MY PAPER EXAMINES THE ’VIOLATION’ CONCEPT OF THE MIRACULOUS, INVOLVING THE OCCURRENCE OF AN EVENT RULED OUT BY A LAW OF NATURE. ANY BELIEF IN THE OCCURRENCE OF SUCH AN EVENT IS IRRATIONAL, IN THE SENSE IN WHICH IT WOULD BE IRRATIONAL FOR YOU TO BELIEVE AT THIS MOMENT THAT YOU WERE NOT READING THIS ABSTRACT BUT WERE HALLUCINATING. TO SHOW THAT IT IS NOT ALWAYS IRRATIONAL TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, ONE MUST ASSERT THAT TO KNOW WITH CERTAINTY THAT AN (...) EVENT IS PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, IS NOT TO KNOW WITH CERTAINTY THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE, ON GROUNDS THAT ITS OCCURRENCE DOES NOT INVOLVE A SELF-CONTRADICTION. BUT SUCH A PREMISE LEADS TO A FORM OF GENERAL SKEPTICISM WHICH WOULD MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE EVER TO ESTABLISH THAT ANY EVENT HAD OCCURRED. (shrink)

In a previous article, Professor abelson contended that the mind-Body identity theory was 'mathematically impossible' inasmuch as the number of possible mental states of a finite thinking organism are infinite, While the number of possible bodily states of such an organism are necessarily finite. I argue that this refutation does not succeed because although it is true that a finite brain can have only a finite number of brain states, Abelson had not demonstrated that there was a limitation on what (...) type of brain state could be generated by a finite brain. Thus, For instance, Although the number of natural numbers that such a brain could think of was necessarily finite, This in itself did not militate against the possibility of the brain producing a brain state corresponding to any natural number, Out of a possible infinite set, That can be thought of. (shrink)

I. Professor William L. Rowe begins an interesting paper on the Cosmological Argument by stating that his ‘purpose …is not to resurrect it’ but ‘to uncover, clarify, and examine some of the philosophical concepts and theses essential to the reasoning exhibited in the argument’. However, in the concluding pages of his paper, Rowe is at some pains to show that his discussion does at least demonstrate that the Cosmological Argument is beyond the reach of criticisms levelled against it in the (...) works of its classical critics, Hume and Kant and their modern-day counterparts. To quote his concluding remark: ‘Like most important philosophical arguments, it appears that the Cosmological Argument is neither as good as its supporters have claimed it to be nor as bad as its critics have believed.’ Now I have long suspected that some such estimate of the Cosmological Argument was correct; however I do not think that Rowe's discussions in his paper establish his contention that the reports of the death of the Cosmological Argument have been premature. Nevertheless, Rowe's uncovering of the reasoning that lies behind the argument does have the merit of laying bare the precise point from which, as well as the direction in which, the defence of the argument should proceed if we are to truly make some headway on this hoary topic. In what follows, I will first try to show why I think Rowe's discussion fails to establish his conclusion and thereafter try to give the outline of a more successful strategy for arriving at the same conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:104 COMMENTARY ON PROFESSOR TWEYMAN ' S 'HUME ON EVIL' Philo concludes his long and celebrated debate with Cleanthes on the problem of evil (Parts X and Xl of Hume's Dialogues) with the assertion that the "true conclusion" to be drawn from the "mixed phenomena" in the world is that "the original source" of whatever order we find in the world is "indifferent" to matters of good and evil. (...) From what Philo says immediately thereafter it is clear that by the phrase "The true conclusion is..." he does not mean 'The truth is...' but rather something like 'The conclusion best supported by the available evidence is....' (D 212) Now according to both Nelson Pike and Stanley Tweyman, the claim made by Philo in these passages involves him in a shift or departure from the procedure he adopted in earlier dialogues when he examined the design argument set forth by Cleanthes. It is claimed that whereas in the earlier dialogues Philo emphatically professed a sceptical outlook — "the view requiring that one embrace no metaphysical position of one's own" (to quote Nelson Pike ) — in the quoted passage he seems to abandon this scepticism in favor of embracing what amounts to being a metaphysical position in natural theology. Pike thinks that this alleged shift is only an apparent one, that the central import of these passages is sceptical rather than metaphysical, and that here, as elsewhere in the earlier dialogues, Philo's sole purpose in offering a more plausible counter-hypothesis is to show that Cleanthes' hypothesis is false. Tweyman, on the other hand, argues that the shift is a very real one and that Hume does indeed "intend Philo's conclusion in Part XI to be a truth in natural theology [.]... Philo is 105 not arguing as a sceptic; rather he is employing the hypothetico-deductive method for testing Cleanthes' 2 hypothesis. " Let me say at once that I agree with Tweyman, as against Pike, that in these passages Philo does claim to put forward a truth Jji natural theology, and I also agree with just about everything that Tweyman says in his paper concerning the proper interpretation of Philo's views in Parts X and XI leading up to this conclusion. I follow the lead of those scholars who, at least since Kemp Smith, have argued that Philo's whole purpose in demonstrating such "truths" is to discredit natural theology in the eyes of a true Christian believer by dramatizing the enormous gulf between the very attenuated form of theism ("diaphonous deism" one scholar calls it), which is the most one can hope to get out of Cleanthes' experimental approach to religion, and the claim of Christian theism to which Cleanthes aspires. But I do not accept the view that Philo's claim in these dialogues represents any sort of sudden departure (and certainly not a "fundamental methodological difference") from his critical stance against the design argument in earlier dialogues. What I hope to show below is that not only does this view distort what Philo does in the earlier dialogues, but it also distracts our attention from the true nature of Hume's achievement in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues. (Incidentally, I will assume throughout the sequel that Kemp Smith's identification of Hume with Philo is essentially correct. ) It would indeed be extremely paradoxical, in the face of Philo's famous (or notorious) peroration at the end of Part VIII proclaiming the "complete triumph of the sceptic" in regard to "all religious 106 systems," to raise any doubts about Philo's acceptance of the sceptical import of his own earlier arguments. But this still leaves unsettled the question as to what sort of scepticism it is whose triumph Philo proclaims at this point and whether it is inconsistent with the conclusion he reaches at the end of his discussion of evil. One would have hoped that at this late stage in the scholarship on the Dialogues, if there is one issue on which all of us could agree it is that Philo at no time in the Dialogues takes the (easy) Pyrrhonian line against Cleanthes' "hypothesis of experimental theism." I mention this because at several places... (shrink)

