This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

This paper argues for two theses: that degrees of belief are context sensitive; that outright belief is belief to degree 1. The latter thesis is rejected quickly in most discussions of the relationship between credence and belief, but the former thesis undermines the usual reasons for doing so. Furthermore, identifying belief with credence 1 allows nice solutions to a number of problems for the most widely-held view of the relationship between credence and belief, the threshold view. I provide a sketch (...) of a formal framework on which both theses are true. This is a modified Bayesian framework; I argue that despite making credences context-sensitive, the framework lets Bayesians hold on to their signature explanatory successes. The sort of context-sensitivity claimed for credences here mirrors the sort of context-sensitivity I have elsewhere claimed for outright belief: one's credences depend, in part, on the space of alternative possibilities one takes seriously in a context. (shrink)

What is music, what is its value, and what does it mean? In this stimulating volume, Roger Scruton offers a comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy. The study begins with the metaphysics of sound. Scruton distinguishes sound from tone; analyzes rhythm, melody, and harmony; and explores the various dimensions of musical organization and musical meaning. Taking on various fashionable theories in the philosophy and theory of music, he presents a compelling (...) case for the moral significance of music, its place in our culture, and the need for taste and discrimination in performing and listening to it. Laying down principles for musical analysis and criticism, this bold work concludes with a theory of culture--and a devastating demolition of modern popular music. "A provocative new study."--The Guardian. (shrink)

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

This paper argues for a treatment of belief as essentially sensitive to certain features of context. The first part gives an argument that we must take belief to be context-sensitive in the same way that assertion is, if we are to preserve appealing principles tying belief to sincere assertion. In particular, whether an agent counts as believing that p in a context depends on the space of alternative possibilities the agent is considering in that context. One and the same doxastic (...) state may amount to belief that p in one context but not another. The second part of the paper gives a formal treatment of doxastic states, according to which belief is context-sensitive along just these lines. The model is applied to characterize (but not to refute) skeptical arguments. (shrink)

In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the (...) neg-raising and weak upper bounds tests, as I call them – which they claim believe and think pass. But I identify several other expressions in ordinary English for attributing belief, all of which fail both tests. Therefore, even if HRS are correct that believe and think refer to a weak attitude, it does not follow that the ordinary concept of belief is weak. I conclude by raising some problems for the accounts of belief as guessing, building on HRS's arguments, due to Kevin Dorst, Matt Mandelkern, and Ben Holguín. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis consists in the development and application of an ideal utilitarian moral theory. ;In chapter one, classical Mental State and modern Desire theories of prudential value are rejected. In chapter two, perfectionism is rejected and an alternative ideal utilitarian Objective List theory is set out. In chapter three, it is argued that prudential rationality requires maximization and temporal neutrality. The aggregation and incommensurability of values is discussed. In (...) chapter four, it is argued that value alone gives rise to grounding reasons for action; the only values are prudential values; we are required to be personally as well as temporally neutral; moral rationality is maximizing. A problem arising when a certain form of incommensurability is combined with the notion of maximizing expected utility is examined. In chapter five, an intrapersonally indirect form of moral theory is defended. ;In the second, practical part of the thesis, the theory developed in the first part is applied to two moral problems: vegetarianism and future generations. In chapter six, the conclusion is that utilitarianism requires us to eat non-intensively-reared meat and to abstain from intensively reared meat. In chapter seven, population problems arising from Derek Parfit's work are considered in the light of the theory. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

Uses a comparative hermeneutical method to explain the most important terms in the classical Confucian philosophical texts, in an effort to allow the tradition to speak on its own terms.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In The Politics of Jurisprudence, Roger Cotterrell offers a concise introduction to and commentary ...

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.

