This introduction to the philosophy of social science provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events. Instead, theory aims to provide an (...) understanding of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of social science, and social scientists from a range of disciplines. (shrink)

Von Peter Sloterdijk kann man zu Recht sagen, daß jeder seiner Aufsätze, jeder seiner Vorträge auch ein ungeschriebenes Buch ist.

This article deals with mechanisms conceived as composed of entities and activities. In response to many perplexities about the nature of activities, a number of arguments are developed concerning their epistemic and ontological status. Some questions concerning the relations between cause and causal explanation and mechanisms are also addressed.

Progress Unchained reinterprets the history of the idea of progress using parallels between evolutionary biology and changing views of human history. Early concepts of progress in both areas saw it as the ascent of a linear scale of development toward a final goal. The 'chain of being' defined a hierarchy of living things with humans at the head, while social thinkers interpreted history as a development toward a final paradise or utopia. Darwinism reconfigured biological progress as a 'tree of life' (...) with multiple lines of advance not necessarily leading to humans, each driven by the rare innovations that generate entirely new functions. Popular writers such as H. G. Wells used a similar model to depict human progress, with competing technological innovations producing ever-more rapid changes in society. Bowler shows that as the idea of progress has become open-ended and unpredictable, a variety of alternative futures have been imagined. (shrink)

Al-Kindi was the first philosopher of the Islamic world. He lived in Iraq and studied in Baghdad, where he became attached to the caliphal court. In due course he would become an important figure at court: a tutor to the caliph's son, and a central figure in the translation movement of the ninth century, which rendered much of Greek philosophy, science, and medicine into Arabic. Al-Kindi's wide-ranging intellectual interests included not only philosophy but also music, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Through (...) deep engagement with Greek tradition al-Kindi developed original theories on key issues in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, physical science, and ethics. He is especially known for his arguments against the world's eternity, and his innovative use of Greek ideas to explore the idea of God's unity and transcendence. Despite al-Kindi's historical and philosophical importance no book has presented a complete, in-depth look at his thought until now. In this accessible introduction to al-Kindi's works, Peter Adamson surveys what is known of his life and examines his method and his attitude towards the Greek tradition, as well as his subtle relationship with the Muslim intellectual culture of his day. Above all the book focuses on explaining and evaluating the ideas found in al-Kindi's wide-ranging philosophical corpus, including works devoted to science and mathematics. Throughout, Adamson writes in language that is both serious and engaging, academic and approachable. This book will be of interest to experts in the field, but it requires no knowledge of Greek or Arabic, and is also aimed at non-experts who are simply interested in one of the greatest of Islamic philosophers. (shrink)

Robert Boyd*†, Herbert Gintis‡, Samuel Bowles§, and Peter J. Richerson¶.

In the Western world it is usually taken as given that we all want happiness, and our educational arrangements tacitly acknowledge this. Happiness, Hope, and Despair argues, however, that education has an important role to play in deepening our understanding of suffering and despair as well as happiness and joy. Education can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and unsettling; it can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness. Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Miguel de Unamuno, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire, (...) and others, Peter Roberts shows why these features of educational life need not be feared; to the contrary, they can be seen as a source of hope and human fulfilment. After years of negotiating an education system dominated by the language of competition, performance, and economic advancement, students and teachers often long for something different; they seek not just measurable success but also opportunities to ask searching questions of themselves and the world they encounter. Happiness, Hope, and Despair makes an important contribution toward meeting this need. It fosters a rethinking of the nature, purpose, and value of education, and opens up possibilities for further scholarly and professional inquiry. (shrink)

"In his latest book on the aesthetics of music, Peter Kivy presents an argument not for authenticity but for authenticities of performance, including ...

The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scientific reasoning in children and lay persons as well as in professional scientists. The (...) editors' introduction lays out the background to the debates, and the volume includes a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the philosophy or psychology of scientific reasoning, as well as those, more generally, who are interested in the nature of the human mind. (shrink)

Ética práctica se ha convertido en una introducción clásica a la ética aplicada. Peter Singer plantea la aplicación de la ética a cuestiones sociales polémicas y difíciles: la igualdad y la discriminación por motivo de raza, sexo, capacidad o especie. el aborto, la eutanasia y la experimentación con embriones. el estatus moral de los animales. la violencia política y la desobediencia civil. la ayuda exterior y la obligación de ayudar a los demás. la responsabilidad para con el medio ambiente. (...) y el trato a los refugiados. Singer explica y evalúa los argumentos pertinentes de forma perspicaz y no doctrinaria. A través de la estructura del libro, muestra cómo las polémicas actuales a menudo tienen profundas raíces filosóficas y presenta a la vez una teoría ética propia que puede aplicarse de manera convincente y coherente a todos los casos prácticos. (shrink)

