Mental causes are threatened from two directions: from below, since they would appear to be screened off by lower-order, e.g., neural states; and from within, since they would also appear to be screened off by intrinsic, e.g., syntactical states. A principle needed to parry the first threat -causes should be proportional to their effects- appears to leave us open to the second; for why should unneeded extrinsic detail be any less offensive to proportionality than excess microstructure? I say that the (...) second threat relies on a perversion of proportionality that would lay waste to all causal relations. (shrink)

Postmodernism has evoked great controversy and it continues to do so today, as it disseminates into general discourse. Some see its principles, such as its fundamental resistance to metanarratives, as frighteningly disruptive, while a growing number are reaping the benefits of its innovative perspective. In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in postmodern (...) perspectives. Using this as a guide, White explores the work of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas, as well as 'difference' feminists, with the goal of showing how postmodernism can inform contemporary ethical-political reflection. In his concluding chapter, White examines how this revisioned postmodern perspective might bear on our thinking about justice. (shrink)

Historical introduction -- Human being -- Identity and human incompletion in Sartre -- Identity and human incompletion in Aquinas -- Human understanding -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Sartre -- The subjective nature of objective understanding in Aquinas -- Human freedom -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Sartre -- Freedom, choice, and the indetermination of reason in Aquinas -- Human fulfillment -- The possibility of human happiness in Sartre -- The possibility of human happiness in (...) Aquinas. (shrink)

[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological commitments, we have to ferret out all traces (...) of nonliterality in our assertions; if there is no sensible project of doing that, there is no sensible project of Quinean ontology. /// [Andre Gallois] I discuss Steve Yablo's defence of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. In the first section I set out what I take that distinction, as Carnap draws it, to be, and spell out a central motivation Carnap has for invoking it. In the second section I endorse, and augment, Yablo's response to Quine's arguments against Carnap. In the third section I say why Carnap's application of the distinction between internal and external questions runs into trouble. In the fourth section I spell out what I take to be Yablo's version of Carnap. In the last I say why that version is especially vulnerable to the objection raised in the second. (shrink)

This scholarly synthesis of biblical studies and Christian social ethics is designed to provide a biblical argument for intentional institutional change on behalf of social justice. Stephen Charles Mott provides a biblical and ethical guide on ways to implement that change. The first part of the book, providing the biblical theology of intentional social change, deals with the central concepts in biblical and theological ethics: grace, evil, love, justice, and the Reign of God. Christian social change must be rooted (...) not only in justice, but in the grace received through the death and resurrection of Christ. The second part evaluates ethical and theological methods for carrying out that intentional social change. It offers a study of evangelism, counter community, civil disobedience, armed revolution, and political reform. It shows the contribution of each as well as the strong limitations of each used in isolation. A recurring theme of the book is the scriptural insistence on the priority of justice as taking upon oneself the cause of the oppressed. Justice is understood on bringing back into the community those who are near to falling out of it. Political authority has a vital role in social change for justice. It is essential that a Christian use all available and legitimate means of meeting basic needs by providing for all what is essential for inclusion in society. In this revised edition, Mott updates the contemporary illustrations and includes his own further reflections in the last thirty years on this topic. (shrink)

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing frameworks in media ethics in (...) light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)

Despite holding that all concepts are strictly speaking innate, Leibniz attempts to accommodate the common belief that at least some concepts are adventitious by appealing to his theory of ideal action. The essential idea is that an innate concept can be considered adventitious, in a sense, just in case its ideal cause is to be found outside the mind of the one who possesses the concept. I explore this attempt at accommodation and argue that it fails. [See external link for (...) English draft.]. (shrink)

I examine the (mediated) correspondence between Spinoza and Robert Boyle concerning the latter’s account of fluidity and his experiments on reconstitution of niter in the light of the epistemology and doctrine of method contained in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. I argue that both the Treatise and the correspondence reveal that for Spinoza, the proper method of science is not experimental, and that he accepted a powerful under-determination thesis. I argue that, in contrast to modern versions, Spinoza’s (...) form of naturalism was a highly rationalist and anti-empirical one. I conclude with a brief account of the value of experience and experimentation for Spinoza’s scientific method. (shrink)

