This chapter surveys set theory, model theory, and computability theory: how they first emerged from the foundations of mathematics, and how they have developed since. There are any amounts of mathematical technicalities in the background, but the chapter highlights those themes that have some philosophical resonance.

Part I. Furthering debate between leading theories of Law -- The Explantory Role of the Weak Natural Law Thesis -- In Defense of Hart -- Law's Authority is not a Claim to Preemption -- The Normative Fallacy Regarding Law's Authority -- The Problem about the Nature of Law vis-à-vis Legal Rationality Revisited : Towards an Integrative Jurisprudence -- Part II. The Power of Legal Systems -- Law as Power : Two Rule of Law Requirements -- A Comprehensive Hartian Theory of (...) Legal Obligation : Social Pressure, Coercive Enforcement, and the Legal Obligations of Citizens -- Law and the Entitlement to Coerce -- Part III. Conceptual Analysis -- Farewell to Conceptual Analysis (in Jurisprudence) -- What Do We Want Law to Be? Philosophical Analysis and the Concept of Law -- Part IV. New Directions -- Legal as a Thick Concept -- Making Old Questions New : Legality, Legal System, and State -- Legal Disagreements and the Dual Nature of Law -- Is There One Right Answer to the Question of the Nature of Law? (shrink)

In this book, Wilfrid Harrington ventures an answer to the question, "What is God?" through a close reading of the Old and New Testaments.

The Metaphysics of Practice brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced (...) Sellars's contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture. (shrink)

Selon Tort, Darwin n'est pas un promoteur de la guerre mais un penseur de la paix universelle. Par la sélection naturelle, il expliquerait mieux que les philosophes du contrat social le passage de l'état de guerre à l'état de paix. Ce livre fait dialoguer Darwin et Kant sur les conditions de la paix cosmopolitique. Il explicite l'opposition de Darwin à Kant, l'existence chez Kant d'une version du concept darwinien d' "effet réversif de l'évolution", et défend l'idée de paix comme tâche (...) de l'humanité.--[Source inconnue]. (shrink)

A collection of some of Sellars' lectures and articles from 1951 to 1962.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A collection of some of Sellars' lectures and articles from 1951 to 1962.

In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth (...) of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography. Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture. (shrink)

[Wilfrid Hodges] During the last forty or so years it has become popular to offer explanations of logical notions in terms of games. There is no doubt that many people find games helpful for understanding various logical phenomena. But we ask whether anything is really 'explained' by these accounts, and we analyse Paul Lorenzen's dialogue foundations for constructive logic as an example. The conclusion is that the value of games lies in their ability to provide helpful metaphors and representations, (...) rather than in any true conceptual analysis. In fact some of the standard explanations of logical notions in terms of competitive games simply don't work. /// [Erik C. W. Krabbe] In an attempt to redeem the Lorenzen-type dialogues from their detractors, it is perhaps best first to provide a survey of the various benefits these dialogues have been supposed to yield. This will be done in Section I. It will not be possible, within the confines of this paper, to scrutinize them all, but in Section II we shall delve deeper into the capacity of this type of dialogue to yield a model for the immanent criticism of philosophical positions. Section III will extend the concept of a dialogue in such a way as to conform better with our intuitive conceptions of what a rational discussion of a position should contain. This will be followed up by a concept of 'winning a dialogue' that takes position midway between the old conception of 'winning one play' and that of the full-fledged presentation of a winning strategy. Concepts of 'rational discussion' are thus shown to be, plausibly, more fundamental than those of proof. In Section IV, I shall discuss the specific problems about dialogical foundations put forward by Wilfrid Hodges. (shrink)

The laws of distribution follow at once from Lyndon's interpolation theorem and the fact that the fallacy of many terms is a fallacy.

1. The lever in question is, of course, that with which, provided that an appropriate fulcrum could be found, Archimedes could move the world. In the analogy I have in mind, the fulcrum is the given, by virtue of which the mind gets leverage on the world of knowledge.