Philosophers have not taken the evolution of human beings seriously enough. If they did, argues Peter Munz, many long standing philosophical problems would be resolved. One of philosophical concequences of biology is that all the knowledge produced in evolution is a priori, i.e., established hypothetically by chance mutation and selective retention, not by observation and intelligent induction. For organisms as embodied theories, selection is natural and for theories as disembodied organisms, it is artificial. Following Popper, the growth of knowledge (...) is seen to be continuous from the amoeba to Einstein'. Philosophical Darwinism throws a whole new light on many contemporary debates. It has damaging implications for cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and questions attempts from within biology to reduce mental events to neural processes. More importantly, it provides a rational postmodern alternative to what the author argues are the unreasonable postmodern fashions of Kuhn, Lyotard and Rorty. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers of science have claimed that much explanation in the sciences, especially in the biomedical and social sciences, is mechanistic explanation. I argue the account of mechanistic explanation provided in this tradition has not been entirely satisfactory, as it has neglected to describe in complete detail the crucial causal structure of mechanistic explanation. I show how the interventionist approach to causation, especially within a structural equations framework, provides a simple and elegant account of the causal structure (...) of mechanisms. This account explains the many useful insights of traditional accounts of mechanism, such as Carl Craver's account in his book Explaining the Brain , but also helps to correct the omissions of such accounts. One of these omissions is the failure to provide an explicit formulation of a modularity constraint that plays a significant role in mechanistic explanation. One virtue of the interventionist/structural equations framework is that it allows for a simple formulation of a modularity constraint on mechanistic explanation. I illustrate the role of this constraint in the last section of the paper, which describes the form that mechanistic explanation takes in the computational, information-processing paradigm of cognitive psychology. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to provide an integrated evolutionary and developmental account of the emergence of distinctively-human creative capacities. Our main thesis is that childhood pretend play is a uniquely human adaptation that functions in part to enhance adult forms of creativity. We review evidence that is consistent with such an account, and contrast our proposal favorably with a number of alternatives.

Version 3.0 12/02/00. Submitted to R.M. Nesse The Evolution of Subjective Commitment, Russell Sage Foundation. Please do not cite without author’s permission.  by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. Comments welcome! Word count 14,487.

Contemporary debates in epistemology devote much attention to the nature of knowledge, but neglect the question of its sources. This book focuses on the latter, especially on the question of innateness. Carruthers' aim is to transform and reinvigorate contemporary empiricism, while also providing an introduction to a range of issues in the theory of knowledge. He gives a lively presentation and assessment of the claims of classical empiricism, particularly its denial of substantive a priori knowledge and of innate knowledge. He (...) argues that we would be right to reject the substantive a priori but not innateness, and then presents a novel account of the main motivation behind empiricism, which leaves contemporary empiricists free to accept innate knowledge and concepts. Carruthers closes with a discussion of scepticism, arguing that acceptance of innate concepts may lead to a decisive resolution of the problem in favor of realism. (shrink)

In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom—what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers—spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes (...) readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific investigations, to illustrate its role in our lives. There are Australian aboriginals and bored Romans, Jeffrey Archer and caged cockatoos, Camus and the early Christians, Dürer and Degas. Toohey also explores the important role that boredom plays in popular and highbrow culture and how over the centuries it has proven to be a stimulus for art and literature. Toohey shows that boredom is a universal emotion experienced by humans throughout history and he explains its place, and value, in today's world. _Boredom: A Lively History _is vital reading for anyone interested in what goes on when supposedly nothing happens. (shrink)

How did our minds evolve? Can evolutionary considerations illuminate the question of the basic architecture of the human mind? These are two of the main questions addressed in Evolution and the Human Mind by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists and archaeologists. The essays focus especially on issues to do with modularity of mind, the evolution and significance of natural language, and the evolution of our capacity for meta-cognition, together with its implications for consciousness. The editors have provided (...) an introduction that lays out the background to the questions which the essays address, and a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in the evolution and nature of the mind. (shrink)

Kinship terminologies are basic cognitive semantic systems that all human societies use for organizing kin relations. Diversity in kinship systems and their categories is substantial, but constrained. Rácz, Passmore, and Jordan explore hypotheses about such constraints from learning theories and social pressures, testing the impact of a community‐size driven learning bottleneck against the social coordination demands of different kinds of marriage and resource systems.

