Book Information Freedom. An Introduction with Readings. By Warburton Nigel. Routledge. London. 2001. Pp. viii + 252. Paperback, £12.99.

Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson (1851–1933) is lauded in both academic and popular circles as the author of the first uniquely Australian cookbooks, which she wrote between 1876 and 1895. Rawson was a prolific writer and stressed that she was the first white woman settler at Boonooroo in the colony of Queensland, where she was ‘beholden to the blacks’ to show her what to eat (Rawson, 1895, p. 54). Rawson's cookbooks famously codified how to use Australian non-human animals, including wallaby, parrot and (...) goanna, as meat, and her published memories of this time detailed the context in which she implemented and refined these recipes. Rawson organised and policed racialised frontier space as a white woman, claiming British sovereignty over Butchulla country in order to profit from and teach other settlers to profit from the coastal land and waterways. This paper draws on ecofeminist and postcolonial theory and works to explore how Rawson organised food production to exercise violent colonial claims to sovereignty as a white woman, explicitly advising other settlers to do the same. (shrink)

The text is taken from the edition of D. E. Hill, Mnemosyne Supplement 79 . The following works are referred to by author's surname only: H. W. Garrod, P. Papini Stati Thebais et Achilleis ; L. Håkanson, Statins Thebaid ; A. Klotz, P. Papini Stati Thebais ; R. Kühner, C. Stegmann, and A. Thierfelder, Ausführliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache ; R. Lesueur, Stace Thébaïde ; J. H. Mozley, Statius ; E. C. Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax.

Religion and the external world -- Projection, religion, and the external world -- The senses, reason and the imagination -- Realism, meaning and justification : the external world and religious belief -- Modality, projection and realism -- 'Our profound ignorance' : causal realism, and the failure to detect necessity -- Spreading the mind : projection, necessity and realism -- Into the labyrinth : persons, modality, and Hume's undoing -- Value, projection, and realism -- Gilding : projection, value and secondary qualities (...) -- The gold : good, evil, belief and desire -- The golden : relational values, realism and a moral sense. (shrink)

Advocates have sought to prove that underdetermination obtains because all theories have empirical equivalents. But algorithms for generating empirical equivalents simply exchange underdetermination for familiar philosophical chestnuts, while the few convincing examples of empirical equivalents will not support the desired sweeping conclusions. Nonetheless, underdetermination does not depend on empirical equivalents: our warrant for current theories is equally undermined by presently unconceived alternatives as well-confirmed merely by the existing evidence, so long as this transient predicament recurs for each theory and body (...) of evidence we consider. The historical record supports the claim that this recurrent, transient underdetermination predicament is our own. (shrink)

Originally published in 1969. This book explains what is wrong with the traditional methodology of "inductive" reasoning and shows that the alternative scheme of reasoning associated with Whewell, Pierce and Popper can give the scientist a useful insight into the way he thinks.

Knowing Persons is an original study of Plato's account of personhood. For Plato, embodied persons are images of a disembodied ideal. The ideal person is a knower. Hence, the lives of embodied persons need to be understood according to Plato's metaphysics of imagery.For Gerson, Plato's account of embodied personhood is not accurately conflated with Cartesian dualism. Plato's dualism is more appropriately seen in the contrast between the ideal disembodied person and the embodied one than in the contrast between mind or (...) soul and body.This study argues that Plato's analysis of personhood is intended to cohere with his two-world metaphysics as well as a radical separation of knowledge and belief. Gerson demonstrates that Plato's account of persons plays a key role not just in his theory of mind, but in his theory of knowledge, his metaphysics, and his ethics. A proper understanding of Plato's account of persons must therefore place it in the context of his doctrines in these areas. Knowing Persons fills a significant gap by showing the way to such an understanding. (shrink)

Engineering is 'the people-serving profession'. The work of engineers involves interaction with clients, other engineers, and the public at large. More than any other profession, their work also directly involves and affects the environment. This book makes the case that engineers have special professional obligations to protect and enhance the environment, and the authors - one, an engineer and the other, a philosopher - seek to provide an ethical basis for these obligations. In exploring these ethical issues, the authors aim (...) to show that engineers make a difference. The text opens with a series of case studies in which engineers face complex and challenging decisions about the environment. Succeeding chapters examine different ideas about environmental ethics for engineers, including professional codes and both modern and historical discussions of environmental responsibility. The book concludes with a collection of readings that complement the text. Students, as well as practising engineers, will find much of interest in this well-argued and thought-provoking book. (shrink)

The aim is to uncover the foundations of quine's distinction between definite singular terms and general terms in predicative position, And hence of the general schema of predication, 'fx'. While each term in such a predication specifies its own item, The items so specified exhibit a typical difference exemplified in the basic case by the difference between spatio-Temporal particulars and properties of such particulars. A generally consequential difference of role is that while both terms are applied to the item of (...) lower type, Only the definite singular term has the function of identifying it. (shrink)

Berent (this issue) critiques one of the three main proposals put forward by Carruthers (this issue), who suggests that cognitive scientists are biased against innateness-claims by the tacit assumptions of the mentalizing faculty. Berent proposes, instead, that the bias results from dissonance produced by a conflict between our innate dualism and our innate essentialism. The present response raises a number of difficulties for her argument.