Substantial efforts have recently been made to reform the physician-patient relationship, particularly toward replacing the `silent world of doctor and patient' with informed patient participation in medical decision-making. This 'new ethos of patient autonomy' has especially insisted on the routine provision of informed consent for all medical interventions. Stronly supported by most bioethicists and the law, as well as more popular writings and expectations, it still seems clear that informed consent has, at best, been received in a lukewarm fashion by (...) most clinicians, many simply rejecting what they commonly refer to as the `myth of informed consent'. The purpose of this book is to defuse this seemingly intractable controversy by offering an efficient and effective operational model of informed consent. This goal is pursued first by reviewing and evaluating, in detail, the agendas, arguments, and supporting materials of its proponents and detractors. A comprehensive review of empirical studies of informed consent is provided, as well as a detailed reflection on the common clinician experience with attempts at informed consent and the exercise of autonomy by patients. In the end, informed consent is recast as a management tool for pursuing clinically and ethically important goods and values that any clinician should see as meriting pursuit. Concurrently, the model incorporates a flexible, anticipatory approach that recognizes that no static, generic ritual can legitimately pursue the quite variable goods and values that may be at stake with different patients in different situations. Finally, efficiency of provision is addressed by not pursuing the unattainable and ancillary. Throughout, the traditional principle of beneficence is appealed to toward articulating an operational model of informed consent as an intervention that is likely to change outcomes at the bedside for the better. (shrink)

Kant is often regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern liberal democracy. His political theory reaches its climax in the ground-breaking work, Perpetual Peace (1795), which sets out the basic framework for a world federation of states united by a system of international law. What is less well known is that two years earlier, in his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793/1794), Kant had postulated a very different, explicitly religious path to the politics of peace: he (...) presents the idea of an “ethical community” as a necessary requirement for humanity to become “satisfactory to God”. While many recent scholars have noted the importance of Kant’s concept of the ethical community, few recognize the force of his argument that such a community is possible only if it takes the form of a church; as a result, the precise status of his proposal remains unclear and under-appreciated. He argues in Division One, Section IV, of Religion’s Third Piece that the idea of this community can become a reality only through a “church” that is characterized by four rational requirements: unity, integrity, freedom, and the changeability of all church rules except these four unchangeable marks. Prior to Section IV, Division One portrays this ethical community as having a political form, yet an essentially nonpolitical matter. He compares it with Jewish theocracy, but observes that the latter failed to be an ethical commonwealth because it was explicitly political. Whereas traditional theocracy replaces the political state of nature (which conforms to the law, “might makes right”) with an ethical state of nature (which conforms to the law that I call, “should makes good”), or attempts to synthesize them, non-coercive theocracy transcends this distinction through a new perspective: it unites humanity in a common vision of a divine legislator whose only law is inward, binding church members together like families, through the law of love. Whereas the legal rights supported by democracy and a system of international law can go a long way to prepare for world peace, Kant’s conviction is that it will be ultimately impossible without support from healthy religion. (shrink)

This book develops a theory of how the imagination functions, and how it evolved. The imagination is characterized as an embodied cognitive system. The system draws upon sensory-motor, visual, and linguistic capacities, but it is a flexible, developmental ability, typified by creative improvisation. The imagination is a voluntary simulation system that draws on perceptual, emotional, and conceptual elements, for the purpose of creating works that adaptively investigate external (environmental) and internal (psychological) resources. Beyond the adaptive useful values of this system, (...) imagination also possesses significant intrinsic value (e.g., in the joy of play, and states of wonder). The book argues that imagination is not a late arrival in the evolution of mind, but one of the earliest human abilities. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our (...) present and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all.... His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books. (shrink)

Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. -/- Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways (...) of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford puts forward a new theory of dispositions, showing how central their role is in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Much of our understanding of the physical and psychological world is expressed in terms of dispositional properties--from the solubility of sugar to the belief that zebras have stripes. Mumford discusses what it means to say that something has a property of this kind, and how dispositions can possibly be real things in the world. His clear, straightforward, realist account (...) reveals them to be less mysterious than they seem, and shows that an understanding of dispositions is essential to an understanding of properties, causation, and scientific laws. (shrink)

