In launching modern economics, Adam Smith paved the way for laissez-faire capitalism, Marxism, and contemporary social science. This book scrutinizes Smith's disparagement of politics and religion to illuminate the subtlety of his rhetoric, the depth of his thought, and the ultimate shortcomings of his project. The author analyzes Smith's ideas on government, justice, human psychology, and international relations, stressing Smith's efforts to elevate wealth at the expense of citizenship and to replace normative political philosophy with historical theorizing and empirical modeling (...) that emphasize economic causes. The book also provides the most comprehensive interpretation available of Smith's views on religion, examining the discrepancies between The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The concluding chapter appraises the demise of communism in light of the Marxian emancipation of economics from politics and religion. (shrink)

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

Cultural commentator and journalist Peter York sets out to uncover the truth behind authenticity, the ultimate con of our generation.

In 1963 at the University of Cambridge, Peter Eisenman -- world famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) and respected and feared by his colleagues for his intellectual acuity and quick-wittedness -- wrote a dissertation on the formal basis of modern architecture. This striking document, with its idiosyncratic photographs, fully deserves to be published here, for the first time, in a faithful reproduction of the original. In an afterword, Peter Eisenman discusses this remarkable starting point of his (...) practical and theoretical work. (shrink)

Truths about non-existent things Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9583-8 Authors Peter Forrest, Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

The Bibliographic Bases of Hume's Understanding of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism PETER S. FOSL N~q~e ~vaoo 6t~ttoxe~v' Epicharmus OVER THE PAST FORTY YEARS, the work of many scholars has served to advance and secure a hermeneutical approach to the development of modern philoso- phy first articulated by Richard H. Popkin3 The central proposition upon which this approach turns is that the discovery and application of ancient I am grateful to Richard Popkin, Julia Annas , Jonathan Barnes , Craig Walton (...) , Tom L. Beauchamp , and a number of anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. LOn the back of one of the sheets of his memoranda Hume wrote this remark. It may be translated as: "Keep sober and remember to be skeptical"; Ernest Campbell Mossner, "Hume's Early Memoranda, 1729-4o: The Complete Text," Journal of the Histo U of Ideas 9.4 : 5o3n.17 9 Richard H. Popkin, "David Hume: His Pyrrhonism and His Critique of Pyrrhonism," The Philosophical Quarterly 1. 5 : 385-4o7; "The Sceptical Crisis and the Rise of Modern Philosophy," Parts I, II, and III, Review of Metaphysics 8 : 131-51, 3o7-33, 499-51o; The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza ; "Scepticism and the Counter-Reformation in France," Archiv ffir.. (shrink)

Sep 17 Time travel in Special Relativity (1) Nahin 1999: 439-51 & 459-66; (2) Taylor & Wheeler 1992: 121-35; (3) Nahin 1999: 343-8. Sep 24 Time travel in General Relativity (1) Malament 1985: 91-5; (2) Thorne 1994: 483-90 & 498-521; (3) Gott 2001: 92-110. Oct 1 Time travel in Quantum Mechanics (1) Albert 1992: 17-38, 73-9, & 112-5; (2) Barrett 1999: 149-62; (3) Deutsch & Lockwood 1994.

This volume engages in conversation with the thinking and work of Max Charlesworth as well as the many questions, tasks and challenges in academic and public life that he posed. It addresses philosophical, religious and cultural issues, ranging from bioethics to Australian Songlines, and from consultation in a liberal society to intentionality. The volume honours Max Charlesworth, a renowned and celebrated Australian public intellectual, who founded the journal Sophia, and trained a number of the present heirs to both Sophia and (...) academic disciplines as they were further developed and enhanced in Australia: Indigenous Australian studies, philosophy of religion, the study of the tension between tradition and modernity, phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of science that is responsive to environmental issues. (shrink)