In the Ukrainian reality of the twenty-first century. The search for the dominant spiritual and national identity is one of the leading places. The dialogue between Catholicism, which is represented by the spiritual phenomenon of the Vatican, and by Ukraine, one of the countries not only of the Greek Catholic, but also of the Orthodox tradition, with a distinct national-cultural specificity, is, in our opinion, the semiosphere where the answers to many challenges of the present and the future. But such (...) answers are difficult to find if the sine era et studio does not analyze the key trends in the development of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by examining it, without looking back at the stereotypes of the identification of Ukrainian spiritual thinking and being with the imperially secular tradition. The most suitable method for this task is the comparative methodology, which examines the basic ideological characteristics of the ideological world of Orthodox thinkers - from Ivan Vyshensky and to thinkers and spiritual prophets of the Second Cathedral of the UAOC. (shrink)

This article examines the origin of experiential organization, especially whether it is salient or selective. Aron Gurwitsch believes it is salient and William James that it is selective. I argue that Gurwitsch is right, and recount his argument and his critique of James, but I also pose my own critique and critical questions on the issue. -/- Gurwitsch's argument attempts to show that the organization of consciousness is not arbitrary or merely selected in some way by the subject. He claims (...) that when consciousness is organized it is found as already organized. -/- This is important for Gurwitsch's philosophical system because if he can establish that consciousness is always originally organized, then his famous claim that the theme, thematic-field, margin structure of consciousness is an invariant patterning impervious to the subject's whim, mood, or possible noetic training, is protected at the very start. (shrink)

1. The Tractatus doctrine of saying and showing In a letter to Russell dated 19.4.1919, written shortly after he had finished the Tractatus, Wittgenstein told Russell that the main contention of the book, to which all else, including the account of logic, is subsidiary, ‘is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s -- i.e. by language -- (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown (gezeigt); (...) which I believe is the cardinal problem of philosophy’ (CL 68). This was emphasized in both preface and conclusion of the book. The preface observes that the whole sense of the book can be summed up in the following words: ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’ (TLP p.3). The conclusion of the book (TLP 7) simply repeats this. The preceding three remarks, however, are noteworthy. They make three claims. First, ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (TLP 6.522). This reiterates the leitmotif of the book, namely that there are things that cannot, by the very nature of representation, be said. But though they cannot be said, they are shown by features of the relevant system of representation. Secondly, the correct method in philosophy would really be to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. empirical propositions that have nothing to do with philosophy, and then, when someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give meaning to certain signs in his propositions (TLP 6.53). This method, of course, is not the method that has been followed throughout the book, which consists almost exclusively of modal assertions concerning what must, can or cannot be thus and so in reality, in language and in the relation between language and reality.. (shrink)

Amazing as it may be, to this day few commentaries on the treatises of Plotinus' Enneads are written. The classic ninth treatise, for example, has hardly been studied. This treatise, however, is of vital importance, because it is in this work that for the first time in the Enneads, the One in its superform emerges and Plotinus dwells on the remarkable phenomenon of a 'mystical union' of the soul with the One. A thorough analysis of the argument and its development (...) next to philosophical and philo-logical support will be welcome to any reader of this in-triguing but difficult treatise. These aims are pursued in the main part of Meijer's work, the commentary. The first part of the book, preceding the commentary, examines the philosophical history of the concept of the One and its status in the first eight treatises. This new approach to the problem of the One leads to striking conclusions. It appears that while Plotinus was writing these first eight treatises, the concept of the One developed from that of a Supreme Entity of a Mesoplatonian character, viz. the upper part of the mind, to One of a Superone above mind. This casts an entirely new light on the position of the One in Plotinus and that of the ninth treatise itself. The third part not only examines the mystical union as pictured in the ninth treatise, but also provides a full scale discussion of Plotinus' descriptions of this union in his en-tire work. The degree of unification, viz. the question whether a part of the mystic self remains intact during the unification, is a matter of vigorous scholarly debate. Meijer shows that, in spite of some inconsistencies in his doctrine about the union, one must accept that Plotinus basically considered the union as a complete absorption of the soul into the Supreme Entity. (shrink)

Originally published 1968, the book examines the ways in which the definitions of education held by different groups with power have changed since 1800 and traces which social institutions exercised the preponderant influence on the growth of the English educational system during the seminal period in which the state system was founded and grew to its present position. Especial attention is given to the influence of the ideologies of the various social classes, to the growing demands of the economy on (...) the educational system and to changes in the structure of the family. (shrink)

For Socrates and Plato such freedom is the arch-achievement of human life--as also in the philosophy of Spinoza. As Socrates loved to argue, getting what seems good to us is one thing, knowing what we really want is another. It is another thing to act over a considerable period with this knowledge clearly in mind and effectively directing our conduct. In so far as we may succeed in doing so, we are internally free. It is freedom, so conceived, that we (...) wish to relate to the idea of human existence. (shrink)

Summary: This volume is interesting and worth reading as an introduction to the philosophical and cognitive neuroscience research on volition.