Originally published in 1970. Two major changes have characterised science in the twentieth century. Firstly, there has been its rapid growth. Secondly, and central to the theme his book – science is no longer mainly an academic activity carried on in universities. Industry will soon be the largest employer of scientists. This book deals with issues of bureaucracy in science threatening its creativity and the failure of industry to recruit the best graduates, as well as what attracts people to study (...) science. (shrink)

In this work, which has survived only in manuscript form and in Italian, Gardiner analyses the great dynastic changes in England's past in order to provide Phillip II with a guide to ruling England and establishing a Catholic dynasty. Gardiner's work is perhaps the clearest example of an attempt to relate Machiavelli's political theories to practical political problems.

The article presents a figurational sociological perspective on the recent history of the discipline of economics in the wake of the global financial crisis or ‘Great Recession’ that began in 2007–8. It is argued that the orthodox mainstream of economics has provided ideological cover for abstract individualism, for short-term greed, and for the denial of the wider social responsibilities of business and finance. The faith in ‘free markets’ has been associated with a blindness to power relationships and an indifference to (...) economic inequality. Orthodox economics is congruent with the mythical American Dream. The article draws upon the writings of Norbert Elias to reflect upon economics, and then in turn uses those reflections to raise some questions about Elias’s theories, particularly his ideas concerning functional democratization and increasing pressures towards more habitual foresight. (shrink)

It weighs in at a bit more than five pounds; its dimensions demand a cradle. Yet this book is a handsome and welcome achievement despite its bulk. Its reproduction of the 1922 text, its maps and photos of 1904 Dublin; its list of minor characters in Ulysses; its bibliography of scholarship, both old and new; its timeline of Joyce's life, and its exemplary detailed annotations of the text: everything, harvested from the best sources, has been brought together to create the (...) largest volume dedicated to Joyce scholarship ever produced—a book that celebrates the first printing of Joyce's masterpiece. Given its weight and size, its classroom utility is likely limited; given its monumentality, it is a proper hundred-year tribute.What is wholly original about the book's contents are the essays that preface each of the eighteen episodes of the masterpiece. That Joycean scholarship grows upon itself is amply demonstrated by the sophistication and weight of learning the eighteen writers can now display. Almost fifty years have passed since Clive Hart and David Hayman edited a volume with a similar aim. Each of the new essays reveals just how much more there is now to know and say about Ulysses, how much more there is to praise in how Joyce conceived the book, how much more there is to teach, and how unlikely it is that Joycean scholarship will ever be diminished in either its curiosity or its energy. Given the increasing complexity and density of such accumulated knowledge, it is a pleasure to witness the economy and precision shown by so many of the writers. In particular, Robert Spoo's writing about “Nestor,” Maud Ellmann's writing about “Lotus Eaters,” and Vicki Mahaffey's writing about “Nausicaa” demonstrate how concision can make for valuable illumination.But there is a problem with where these essays are positioned. Coming before each of the episodes they introduce, they might condition the mind of a reader new to Ulysses to look upon those episodes as no more than demonstrations of what the scholars think. Catherine Flynn, the book's editor, emphasizes the need of such professional interpretation when she describes the plight of anyone “struggling through Ulysses” and “the key challenges facing the reader.” She is right about how hard it is for any new reader to “get” the book, but the placement of the essays is at odds with her claim that “grappling with the novel's challenges, the reader is pushed toward one of the most important rewards of reading Ulysses: thinking independently.” The prefaces may well impede the reader from thinking independently.Professor Flynn's focus on challenge and difficulty is widely shared throughout the Joycean community and has become a fundamental preoccupation in Joyce scholarship. Taking Joyce's mastery as a given, many Joyceans assume a Talmudic stance in believing, to quote Spinoza, that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.” Facing the formidable Joyce, they turn and turn again to explication. They subscribe to the dictum that the youthful Joyce himself, perhaps self-mockingly, set down: “A man of genius makes no mistake. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” But is Ulysses free of error?Fritz Senn, writing about “Ithaca,” does not put himself in opposition to Joyce but in opposition to the presumed inerrancy of Joyce. He argues that the episode displays a troubling disjunction between what Joyce intended to do in the episode and what he did. Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that in the episode “not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.” But readers do not, indeed, get to know all they should, or see all they should see. Senn notes that they “learn next to nothing about Bloom's mother, his birthday, or the exact nature of his father's suicide, although they do learn a lot about such things as the junk in a drawer, the Dublin water supply system, and the addresses of Dublin shops.” Senn asks: “What does the meeting of the two characters amount to? Will it change Stephen so that he might become the author of the book he is in? Does Bloom find a son? Does he become the father that Stephen is supposed to be looking for? The impassive episode does not seem to answer, or to care.” But these are questions about which many a reader might care.Joyce named “Ithaca” as his favorite among the episodes. Senn demonstrates by his care and attentiveness that he too admires it. But by not limiting himself to dutiful reverence, he instead critically examines the Joycean text. His tribute to Joyce is both unsparing and generous.Equally attentive and yet incisive is Katherine O'Callaghan in her examination of “Sirens.” She recognizes the experimental daring of Joyce's strategy of “conveying music through language” in that episode. But her analysis, as penetrating as it is learned, does not leave the reader persuaded that the episode is entirely successful. As she observes, “the reluctance of the musical art to bend to the critical written voice” is a “stumbling block.”Another problematic experiment, “Oxen of the Sun,” which Joyce himself described as “the most difficult episode... both to interpret and to execute,” presents its commentator, Sarah Davison, with the task of explaining how its grandiose mixture of parody, plagiarism, and sheer celebration of myriad English prose styles over the centuries can function without, as she says, “wrongfooting and dissatisfying readers” who assume that the episode “enacts a historical progression only to find themselves disorientated by so many different echoes and cadences.”Were Joycean scholars more devoted to critical judgment than to explication—even when they are faced with the spectacular imposition of genius—the common reader would more likely find fellowship, and less intimidation, when reading a book that is not a sacred text but a human document, written with the extraordinary self-imposed challenges, as well as the problematic results, that only a most extraordinary human could make. (shrink)