IN the final section of his chapter on ‘Perception’ in The Problem of Knowledge, Ayer makes the statement that ‘The failure of phenomenalism does not mean, however, that there is no logical connection of any kind between the way physical objects appear to us and the way they really are’. To prove his contention, he sets out ‘a pair of limiting cases’ of conditions in which the truth of premises referring exclusively to ‘appearance’ would allegedly afford logical guarantees for the (...) existence, or the non-existence, of physical objects. In this paper I wish to raise some serious reservations concerning the viability of the second of these two limiting conditions, which reads. (shrink)

IN this note I propose to make some general remarks concerning the analytical forays carried out into moral discourse by some leading figures in the modern ‘linguistic’ tradition. The philosophers I am going to speak of, may all be said to be attempting some sort of ‘descriptive’ analysis, but my thesis is that philosophers such as Toulmin and Baier are attempting something that is significantly different from what a philosopher such as Nowell-Smith is attempting. I will suggest, in the following (...) section, that the expression—‘the logic of moral discourse’—seems to be understood by these two groups of linguistic philosophers in two different ways and that one of these ways involves a more ambitious claim, than does the other, on behalf of the philosopher embarking upon a conceptual analysis of moral discourse. The manner in which, it seems to me, Toulmin and Baier understand this expression is the one that involves the more ambitious claim. In the final section of this paper I suggest that the more ambitious claim involves overloading the so-called Linguistic method to force it do a job that it seems at least not suited to perform. (shrink)

IT has been some time now since anyone professing himself to be a phenomenalist has characterized physical objects as ‘logical constructions out of sense-data’ in the strict sense of this expression. If he is to be justified in applying the expression in the strict sense, the phenomenalist must demonstrate that there exists a relation of mutual entailment between a statement implying the existence of a physical object and a statement referring exclusively to our ‘sense-experiences’. As a matter of historical fact, (...) no phenomenalist has ever succeeded in doing this; and it is now generally acknowledged, even by those who still wish to adhere to some form of a phenomenalistic analysis of physical object statements, that there are difficulties in principle why the reductivist programme of the early phenomenalists cannot be carried out. The modern-day phenomenalist, in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls in his predecessors’ position, tends to regard physical objects as fruitful and convenient theoretical constructions for interpreting and predicting our sense-experiences. Thus, although still committed to the view that physical objects are ‘constructed’ out of sense-data, he is no longer committed to the thesis of a strict logical equivalence between statements about objects and statements about experiences. Professor A J Ayer, perhaps the foremost exponent of this type of view today, put the matter this way not so long ago. (shrink)

My attention in this paper will be focused almost exclusively on the interpretation of Part III of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion suggested by Professor Nelson Pike at the very close of his excellent recent commentary on that enduring classic. 1 As I will show briefly in Section II below, Pike's interpretation of Part III emerges from the wider context of his quarrel with Kemp Smith in regard to the final outcome of these Dialogues . I find much in Pike's (...) commentary to applaud and to agree with, especially in its earlier sections, but on this whole question of Hume's final position in the Dialogues , I find his views less than convincing. But in this paper I will confine myself to showing what I think is wrong with his reading of Part III, and no more. 2 In particular, I will make no effort to challenge Pike's disagreement with Kemp Smith in regard to the final dialogue. Though Pike himself regards Part III as crucial, I am well aware that to make anything like a successful case against the kind of interpretation he favours of the upshot of the Dialogues much more would have to be done than I attempt in this paper. I submit this attempt, then, in partial fulfillment of a larger task to be completed at some future time. (shrink)

The author sides with the linguistic philosophers in that to analyse 'moral reasoning' is to provide a conceptual description of a prescriptive or normative area of language. He considers the question of why we should adopt a "moral point of view" in terms of toulmin (who thinks it is a meaningless question) and baier and nelson (who think it is legitimate). The author argues that it is a crucial question which must be answered. He concludes that baier has not proven (...) that the normative criteria of justification involved in morality constitute a question for the philosopher. (wstaff). (shrink)