The puzzle of how altruism can evolve has been at the center of recent debates over Hamilton’s Rule, inclusive fitness, and kin-selection. In this paper, I use recent debates over altruism and Hamilton’s legacy as an example to illustrate a more general problem in evolutionary theory that has philosophical significance; I attempt to explain this significance and to draw a variety of conclusions about it. The problem is that specific behaviours and general concepts of organism agency and intentionality are defined (...) in terms of concepts of evolutionary “costs” and “benefits,” and these terms have determined the role that agency should play in evolutionary explanation. However, costs, benefits, and agency are not only or even best conceived through evolutionary effects in a biological context. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I explain how the issue of agency relates to the evolutionary puzzle of altruism. Next, I discuss how questions about agency have figured in recent debates over Hamilton’s legacy. In the final section, I argue that Denis Walsh’s “situated Darwinism,” which attempts to return the organism to central status in biological explanation, offers a more productive route for thinking about different forms of costs, benefits, and agency. Finally, I argue that the upshot of all this is that there may be many different, and equally valid, ways to express what organisms are doing and how they are behaving based on different currencies of cost and benefit—even if these may stand in some tension. I illustrate this through returning to the case of altruism and using examples to show that even in non-humans there can be many forms of altruism, even if they are not all biological altruism as defined in the conventional evolutionary terms. (shrink)

This title is written to match GCSE Religious Studies AQA B, option 2 and can be used as part of a full course or short course. It contains summaries and practise exam questions at the end of each section to help prepare for exams.

As part of his defence of panpsychism, Strawson introduces the notion of 'brute' emergence, and hints at a contrasting notion of 'true' emergence. Panpsychism is true not least because brute emergence is incoherent. The alternative relation of true emergence is coherent and congruent with panpsychism. Strawson's distinction suggests that panpsychists endorse true emergence, while emergentists endorse brute emergence. I show that this yields a false dichotomy, which wrongly associates traditional emergentism with an implausible notion of emergence. I clarify the nature (...) and purpose of true and brute emergence, and I argue that traditional emergentists should reject both of them. (shrink)

In this brief commentary, I would like to discuss two reservations I have about the article by Bergner and Bunford. Before doing so let me make some preliminary remarks.Their hypothesis that the concept of disability unites the various mental disorder constructs that have been proposed over the centuries and across cultures is reasonable and accords well with common sense. The concept of disability does a lot of good work in helping us to understand mental disorders.With respect to the authors’ contrast (...) between the disability conception versus the behavioral conception of mental disorder, the notion that counting behaviors alone justifies diagnosing a psychiatric disorder is worth critiquing. Claiming that everyone... (shrink)

It is important for a field to occasionally take stock of where it is, which Annemarie Köhne has done with her exploration of different frames of thought on psychopathology currently in play. As an advocate for thinking of psychiatric constructs as practical kinds that are often calibrated to serve different, even competing purposes, I am in agreement with her concerns about relying on a one-size-fits-all model. Between her and I there are slight differences of emphasis with respect to essentialism and (...) the role and scope of symptom-based descriptive psychopathology. In what follows I explicate these differences.Köhne competently elucidates how a categorical, disease-based model of disorder... (shrink)

The present paper is concerned with a ramified type theory (cf. (Lorenzen 1955), (Russell), (Schütte), (Weyl), e.g.,) in a cumulative version. §0 deals with reasoning in first order languages. is introduced as a first order set.

Conditions for description are general rules to which language must conform if it is to serve descriptive purposes. It is argued that the existence of such rules renders scepticism about them incoherent. The only way we can decide whether or not there are such conditions is by seeing in practice whether or not there are certain rules such that we cannot in fact break them without making language unfit for describing. The case is similar to that of, e.g., the law (...) of contradiction, which is itself a condition for description. If we find other conditions, the sceptic, like anyone else, will have to accept that he is bound by them no less than he is bound by the law of contradiction. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the argument about Achilles and the tortoise was intended to prove that the concept of movement was contradictory or ambiguous and therefore that it did not belong in the foundations of ontology. It is suggested here that the argument stands unless we are prepared to define a standard time by means of dynamical concepts. It would be a premature assumption, however, to suppose that Zeno himself should have been so prepared.

In Michael Dummett’s manifestability challenge to truth conditional semantics, it is argued that the meaning of sentence cannot be its truth conditions, for then a speaker’s knowledge of the meaning would not in all cases be manifestable. In those cases, the speaker would not know how to find out whether the truth conditions are satisfied or not. By contrast, knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence would pass the manifestability test, since a speaker is supposed always to (...) be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence. There is a problem for the positive part, however, for there is no guarantee that a compositional proof-theoretic semantics in all cases provides knowledge sufficient for recognizing any proof of a provable sentence for which the meaning is given. In those cases, the speaker need not know how to find out whether a given object is a proof of the sentence. Hence, if knowledge of meaning is required to be manifestable, there is no guarantee in general is compositionally specifiable. (shrink)