This article challenges Block's ‘overflow argument’ for the conclusion that phenomenal consciousness and access-consciousness are distinct. It shows that the data can be explained just as well in terms of a distinction between contents that are made globally accessible through bottom–up sensory stimulation and those that are sustained and made available in working memory through top-down attention.

Al-Kindi was the first philosopher of the Islamic world. He lived in Iraq and studied in Baghdad, where he became attached to the caliphal court. In due course he would become an important figure at court: a tutor to the caliph's son, and a central figure in the translation movement of the ninth century, which rendered much of Greek philosophy, science, and medicine into Arabic. Al-Kindi's wide-ranging intellectual interests included not only philosophy but also music, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Through (...) deep engagement with Greek tradition al-Kindi developed original theories on key issues in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, physical science, and ethics. He is especially known for his arguments against the world's eternity, and his innovative use of Greek ideas to explore the idea of God's unity and transcendence. Despite al-Kindi's historical and philosophical importance no book has presented a complete, in-depth look at his thought until now. In this accessible introduction to al-Kindi's works, Peter Adamson surveys what is known of his life and examines his method and his attitude towards the Greek tradition, as well as his subtle relationship with the Muslim intellectual culture of his day. Above all the book focuses on explaining and evaluating the ideas found in al-Kindi's wide-ranging philosophical corpus, including works devoted to science and mathematics. Throughout, Adamson writes in language that is both serious and engaging, academic and approachable. This book will be of interest to experts in the field, but it requires no knowledge of Greek or Arabic, and is also aimed at non-experts who are simply interested in one of the greatest of Islamic philosophers. (shrink)

What is the place of language in human cognition? Do we sometimes think in natural language? Or is language for purposes of interpersonal communication only? Although these questions have been much debated in the past, they have almost dropped from sight in recent decades amongst those interested in the cognitive sciences. Language and Thought is intended to persuade such people to think again. It brings together essays by a distinguished interdisciplinary team of philosophers and psychologists, who discuss various ways in (...) which language may be implicated in human cognition. The editors have provided an introduction which lays out the basic terms and history of the debate, and a consolidated bibliography which will provide a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great interest to all researchers and students interested in language and its place in cognition. (shrink)

This volume brings historians of science and social historians together to consider the role of "little tools"--such as tables, reports, questionnaires, dossiers, index cards--in establishing academic and bureaucratic claims to authority and objectivity. From at least the eighteenth century onward, our science and society have been planned, surveyed, examined, and judged according to particular techniques of collecting and storing knowledge. Recently, the seemingly self-evident nature of these mundane epistemic and administrative tools, as well as the prose in which they are (...) cast, has demanded historical examination. The essays gathered here, arranged in chronological order by subject from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth century, involve close readings of primary texts and analyses of academic and bureaucratic practices as parts of material culture. The first few essays, on the early modern period, largely point to the existence of a "juridico-theological" framework for establishing authority. Later essays demonstrate the eclipse of the role of authority per se in the modern period and the emergence of the notion of "objectivity." Most of the essays here concern the German cultural space as among the best exemplars of the academic and bureaucratic practices described above. The introduction to the volume, however, is framed at a general level the closing essays also extend the analyses beyond Germany to broader considerations on authority and objectivity in historical practice. The volume will interest scholars of European history and German studies as well as historians of science. Peter Becker is Professor of Central European History, European University Institute. William Clark is Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University. (shrink)

This is the first of three volumes on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. This book along with the following two volumes provide assess of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. This book is concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: what capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections (...) are innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities, and which of them are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? The book includes an introduction giving some of the background to debates about innateness and introducing each of the subsequent chapters, as well as a consolidated bibliography. (shrink)

Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley's thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discovered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read 'as poetry'. A shift of emphasis from talking about 'meaning' in poetry to talking about 'content' is promoted, as is a more prominent role for 'experience' (...) in characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be 'interest-relative' such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the experience of a poem can be heightened. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard has recently defended a view he calls ‘epistemological disjunctivism’, largely inspired by John McDowell. I argue that Pritchard is right to associate the view with McDowell, and that McDowell’s ‘inference-blocking’ argument against the sceptic succeeds only if epistemological disjunctivism is accepted. However, Pritchard also recognises that epistemological disjunctivism appears to conflict with our belief that genuine and illusory experiences are indistinguishable (the ‘distinguishability problem’). Since the indistinguishability of experiences is the antecedent in the inference McDowell intends to block, (...) I suggest that his argument rests on an inconsistent set of premises. In support of this, I show that Pritchard’s response to the distinguishability problem is incompatible with the conclusion of the ‘inference-blocking’ argument, and that the response available in McDowell’s work relies on a mistaken conception of fallibility. Either McDowell must deny the sceptic’s premise that perceptual experiences are indistinguishable, or he must give up his conclusion that perceptual warrant can be indefeasible. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, few topics are so relevant to today's cultural and political landscape as philosophy in the Islamic world. Yet, this remains one of the lesser-known philosophical traditions. In this Very Short Introduction, Peter Adamson explores the history of philosophy among Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in Islamic lands, from its historical background to thinkers in the twentieth century.Introducing the main philosophical themes of the Islamic world, Adamson integrates ideas from the Islamic and Abrahamic faiths to (...) consider the broad philosophical questions that continue to invite debate: What is the relationship between reason and religious belief? What is the possibility of proving God's existence? What is the nature of knowledge? Drawing on the most recent research in the field, this book challenges the assumption of the cultural decline of philosophy and science in the Islamic world by demonstrating its rich heritage and overlap with other faiths and philosophies. (shrink)

In A Professor's Duties, distinguished philosopher Peter J. Markie adds to the expanding discussion of the ethics of college teaching. Part One concentrates on the obligations of individual professors, primarily with regard to issues about what and how to teach. Part Two expands Professor Markie's views by providing a selection of the most significant previously published writings on the ethics of college teaching.

How much inequality does market interaction generate? The answer to this question partly depends on the level of competition among economic agents. Yet, in their normative analysis of the market, theories of distributive justice focus on individual characteristics such as talents as determinants of income, and tend to ignore structural features such as competition. Economists, on the other hand, dispose of the conceptual tools to assess the distributive impact of competition, but their analysis is usually limited to allocative efficiency. Part (...) I of the article distinguishes my argument from conventional perspectives on income inequality and redistribution. Whereas the latter propose either to redistribute income once the market interaction has taken place or to adjust the initial holdings of market participants, I focus on the distributive impact of the institutional structure of the market itself. Part II outlines the ways in which various forms of competition affect distribution. My objective here is descriptive in nature, but shows that a normative evaluation of the market has to take seriously the distributive impact of competition. This impact can be broken down into the analysis of three overlapping groups of economic agents, namely consumers, workers, and capital owners. Consumers potentially gain from competition in the form of lower prices, but these gains are only realized if competition does not put pressure on their work income at the same time. Unless competition squeezes profits unusually hard, capital owners tend to benefit from competition. (shrink)

Duff offered an argument for the conclusion that just or legitimate punishment of socially deprived offenders in our unjust society is impossible. One of the claims in his argument is that our courts have the standing to blame an offender only if our polity has the right to do so since our courts are acting as the representatives of, or to use the exact phrases by Duff, “in the name of”, or “on behalf of”, the whole polity. In this paper (...) I will challenge that claim. I will argue that the courts can be seen as acting, not on behalf of the whole polity, but only on behalf of a subset of its citizens, namely, the just citizens (i.e. the citizens who cannot be seen to have wronged the deprived offenders). (shrink)

The Moral Interpretation of Religion provides a critical examination of the traditional attempt to interpret religion in moral terms alone.

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated with an (...) originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”. (shrink)

How might consciousness have evolved? Unfortunately for the prospects of providing a convincing answer to this question, there is no agreed account of what consciousness is. So any attempt at an answer will have to fragment along a number of different lines of enquiry. More fortunately, perhaps, there is general agreement that a number of distinct notions of consciousness need to be distinguished from one another; and there is also broad agreement as to which of these is particularly problematic - (...) namely phenomenal consciousness, or the kind of conscious mental state which it is like something to have, which has a distinctive subjective feel or phenomenology (henceforward referred to as p-consciousness). I shall survey the prospects for an evolutionary explanation of p-consciousness, on a variety of competing accounts of its nature. My goal is to use evolutionary considerations to adjudicate between some of those accounts. (shrink)