reality is the reality of self-interpreting animals. But under the circumstances of advanced modernity, there are aspects of human life, or spheres of human thought and action, that appear to contradict this general thesis, in that they do not present themselves as the doings of self-interpreting animals at all. Of these, the predominant one is the sphere of work or 'productive' action. In face of historical circumstances (...) in which work presents itself as bereft of the meanings that concern self-interpreting animals, hermeneutic philosophy faces a choice: Does it exempt work from the realm of self-interpretive activity, making it an exception to the general ontological thesis; or does it seek to retrieve the hermeneutic provenance of productive action? With a focus on the writings of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the chapter shows that philosophical hermeneutics has vacillated on this issue and it suggests that retrieval of the self-interpretive dimension of productive action is a central task for hermeneutics today. (shrink)

Draws on a broad range of scientific evidence to theorize an evolutionary basis for religion, considering how religion may have served as an essential component of early society survival and that the brain may be inherently inclined toward religious behavior.

In this paper I outline my propensiton version of quantum theory (PQT). PQT is a fully micro-realistic version of quantum theory that provides us with a very natural possible solution to the fundamental wave/particle problem, and is free of the severe defects of orthodox quantum theory (OQT) as a result. PQT makes sense of the quantum world. PQT recovers all the empirical success of OQT and is, furthermore, empirically testable (although not as yet tested). I argue that Einstein almost put (...) forward this version of quantum theory in 1916/17 in his papers on spontaneous and induced radiative transitions, but retreated from doing so because he disliked the probabilistic character of the idea. Subsequently, the idea was overlooked because debates about quantum theory polarised into the Bohr/Heisenberg camp, which argued for the abandonment of realism and determinism, and the Einstein/Schrödinger camp, which argued for the retention of realism and determinism, no one, as a result, pursuing the most obvious option of retaining realism but abandoning determinism. It is this third, overlooked option that leads to PQT. PQT has implications for quantum field theory, the standard model, string theory, and cosmology. The really important point, however, is that it is experimentally testable. I indicate two experiments in principle capable of deciding between PQT and OQT. (shrink)

Fodor’s radical concept nativism flowed from his view that hypothesis testing is the only route to concept acquisition. Many have successfully objected to the overly-narrow restriction to learning by hypothesis testing. Existing representations can be connected to a new representational vehicle so as to constitute a sustaining mechanism for a new representation, without the new representation thereby being constituted by or structured out of the old. This paper argues that there is also a deeper objection. Connectionism shows that a more (...) fundamental assumption underpinning the debate can also be rejected: the assumption that the development of a new representation must be explained in content-involving terms if innateness is to be avoided. -/- Fodor has argued that connectionism offers no new resources to explain concept acquisition: unless it is merely an uninteresting claim about neural implementation, connectionism’s defining commitment to distributed representations reduces to the claim that some representations are structured out of others (which is the old, problematic research programme). Examination of examples of representational development in connectionist networks shows, however, that some such models explain the development of new representational capacities in non-representational terms. They illustrate the possibility of representational development that is not explicable-by-content. Connectionist representations can be distributed in an important sense, which is incompatible with the assumption of explanation-by-content: they can be distributed over non-representational resources that account for their development. Rejecting the assumption of explanation-by-content thereby opens up a more radical way of rejecting Fodor’s argument for radical concept nativism. (shrink)

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an (...) object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption-Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are “time-determinations,” which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound. (shrink)