"Psychiatry and Philosophy of Science" explores conceptual issues in psychiatry from the perspective of analytic philosophy of science. Through an examination of those features of psychiatry that distinguish it from other sciences - for example, its contested subject matter, its particular modes of explanation, its multiple different theoretical frameworks, and its research links with big business - Rachel Cooper explores some of the many conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological issues that arise in psychiatry. She shows how these pose interesting challenges for (...) the philosopher of science while also showing how ideas from the philosophy of science can help to solve conceptual problems within psychiatry. Cooper's discussion ranges over such topics as the nature of mental illnesses, the treatment decisions and diagnostic categories of psychiatry, the case-history as a form of explanation, how psychiatry might be value-laden, the claim that psychiatry is a multi-paradigm science, the distortion of psychiatric research by pharmaceutical industries, as well as engaging with the fundamental question whether the mind is reducible to something at the physical level. "Psychiatry and Philosophy of Science" demonstrates that cross-disciplinary contact between philosophy of science and psychiatry can be immensely productive for both subjects and it will be required reading for mental health professionals and philosophers alike. (shrink)

It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that (...) between art and nature appreciation, where it would seem wise to begin. (shrink)

This book discusses both the philosophy of language and linguistic philosophy.

Quotation has been much studied in philosophy. Given that quotation allows one to diagonalize out of any grammar, there have been comparatively few attempts within the linguistic literature to develop an account within a formal linguistic theory. Nonetheless, given the ubiquity of quotation in natural language, linguists need to explicate the formal mechanisms it employs. The central claim of this paper is that once one assumes a dialogical perspective on language such as provided by the KoS (KoS is not (...) an acronym, despite emphasizing a Konversationally Oriented Semantics) framework, formalized in a rich type theory like Type Theory with Records, much of the mystery evaporates. In particular, one can utilize as denotations for quotative constructions entities that are independently motivated for dialogue processing—utterance types and locutionary propositions, Austinian propositions about speech events. (shrink)

This paper is part of a broader project whose aim is to present a coherent unified approach to natural language dialogue semantics using tools from type theory. Here we explore aspects of our approach which relate to situation theory and situation semantics. We first point out a relationship between type theory and the Austinian notion of truth. We then consider how records in type theory might be used to represent situations and how dependent record types can be used to (...) model constraints on situations. We then sketch treatments of attitude phenomena for which Barwise and Perry proposed situation semantic analyses (perception complements, belief, the Pierre puzzle) as well as two other intensional phenomena (intensional verbs and intentional identity). Finally we give a characterisation of the type theory used and a small illustrative fragment of English. (shrink)

Knowledge, Nature, and the Good brings together some of John Cooper's most important works on ancient philosophy. In thirteen chapters that represent an ideal companion to the author's influential Reason and Emotion, Cooper addresses a wide range of topics and periods--from Hippocratic medical theory and Plato's epistemology and moral philosophy, to Aristotle's physics and metaphysics, academic scepticism, and the cosmology, moral psychology, and ethical theory of the ancient Stoics.Almost half of the pieces appear here for the first time or are (...) presented in newly expanded, extensively revised versions. Many stand at the cutting edge of research into ancient ethics and moral psychology. Other chapters, dating from as far back as 1970, are classics of philosophical scholarship on antiquity that continue to play a prominent role in current teaching and scholarship in the field. All of the chapters are distinctive for the way that, whatever the particular topic being pursued, they attempt to understand the ancient philosophers' views in philosophical terms drawn from the ancient philosophical tradition itself.Through engaging creatively and philosophically with the ancient texts, these essays aim to make ancient philosophical perspectives freshly available to contemporary philosophers and philosophy students, in all their fascinating inventiveness, originality, and deep philosophical merit. This book will be treasured by philosophers, classicists, students of philosophy and classics, those in other disciplines with an interest in ancient philosophy, and anyone who seeks to understand philosophy in philosophical terms. (shrink)