Confucian political philosophy has recently emerged as a vibrant area of thought both in China and around the globe. This book provides an accessible introduction to the main perspectives and topics being debated today, and shows why Progressive Confucianism is a particularly promising approach. Students of political theory or contemporary politics will learn that far from being confined to a museum, contemporary Confucianism is both responding to current challenges and offering insights from which we can all learn. The Progressive Confucianism (...) defended here takes key ideas of the twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan as its point of departure for exploring issues like political authority and legitimacy, the rule of law, human rights, civility, and social justice. The result is anti-authoritarian without abandoning the ideas of virtue and harmony; it preserves the key values Confucians find in ritual and hierarchy without giving in to oppression or domination. A central goal of the book is to present Progressive Confucianism in such a way as to make its insights manifest to non-Confucians, be they philosophers or simply citizens interested in the potential contributions of Chinese thinking to our emerging, shared world. (shrink)

v. 1. The collective use and evolution of concepts.

This issue of the Journal contains the material on physical mediumship originally scheduled for the Spring JSE. The plan for that issue had been to focus on the Felix Experimental Group (FEG) and its medium Kai Mügge, and Michael Nahm and I had each written very long papers describing and evaluating our detailed and extensive investigations of the group. But as I mentioned in my Editorial in the last issue, JSE 28:1 (Spring 2014), as we were preparing to send the (...) Spring issue to the printers, convincing evidence of fraud surfaced in the case, and the current issue now contains substantial revisions of those two long papers, reflecting what Nahm and I have learned and concluded in the interim. But first, since some (maybe many) JSE readers lack the background to put these contemporary investigations of physical mediumship into context, a few words on the subject are perhaps in order. As regular readers of our Historical Perspectives papers will know, physical mediumship flourished during a roughly 80-year period beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The widespread emergence of physical mediums corresponded to the beginning, and then the heyday, of the Spiritualist movement, which began in the United States in the 1850s, and spread quickly to Europe. Spiritualism in the West fostered a more secular spiritism-the view that personal consciousness persists after bodily death, and that although some people are especially gifted mediumistically the rest of humanity can also experience a direct connection to "the other side." While mental mediums claimed to deliver messages from the deceased, say through automatic writing or trance impersonations, physical mediums purported to provide evidence of survival in various physical forms. The most common of these were "raps" or knocking sounds, either in the séance table or elsewhere in the room, typically answering "yes" or "no" questions by the number of sounds (e.g., two for "yes" and three for "no"). Sometimes, instead of raps, the séance table would tilt up and down several times, and in more dramatic cases the table would levitate fully. And in the most dramatic of those cases, sitters would report that the table carried people up and around the room with them, and many reported that they were unable to move the levitated table back to the floor once it was aloft. More dramatically still, many mediums purported to materialize objects resembling the deceased-for example, a disembodied hand and wrist (perhaps with characteristic deformations), or an image of the deceased's face, or a full-figure materialized human form. Although most spiritists insisted throughout that these physical phenomena were manifestations of the deceased mediated by the living, many investigators entertained and then gradually accepted the view that the carefully controlled (and presumably non-fraudulent) phenomena were actually psychokinetic productions of the living. Undoubtedly, many factors