Henry Rosemont, Jr., in his Against Individualism has mounted a compelling argument that foundational individualism in its various iterations has become a malevolent ideology implicated in and aggravating many of the pressing problems of our time. The overall thrust of his thesis can be stated rather simply. The industrial democracies and most of the rest of the world are dominated by a corporate capitalism the interests of which are served largely by a procedural justice grounded in a foundational individualism that (...) compounds the benefits of a few and marginalizes the possibility of realizing a distributive justice for the many. Hence, the more that academic and political forces are successful in defending... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:First Order Relationality and Its Implications:A Response to David ElsteinRoger T. Ames (bio)David Elstein has asked a series of important questions about Human Becomings that provide me with an opportunity to try to bring the argument of the book into clearer focus. Let me begin by thanking David for his always generous and intelligent reflection on not only my new monograph [End Page 181] but also on Henry Rosemont's (...) and my best efforts to expand upon the idea of "role ethics" as a productive way to read Confucian ethics.David asks: Is relationality truly a part of original Confucian thought? Does relationality rule out any notion of essential human nature, and does it necessarily imply or entail role ethics? Is relationality true or merely a useful way of thinking (if these can be distinguished)? Do we know that it's useful?I think the answer to these questions turns on two very different ways of understanding relationality, namely the doctrines of first and second order relationality. The term 'ontology' as "the science of being per se or in itself" gives us a doctrine of external, second order relations. Ontology was introduced into our philosophical vocabulary as a new term for an old way of thinking at the beginning of the seventeenth century by two German philosophers.1 For the classical Greeks, "the science of being per se" (to on he on) was posited as their "first philosophy" with all of its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and so on. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that seeks to classify and explain the things that exist, with its underlying assumption that there are unchanging substances or essences internal to things that are available to us to classify them as this and not that. Ontology privileges "being per se" with its categorical language and its "substance" and "attribute" dualism, giving us a grammar of substances as property-bearers and properties that are borne, respectively.Such ontological thinking animates Plato's pursuit of formal, "real" definitions in his quest for certainty (that is, definitions not of words but of what really is), and underlies Aristotle's taxonomical science of knowing "what is what." For these classical Greek philosophers, only what is real and is thus true can be the proper object of knowledge, giving us a logic of the changeless. Corollary to ontology is causal thinking, formal definitions, and, important for David's question, a doctrine of external, second order relationality in which relations conjoin discrete and self-sufficient things, such as human "beings." As the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 avers, this kind of substance ontology defining the real things that constitute the content of an orderly and structured cosmosprovides a "dictionary" kind of explanation of the world, seeking to set up an accurate understanding of the limits of all things. In simple terms, it determines "what is what," and all concepts are footnotes to "being" or "is."2In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary making explicit cosmological assumptions that stand in stark contrast to this substance ontology and that brings with it a doctrine of first order, constitutive relations. This alternative "first philosophy" has prompted me to create the neologism "zoetology," with the Greek zoe- "life" and -logia "discourse," as my own new term for an old way of thinking that we might translate into modern Chinese as shengshenglun 生生論: "the art of living." The starting point in this zoetological cosmology, then, is that nothing does anything by [End Page 182] itself; association is a fact. Since the very nature of life is associative and transactional, the vocabulary appealed to in defining Confucian cosmology is irreducibly dyadic and collateral: always multiple, never one.And further, it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth, where such growth has a persistent existential and thus intentional aspect. "Life" is the productive correlation between organism and environment that gives rise to correlative, relational, ecological thinking that many of our best sinologists (Marcel Granet, David Keightley, Tang Junyi, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and many others) would ascribe to the earliest semblances of Chinese... (shrink)

‘To translate’ means quite literally ‘to carry across, to bring across,’ that is, ‘to remove from one place to another.’ The questions I want to address in this essay are: To what extent have we been successful in, first, understanding the Chinese philosophical narrative and, then, in ‘carrying it across’ into the western academy? To what extent have we been able to grow and ‘appreciate’ our own philosophical parameters by engaging with this antique tradition? The self-conscious strategy of translation, then, (...) must be to go beyond word-for-word translation and attempt to enable students of Chinese philosophy to read the seminal texts by providing them with a means of developing their own sophisticated understanding of a set of critical Chinese philosophical terms. The premise is that there is no real alternative but to cultivate a nuanced familiarity with the key Chinese vocabulary itself. It is in this effort to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms, then, that we must begin from the interpretive context by taking into account the tradition’s own indigenous presuppositions and its own evolving self-understanding. We must be aware of the ambient, persistent assumptions that have given the Chinese philosophical narrative its unique identity over time. (shrink)

This special issue of Philosophy East and West is dedicated to the inaugural meeting of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures, convened at the University of Hawai‘i and the East-West Center, October 8-12, 2014, on the theme “Confucian Values in a Changing World Cultural Order,” to explore the contributions of Confucian thought to world culture. The conference brought together leading scholars from partner institutions around the world to explore critically the meaning and value of Confucian culture in the (...) twenty-first century. The purpose of this initial meeting was to address the questions “What is the contemporary form of ‘Confucian’ culture?” “What are its historical failings and limitations?”... (shrink)

