The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in September, 1959. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry, and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Roderick M. Chisholm, (...) Chairman, H. G. Alexander, Lewis Hahn, Paul C. Hayner, and Charles W. Hendel. (shrink)

This article discusses the process of empirical research on access to justice, explaining the procedure from data collection to analysis. Research into access to justice finds ways to render civil justice to citizens equitably. Reliable, non-anecdotal data is a prerequisite for useful empirical research into access to justice. Three international initiatives illustrate the reflection of access to justice in research projects. They are, the World Bank's Justice for the Poor Program, UNDP Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and the (...) Tilburg Microjustice Initiative. The most comprehensive empirical projects on access to justice are those sponsored at the national or sub-national level. Non-governmental drivers of broad-based data collection are other legal actors. This article discusses examples of data collection and evaluation in countries where research has generated data on civil justice. Finally, this article discusses barriers to access to justice, which cause exclusion. (shrink)

This paper argues that the approach to questions of authority, legitimacy, and personal identity characteristic of contemporary European law presents a paradox. The power of the legal project that emerged after the French Revolution lay in its deployment of the notion of abstract legal subjectivity to challenge claimed authority. Much is made of the public law dimensions of this revolutionary moment—the creation of political constitutions establishing national citizenship and human rights standards. But the transposition of abstract legal subjectivity into the (...) private law through national social constitutions like Civil Codes has been far less successful.legal subjectivity in public law regimes necessarily privileges some personal identities over others in its construction of citizenship. These privileged identities of public law citizenship limit how legal subjects can express their identities in the private law. The paper proposes an alternative, pluralist, theorization of the diverse, iterative character of everyday human interaction that gives content to the idea of legal subjectivity in the private law. It seeks to reconcile a public law of abstract, unitary citizenship with a private law of plural legal subjectivities in a manner that advances the project of democratic constitutionalism. (shrink)

The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.

Classical archaeology in the service of the state and national identity is not a new concept, although it is one that is seen less, or at least less blatantly, in modern Europe. This particular use of the classical past is still very much in use in the region of Macedonia, both the Greek province and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Nationalism uses archaeology and the imagery of the ancient world to claim legitimacy in the modern world. By claiming the (...) ancient past and projecting it into the present, nations can create a strong national identity. By tying the present day inhabitants of an area to a strong cultural past, the nation itself becomes more legitimate. Problems arise when two nations seek to claim the same past as in the case in the Greek province of Macedonia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This competition and issues surrounding the claim of ownership of a particular national past can be seen through the examples of the tumulus at Vergina and the differing traditions of the symposion in Macedonia and Athens. The projection of the past into the present can be seen in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia flag, in three pamphlets on the “Macedonian Question” from Greece, and in the recent rebuilding of Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s capital, Skopje. (shrink)

SUMMARYAs one of his first acts upon becoming Astronomer Royal in 1835, George Airy made moves to set up a new observatory at Greenwich to study the Earth’s magnetic field. This paper uses Airy’s correspondence to argue that, while members of the reform movement in British science were putting pressure on the Royal Observatory to branch out into geomagnetism and meteorology, Airy established the magnetic observatory on his own initiative, ahead of Alexander von Humboldt’s request for British participation in (...) the worldwide magnetic charting project that later became known as the ‘Magnetic Crusade’. That the Greenwich magnetic observatory did not become operational until 1839 was due to a series of incidental factors that provide a case study in the technical and political obstacles to be overcome in building a new government observatory. Airy attached less importance to meteorology than he did to geomagnetism. In 1840, he set up a full programme of meteorological observations at Greenwich – and thus turned his magnetic observatory into the ‘Magnetic and Meteorological department’ – only as the price of foiling an attempt by Edward Sabine and others in the London scientific elite to found a rival magnetic and meteorological observatory. Studying the origins of Airy’s Magnetic and Meteorological department highlights how important the context of other institutions and trends in science is to understanding the development of Britain’s national observatory. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that that the primary goal of statues honouring public figures is to create and shape a collective identity. The way that these statues further the goal of identity is not by holding up the subjects of the statues as admirable but rather by asserting that the subjects were in some way objectively important and central to some group surrounding the statue. I will look at the defences for keeping statues of and awards named after John (...) A. Macdonald and show that the primary concern is not with defending the character of Macdonald but rather that removing him is ‘erasing history’. These defences are not about defending Macdonald as a person but rather defending a conception of the Canadian identity that requires Macdonald play a central role. Against these defences of Macdonald, I show that the ‘objective history’ case for him and other such similar figures fails. In the particular case of Macdonald, it fails because he was actually not that important for Canadian history. In the general case of negative public figures, I provide a short defence of how group identities are not static and not unchangeably rooted in a single historically based articulation. (shrink)