contributed to the decline of the Spiritualist movement and the apparent retreat of physical mediums to relatively inconspicuous enclaves or sitter groups. Not surprisingly, one of those is the richly documented history of mediumistic fraud perpetrated by soundrels only too willing to take advantage of grieving and gullible sitters. Nevertheless, and contrary to what many like to claim, it would be a mistake to think either that all physical mediums were frauds or that nobody managed to weed out the charlatans among them. First of all, investigators exposed many hundreds of fraudulent mediums during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of those investigators were self-styled skeptical debunkers-scientists or laypersons who made reputations for themselves by exposing mediumistic duplicity, and most of whom believed that spiritualistic phenomena simply couldn't be genuine. But others combined careful and critical research with a sympathetic or at least open-minded attitude toward the paranormal. One of the reasons this period is so important is that some physical mediums clearly stood out from the crowd. No matter how carefully they were controlled, and no matter how alert, competent, and familiar with conjuring were their investigators, these mediums produced effects that couldn't plausibly be dismissed as fraudulent or attributed to malobservation. In fact, one of the strongest bodies of evidence comes from the 1908 Naples sittings with Eusapia Palladino. Eusapia's three investigators were England's most experienced debunkers of fraudulent mediums. They knew the tricks of the trade (indeed, two of them were skilled conjurors); they knew what Eusapia's sometimes suspicious methods (and occasionally outright but simplistic tricks) were; they knew how to control for them; and the phenomena occurred in decent electric light and often at a distance from the medium. The investigators traveled to Naples believing they would establish once and for all that Eusapia was nothing but a trickster, and they left Naples grudgingly convinced that the nearly 500 phenomena they documented over eleven séances were not fraudulent. (shrink)

“What did the President know and when did he know it?”Senator Howard Baker, Watergate hearings, 1973Why do scientists accept or reject theories? More specifically: why do they change from one theory to another? What is the role of empirical tests in the evaluation of theories?This paper focuses on a narrowly-defined question: in judging theories, do scientists give greater weight (other things being equal) to successfulnovel predictionsthan to successful deductions of previously-known facts? The affirmative answer is called the “predictivist thesis” (Maher (...) 1988).It is primarily philosophers who are interested in this question, and they have treated it mostly as a normative or logical problem. Can the writings of historians of science tell us how scientists have treated novel predictions in the past? Until recently historians have rarely addressed this point. (shrink)

SummaryThe Admonition Controversy, largely between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift has proven fecund ground for intellectual historians analysing the religious dimension to early-modern political ideas. This paper argues that the religious dimension of Cartwright's mixed constitutionalism needs better explanation, rather than just noting that his ecclesiastical mixed constitutionalism mirrors his political mixed constitutionalism. This paper tracks Cartwright's progressive, dialogical unfolding of his mixed constitutionalism in response to Whitgift's attempt to derive episcopacy from the fact of English monarchy, effectively discrediting the (...) Admonition to Parliament. Furthermore, the essay outlines how the Cartwright–Whitgift debate led Cartwright to emphasise a parliamentarist mixed constitution when most of his contemporaries, especially the more famous mixed constitutionalist, Thomas Smith, portrayed the English parliament leaning noticeably towards the monarch. This analysis accepts that religious polemic was a major driving force in the normalisation of parliamentarism, yet seeks to show exactly how this worked out in one of the most important church–state disputes in Elizabethan England. (shrink)