This essay charts the author’s philosophical journey from schoolboy enthusiasms for Sartre, Plato, and Buddhism to the equally intercultural themes of his writings over the last few decades. It tells of his disillusion with the dominant style of philosophy in 1960s Oxford and of the liberating effect of working for three years in the USA. The author relates the revival of his interest in Existentialism and how his reading of Heidegger led to an increasing appreciation of Asian traditions of thought. (...) The essay explains why it is important for philosophers to be acquainted with non-western traditions. This importance is illustrated by the ways in which the author draws upon various world philosophies in his recent writings on, for example, mystery, our relationship to nature, and the significance of beauty. (shrink)

I offer here a solution to a mystery about William James's theory of the self. Among the many students of James who have been mystified is Gerald Myers, who expresses surprise in William James: His Life and Thought that, given the religious and mystical overtones of his later metaphysics, James did not abandon the apparent bodily self of the earlier Principles of Psychology for a “nonbodily, spiritual, and mysterious referent for the first-person pronoun,” instead of consistently adhering “to his claims (...) that the body is at the center of any experience of self, that nothing nonbodily shows itself definitely to introspection, and that nothing about using I makes a mystery of the self”. The mystery is particularly deep because James explicitly avowed the coherence of the Principles treatment of the self with the later metaphysical treatment, such as the material in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Arguing in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” from the Essays that a metaphysics of pure experience should replace the dichotomy between consciousness and the body, James adduces in support his earlier discussion of the self: “In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the ‘passing thought’.” On the other hand, Myers observes, “if telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition actually occur,” as James was disposed to think, “our everyday equation of the self with bodily experience will surely require some revision”. Then too James's religious convictions as expressed in The Varieties of Religious Experience would also seem to call for revision of the earlier equation. James wrote there, for instance, that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end.” “Yet instead of suggesting how his psychological concept of the self might have shifted during the progression from Principles to the metaphysics of pure experience,” Myers comments with a note of puzzlement, “James wrote in his later period that this concept was a natural ally if not the original herald of that metaphysics.”. (shrink)

Numerous studies have examined technological advances and their effects on industry, urbanization, social and economic shifts in power and expertise. Action into Nature assesses technology as the constitutional or political essence of the contemporary world.

Do UK community pharmacists encounter the high drama dilemmas of the medical ethics literature or is a 'morality of the mundane' more appropriate? This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that asked a sample of UK pharmacists to describe their ethical issues and to establish whether these were ethical dilemmas as understood philosophically or ethical problems of a more legal or emotional nature. It emerged that although many pharmacists referred to 'dilemmas', these were often problems involving a conflict (...) between an ethical value and a legal or procedural issue and often arose in the routine minutiae of dispensing prescriptions and selling medicines. Such ethical problems remained of concern for pharmacists and the commercial environment, corporate pharmacy ownership and pharmacists' subordination to doctors, all precipitated ethical problems. Law and ethics appeared to be understood synonymously but this may reflect a modernity that increasingly brackets out ethical experiences by encouraging reliance upon law and procedure. (shrink)

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to the frame in which explanations are required, sought, and justified in natural science. Through addressing a wide range of Kant's works, Cooper challenges the claim that Kant's theory of science denies a developmental conception of nature and argues instead (...) that it establishes a method by which natural historians can genuinely dispute historical claims and potentially come to consensus. This method, Cooper argues, can be used to expose serious flaws in Kant's own historical reasoning, including the formation and defence of his racist views. The book will be valuable to philosophers seeking to discern both the power and limitations of Kant's theory of science, and to historians of science working on the fractured landscape of eighteenth-century Newtonianism. (shrink)