This book examines Bertrand Russell’s complicated relationships to the women around him, and to feminism more generally. The essays in this volume offer scholarly reassessments of these relationships and their import for the history of feminism and of analytic philosophy. Russell is a founder of analytic philosophy. He has also been called a feminist due to his public, decades-long advocacy for women’s rights and equality of the sexes. But his private behavior towards wives and sexual partners, and his apparently dismissive (...) (occasionally public) responses to some women philosophers, raises the question of what sort of feminist (or chauvinist) Russell actually was. Focusing on women in Russell’s circle of acquaintance, including feminist activists and his philosophical interlocutors, this book casts new light on a timeless thinker’s feminism and the women who played critical roles in the making of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Nietzsche, the Godfather of Fascism? What can Nietzsche have in common with this murderous ideology? Frequently described as the "radical aristocrat" of the spirit, Nietzsche abhorred mass culture and strove to cultivate an Übermensch endowed with exceptional mental qualities. What can such a thinker have in common with the fascistic manipulation of the masses for chauvinistic goals that crushed the autonomy of the individual? The question that lies at the heart of this collection is how Nietzsche came to acquire the (...) deadly "honor" of being considered the philosopher of the Third Reich and whether such claims had any justification. Does it make any sense to hold him in some way responsible for the horrors of Auschwitz? The editors present a range of views that attempt to do justice to the ambiguity and richness of Nietzsche's thought. First-rate contributions by a variety of distinguished philosophers and historians explore in depth Nietzsche's attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, Christianity, anti-Semitism, and National Socialism. They interrogate Nietzsche's writings for fascist and anti-Semitic proclivities and consider how they were read by fascists who claimed Nietzsche as their intellectual godfather. There is much that is disturbingly antiegalitarian and antidemocratic in Nietzsche, and his writings on Jews are open to differing interpretations. Yet his emphasis on individualism and contempt for German nationalism and anti-Semitism put him at stark odds with Nazi ideology. The Nietzsche that emerges here is a tragic prophet of the spiritual vacuum that produced the twentieth century's totalitarian movements, the thinker who best diagnosed the pathologies of fin-de-siècle European culture. Nietzsche dared to look into the abyss of modern nihilism. This book tells us what he found. The contributors are Menahem Brinker, Daniel W. Conway, Stanley Corngold, Kurt Rudolf Fischer, Jacob Golomb, Robert C. Holub, Berel Lang, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Alexander Nehamas, David Ohana, Roderick Stackelberg, Mario Sznajder, Geoffrey Waite, Robert S. Wistrich, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. (shrink)

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and (...) desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

Argues that Nietzsche tried to create a specific literary character in his writings and discusses the paradoxes of his work.

The familiar Vendler-Kenny scheme of verb-types, viz., performances (further differentiated by Vedler into accomplishments and achievements), activities, and states, is too narrow in two important respects. First, it is narrow linguistically. It fails to take into account the phenomenon of verb aspect. The trichotomy is not one of verbs as lexical types but of predications. Second, the trichotomy is narrow ontologically. It is a specification in the context of human agency of the more fundamental, topic-neutral trichotomy, event-process-state.The central component in (...) this ontological trichotomy, event, can be sharply differentiated from its two flanking components by adapting a suggestion by Geoffrey N. Leech and others that the contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect in verbs corresponds to the count/mass distinction in the domain of nouns. With the help of two distinctions, of cardinal count adverbials versus frequency adverbials, and of occurrence versus associated occasion, two interrelated criteria for event predication are developed. Accordingly, Mary capsized the boat is an event predication because (a) it is equivalent to There was at least one capsizing of the boat by Mary, or (b) because it admits cardinal count adverbials, e.g., at least once, twice, three times. Ontologically speaking, events are defined as those occurrences that are inherently countable. (shrink)

The A to Z of Philosophy is a concise and accessible introduction to a fascinating subject. Ideal for the general reader or first-year student, this A to Z guide covers all the key terms, concepts and thinkers. The book offers more than 100 jargon-free entries on topics from Animal Ethics to Wittgenstein and includes witty anecdotes and handy tips on further reading. No prior knowledge of philosophy is required to enjoy this reader-friendly guide - this is the ideal reference tool (...) for anyone starting out in philosophy. (shrink)