Anjan Chatterjee has promoted an analogy between the Bengalese finch and the human artist. With reduced selective pressure from females due to its domestication, the male finch’s song has become more elaborate. Similarly, art’s lack of a practical function facilitates the creative generativity shown by artists. I argue that this analogy is flawed on both sides. Only recently has some art been regarded as non-functional. And the elaboration of the finch’s song is an effect of female selection under the conditions (...) of domestication. (shrink)

There is an increasing recognition by friends of personal probability that the standard systems of personal probability do not provide a fully adequate basis for the theories of scientific inference and rational decision making. This recognition has methodological and formal components. On the methodological side, Jeffrey [8] and Spielman [16], [17] have suggested that personal probabilities should be interpreted as judgments about thecredibilityof propositions, i.e., as appraisals of the degrees of confidence that are warranted by the information available to the (...) appraiser. The idea behind this interpretation is that there are criteria for appraising degrees of confidence as rational, plausible, silly or unwarranted. They have not been canonized, with the exception of the traditional informal fallacies of insufficient evidence, and if they were, would be highly vague and subject to revision as knowledge advances. (shrink)

The search for a worldwide environmental ethic is linked to the increase in environmental concern since (particularly) the 1960s, and the recognition that environmental problems can have a global i...To date, insufficient work has been carried out on how children view living organisms in the environment. In this study a large number of conversations were audio-taped and transcribed while primar...

In The Things We Mean I argue that there exist such things as the things we mean and believe, and that they are what I call pleonastic propositions. The first two chapters offer an initial motivation and articulation of the theory of pleonastic propositions, and of pleonastic entities generally. The remaining six chapters bring that theory to bear on issues in the theory of content: the existence and nature of meanings; knowledge of meaning; the meaning relation and compositional semantics; the (...) relation between content-involving facts and underlying physical facts; vagueness and indeterminacy; conditionals; normative discourse; and the role of propositional content in explanation, prediction, and knowledge acquisition. (shrink)

Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full book-length study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. He argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a (...) mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. Buckle offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. He shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world, and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy - a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision. (shrink)

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about (...) the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)

Hume's Enlightenment Tract is the first full book-length study for forty years of David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry has, contrary to its author's expressed wishes, long lived in the shadow of its predecessor, A Treatise of Human Nature. Stephen Buckle presents the Enquiry in a fresh light, and aims to raise it to its rightful position in Hume's work and in the history of philosophy. He argues that the Enquiry is not, as so often assumed, a (...) mere collection of watered-down extracts from the earlier work. It is, rather, a coherent work with a unified argument; and, when this argument is grasped as a whole, the Enquiry shows itself to be the best introduction to the lineaments of its author's general philosophy. Buckle offers a careful guide through the argument and structure of the work. He shows how the central sections of the Enquiry offer a critique of the dogmatic empiricisms of the ancient world, and set in place an alternative conception of human powers based on the sceptical principles of habit and probability. These principles are then put to work, to rule out philosophy's metaphysical ambitions and their consequences: religious systems and their attendant conception of human beings as semi-divine rational animals. Hume's scepticism, experimentalism, and naturalism are thus shown to be different aspects of the one unified philosophy - a sceptical version of the Enlightenment vision. (shrink)

Fisher’s 1918 paper accomplished two distinct goals: unifying discrete Mendelian genetics with continuous biometric phenotypes and quantifying the variance components of variation in complex human characteristics. The former contributed to the foundation of modern quantitative genetics; the latter was adopted by social scientists interested in the pursuit of Galtonian nature-nurture questions about the biological and social origins of human behavior, especially human intelligence. This historical divergence has produced competing notions of the estimation of variance ratios referred to as heritability. Jay (...) Lush showed that they could be applied to selective breeding on the farm, while the early twin geneticists used them as a descriptive statistic to describe the degree of genetic determination in complex human traits. Here we trace the early history of the heritability coefficient now used by social scientists. (shrink)