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect (...) to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. (shrink)

Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, (...) Golhke explores in Accommodating Nature how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, Accommodating Nature exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us. (shrink)

Wilfrid Hodges; VIII*—Truth in a Structure, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages 135–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

Inference and meaning -- Some reflections on language games -- Language as thought and as communication -- Meaning as functional classification : a perspective on the relation of syntax to semantics -- Naming and saying -- Grammar and existence : a preface to ontology -- Abstract entities -- Being and being known -- The lever of Archimedes -- Some reflections on thoughts and things -- Mental events -- Phenomenalism -- The identity approach to the mind-body problem -- Philosophy and the (...) scientific image of man -- "...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks..." -- Some remarks on Kant's theory of experience -- The role of imagination in Kant's theory of experience. (shrink)

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.

A rational justification for therapeutic decisions can be developed using probability and decision theory. The set of treatments and their outcomes or consequences, which are states of health, have to be defined; and estimates made of the probabilities of outcomes, their utilities, and the costs of treatments. Most difficult is the estimation of utilities of states of health but this may be possible using a wagering technique. Until it is possible to establish some equivalence between utility and money, costs may (...) be introduced by measuring the efficiency of treatment by comparing expected utilities per unit cost. The whole method is examined practically in a plausible clinical setting. Emphasis is laid on the value of testing the completed model using a computer to get an intimate feel of the problem using different assumptions and different values for all the parameters. (shrink)

The short-lived emperor Macrinus had a son whose name, inscriptions reveal, was M. Opellius Antoninus Diadumenianus. Little is known about this figure, who is remembered through brief references in the late Roman breviaries and in Herodian, and in a short biography in the collection of imperial lives now known as the Historia Augusta. In 1889, Dessau argued that the lives of the Historia Augusta, which present themselves as written by six different authors in the Age of Constantine, were in fact (...) written by a single writer closer to the year 400, an argument that has now all but prevailed in scholarly circles. Some of the biographies depend on reliable sources, at least in part, and thus can provide actual historical information; others do not, and are mostly or entirely the result of authorial invention. The life of Diadumenianus fits clearly in the latter category. The secondary lives of the Historia Augusta contain no original information, but rather are constructed from a combination of information derived from their ‘parent’ life and invented fiction. So, for example, the life of the Caesar Aelius combines information from the life of Hadrian with fiction, the life of the usurper Avidius Cassius combines information from the life of Marcus Aurelius with fiction, and the lives of Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus combine information from the life of Severus with fiction. In the case of Diadumenianus, the life is even more thoroughly fictional, since the life of Macrinus from which it is derived is itself a kind of secondary life; Cameron suggests that Marius Maximus, the probable source for the author of the Historia Augusta, treated Macrinus as a usurper in the life of Elagabalus. Almost every detail of the life of Diadumenianus is therefore the fictive invention of the author. (shrink)

A distinctive feature of the biographies of Suetonius is his methodical and detailed description of the physical appearances of the emperors. This feature was adopted by two fourth-century Latin writers, Ammianus Marcellinus and the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta. This study will explore how ancient theories of the relationship between appearance and character intersect with the physical descriptions of emperors the authors provide. These authors reveal themselves to be engaged with contemporary approaches to the question without being bound by (...) any one theory, and thus presuppose a readership for whom physiognomic questions were both interesting and debatable. The approaches of the authors to this minor feature in their work also offer broader insight into their biographical style and purpose. (shrink)

À Jean-Luc Nancy, un maître qui m’a donné la chiquenaude initiale et dont la salutation m’a introduit à la pensée. Une des clés pour la lecture de cet ouvrage se trouve à la page 23. Nous y lisons qu’il ne s’agit pas de thématiser l’adoration, c’est-à-dire aussi bien d’en faire la théorie, d’en construire un concept ou d’en proposer une analyse méthodique. Même si l’analyse méthodique n’est pas absente, loin s’en faut, du livre de Jean-Luc Nancy! Mais cette analyse ne (...) fait que frayer un chem... (shrink)

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.

Readings in Health Care Ethics provides a wide-ranging selection of important and engaging contributions to the field of health care ethics. The second edition adds a chapter on health care in Canada, and the introduction has been expanded to include discussion of a new direction in feminist naturalized ethics. The book presupposes no prior knowledge, only an interest in the bioethical issues that are shaping our world.