The comment endorses and reinforces Daniel W. Graham’s highly original and attractive proposal that early Greek cosmology develops in two stages. In what Graham calls the “meteorological stage” of the sixth century BCE, celestial objects are explained as formations either from fire or from watery exhalations in a roughly planar model of the cosmos. In the “lithic stage” of the mid- and late fifth century introduced by Anaxagoras, the model is that of a central earth around which solid stone-like celestial (...) objects revolve held aloft in a vortex. The change to the lithic stage comes about, according to Graham, as the implications of Parmenides’ epoch-making discovery that the moon is illuminated by the sun come to be understood and are then theoretically exploited. The present comment also proposes that the false explanations of lunar phases and lunar and solar eclipses in the meteorological-stage cosmologies, respectively, of Xenophanes and of Heraclitus may have played a helpful heuristic role in the theoretical breakthrough to heliophotism. (shrink)

As indicated by Kahn's use of the pronoun "whatever," the thesis has the force of universality. Let me condense the formulation into a single proposition.

Alexander R. Pruss examines a large family of paradoxes to do with infinity - ranging from deterministic supertasks to infinite lotteries and decision theory. Having identified their common structure, Pruss considers at length how these paradoxes can be resolved by embracing causal finitism.

ABSTRACT The phrase “Enlightenment rhetoric” typically denotes discourses bent on rejecting classical oratorical styles in favor of purportedly scientific ones. Likewise, scholars often associate Enlightenment rhetorical styles with the scientific epistemologies that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconsiders Enlightenment rhetoric by analyzing David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Eloquence.” More specifically, the article argues that the Scottish Enlightenment context necessitated a rhetoric that compensated for the discursive limitations of new scientific worldviews. In so doing, the article argues (...) that Hume verbalizes the transcendent dimension of classical eloquence in ways commensurate with the emphasis on perspicuity emerging in English culture, a rhetorical maneuver that the author calls discursive transcendence. Hume’s “Of Eloquence” thus serves as a case study demonstrating how an Enlightenment writer advanced a rhetoric that both rejects and pulls from prior rhetorical traditions, constituting a new understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric. (shrink)

As more and more instances of corporate hypocrisy become public, consumers have developed an inherent general skepticism towards firms’ corporate social responsibility claims. As CSR skepticism bears heavily on consumers’ attitudes and behavior, this paper draws from Construal Level Theory to identify how it can be pre-emptively abated. We posit that this general skepticism towards CSR leads people to adopt a low-level construal mindset when processing CSR information. Across four studies, we show that matching this low-level mindset with concrete CSR (...) messaging works to effectively mitigate the negative effects of inherent CSR skepticism on consumers’ attitudes, purchase intentions, and word of mouth. The resulting construal-mindset congruency strengthens the favorability of consumer responses through increased positive elaboration and perceptions of CSR message credibility. Furthermore, this congruency effect is shown to persist over time in skeptical domains but to dissipate in less skeptical domains. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo explicitar a noção de consciência em Sartre, explorando o modo como se dá a relação entre ontologia e fenomenologia na filosofia de Sartre.

There has been much first-rate work done in recent years both by way of criticizing Humean assumptions and explicating alter native concepts of causal explanation and non-logical necessity. Roderick Chisholm early showed the inadequacies of neo-Humean views of explanation in his articles on counterfactual inference, and C. J. Ducasse, Sterling Lamprecht, William Kneale, Nicholas Maxwell, Richard Taylor, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. T. Geach, Milton Fisk, Baruch Brody, Peter Alexander, R. Harré, and William Wallace, among others, have articulated (...) interesting alternative views to the Humean ones they have so trenchantly criticized. We will be concerned with the recent work of Harré and Wallace in this study. Harré has not only launched a fresh attack but has also presented what is probably the most fully developed neorealistic [[sic]] alternative. Wallace’s work is basically historical but has an intentional systematic import also. The books of the two authors are mutually supportive. (shrink)

Nietzsche often gives the impression that all human beliefs are false. Some scholars, like Maudemarie Clark, believe that such a “falsification thesis” is unacceptable and try to limit Nietzsche's commitment to it, claiming that he abandons it in his very last works. Others, like Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain, take it in ways that make it true and locate it in all. I argue that the view that is common to both approaches—that Nietzsche held that thesis in the first place—is (...) unjustified. To that end, I interpret the texts where these scholars claim to find the thesis in a way that shows that they do not commit Nietzsche to it, and I offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more fruitful way of interpreting his views on the importance of truth—and falsehood—and their function in the economy of human life. (shrink)