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than (...) science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te. (shrink)

Key ideas in the work of Michel Foucault are explored and applied to the organized pursuit of knowledge in higher education. His association of power and knowledge accounts for deeply rooted practices in higher education that would need to be mediated or overcome for there to be a revolution in inquiry to occur, such as the one advanced by Nicholas Maxwell. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and bio-power, and how they act to manage the behavior of free citizens, are described. (...) These concepts are then applied to free inquiry, to show how the activity of individual inquirers is managed and how critical inquiry is controlled. The management of inquiry involving four norms, two of them intrinsic to inquiry and the other two extrinsic, is explained. The potential of Foucault’s concept of discursive formations is introduced as a means of reconceiving inquiry to overcome these impediments to a revolution in inquiry. (shrink)

The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh which had flourished for a few years after 1738 was as good as dead in 1748. Lord Morton, its President, now lived most of the time in London whence he wrote to Sir John Clerk in 1747 that he regarded the Society as ‘annihilated’, apparently thinking that the death of Colin MacLaurin in 1746 and the temporary retirement to the countryside of its other Secretary, Andrew Plummer, had put an end to it. Sir John had (...) hoped to revive it through association with the Royal Society of London, but Morton did not encourage him in this scheme, about which he had ‘great doubts’. The Society needed a mathematician and an experimenter who could carry on the consulting work which MacLaurin had done, but Morton glumly wondered if ‘the new professor of Mathematics [Matthew Stewart] will be as zealous as MacLaurin had been.’ The Society's other officers, Dr John Clerk and Alexander Lind, are not known to have tried to revive the Society. Perhaps they were discouraged by the fact that ten of the members of the Society were dead, and that six more had left the kingdom. At least three others were likely to have been habitually absent from meetings because they lived some distance from Edinburgh. Of the remaining forty-five known members in 1748, nine were over sixty-one years of age with four being between seventy-one and seventy-six. In 1737 the average age of thirty-eight of the founders had been 46.0, but by 1748 it had risen to 53.9 for the thirty-three men for whom it can be calculated. Disruption, death, and age had diminished enthusiasm for the Society and jeopardized its survival. Only two meetings are known to have been held in 1746. Sir John's letter to Morton about affiliation with the Royal Society is the only clear sign of life in 1747. We may well ask why this floundering body survived, to whom and to what it owed its revival? The answers to these questions tell us something about the intellectual needs and interests of the Edinburgh intelligentsia of the mid-eighteenth century. (shrink)

Roger A. Shiner; VII*—Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 103–124, ht.

In this lucid and engaging introductory volume on the nature of society, Roger Trigg examines the scientific basis of social science and shows that philosophical presuppositions are a necessary starting point for the study of society.

Title: Michel Foucault Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 0312531664 Author: Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain Title: Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801415721 Author: Karlis Racevskis.

Tomando en cuenta las críticas más importantes a la teoría de los individuostransmundanos, así como algunos argumentos en relación con el esencialismo deorigen, este artículo trata el problema de la identidad de aquellos individuos a travésde mundos posibles. Proponemos la noción de mundo admisible como un tipo especial de modelo en Lógica Intensional, que, dentro de otro modelo, permite el mapeo de la historia e identidad de los individuos en diferentes mundos posibles. Esta propuesta sugiere una solución plausible para determinar (...) propiedades esenciales empíricamente relevantes ostentadas por los individuos transmundanos, un método eficaz para evaluar su identidad y, finalmente, una nueva perspectiva desde la cual reexaminar el clásico debate entre realismo y antirrealismo en la Filosofía del Lenguaje. Considering the most important criticisms to the theory of transworld individuals aswell as some problems related to origin essentialism, this article addresses the issue of the identity of those individuals across possible worlds. We propose the notion of admissible world as a special type of model in Intensional Logic, which, within another model, allows mapping the history and identity of individuals in different possible worlds. This view suggests a plausible solution for determining the empirically relevant essential properties of transworld individuals, a useful method to assess their identity, and, finally, a new way of reexamining the classical debate between realism and anti-realism in the Philosophy of Language. (shrink)