Questions about the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers. And today, a host of new issues has been prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, testifying to a great revival of interest in aesthetics and literary criticism. The nature of representation, the relation between art and truth, and the criteria for interpretation are among the most debated problems in contemporary philosophy. This reference series, centred on (...) analytic philosophy but also covering important aspects of the continental tradition and of non-Western philosophies, is made up of a number of volumes each dealing with a particular subject area. Taken together the series offers a comprehensive survey of philosophy as a whole. The entries in each volume combine summarized information on names, terms and moverments and each essay is also supported by a selective bibliography. Alphabetically arranged, the 130 articles in this volume provide comprehensive coverage of the main topics and writers in this area of aesthetics. The Companion will serve students of philosophy, literary criticism and cultural studies - as well as the general reader - both as a work of reference and, with its many substantial essays, as a guide to the best thinking about the arts in the late twentieth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We Need to Cut the Neck!”Confronting Psychological and Moral Distress during Emergency Cricothyrotomy1Stephanie CooperEnoughYou didn’t die in the ER, but rather, began your inexorable demise. The last, first, and only words I ever heard you utter was the weak mewl “tight, tight” as the blood pressure cuff constricted your left arm. You were 98–years–old, bed–bound, at the end. Your world was already partitioning itself from us, your brain tunneling (...) down the uneven corridors of consciousness. A concretion of otoliths muffled your hearing, and fatigue burdened your ancient heart.Your name–band encircled your skinny ankle like a bird. Deformed by arthritis, you were caged within yourself, imprisoned by senescence. You could not declare yourself to us. Words disintegrated into moans and your grimace became animal.When you came back from x–ray—hypotensive with multiple neck fractures confirmed—you could speak no more. Your pulse slowed, your blood pressure plummeted. I jammed a gloved finger against your femoral pulse, faint and tired. [End Page E5]“What’s her DNR status?” I gravely asked your nurse.The DNR paperwork for once had arrived with the patient. “No CPR” she said with relief. But then the paperwork went on, forcing me—the waitress of tragedy—to serve up the hash of an impossible menu.As health care providers, we are all often tasked with performing contradictory actions: the pain of IV insertion followed by the morphine push, drilling deeper into broken bone in order to plate it, the inadvertent cracking of ribs during chest compressions. We sometimes must perform violent action in the hope of sustaining and resurrecting life. We are asked to perform the impossible, the contradictory, the painful. And sometimes the actions we must take catalyze an inexorable chain reaction of actions, which can end in death–prolonging and painful interventions that we did not intend.Although our culture may imagine that one can choose one’s meal at the end–of–life fast–food franchise of death, such is not the case. You can’t suddenly decide you’re a vegetarian. You can’t order the cheeseburger without the cheese—and we all are getting the burger, in the end. Ordering the heart–squeezing drugs without the CPR to circulate them, or the antibiotics without the fluid to counter dehydration, is like ordering the burger without the bun. Sometimes the possible choices are not necessarily realistic choices. You get served what you get served, and perhaps we should question the assumption that we have the ability to choose at all.Your DNR form proclaimed no CPR but then said that antibiotics and intubation were okay—the cheeseburger without the cheese. An unfortunate choice for you, me, and the rest of us, as your death menu led to a very unhappy meal.You were comatose. I stuck a tongue blade deep into your desiccated throat. You did not gag. This means I should have intubated you, but morally, I couldn’t. To what end? You were 98 years old, broken, moribund. If you hadn’t suffered multiple neck fractures, or if you were a vibrant elder who had just walked off Mt. Rainier, maybe the story would have been different. But you? I doubted that you truly had a chance of ever feeling joy again. You were somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. I knew this step would lead to the domino of unstoppable steps. I refused to flog your corpse.I called your daughter Kay on her cell phone, told her that you were in critical condition and that she should come to the ER immediately. But how to begin to tell a daughter her mother is dying, let alone over a cell phone? Gentle but surreal and impersonal, my voice tried to tell your daughter that the interventions you needed would likely kill you. I have seen enough human suffering to know. To me, the choices were clear: death by nature’s irrefutable course, versus a more painful, protracted, and violent death by what we’d do to you.Kay arrived in a wheelchair and scooted up to your bedside. Like all daughters, she wasn’t ready for you... (shrink)

Classifying Madness (Springer, 2005) concerns philosophical problems with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, more commonly known as the D.S.M. The D.S.M. is published by the American Psychiatric Association and aims to list and describe all mental disorders. The first half of Classifying Madness asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that reflects natural distinctions makes sense. Chapters examine the nature of mental illness, and also consider whether mental disorders fall into natural (...) kinds. The second half of the book addresses epistemic worries. Even supposing a natural classification system to be possible in principle, there may be reasons to be suspicious of the categories included in the D.S.M. I examine the extent to which the D.S.M. depends on psychiatric theory, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. I aim to be critical of the D.S.M. without being antagonistic towards it. Ultimately, however, I am forced to conclude that although the D.S.M. is of immense practical importance, it is unlikely to come to reflect the natural structure of mental disorders. (shrink)

This book is a sustained examination of issues in the philosophy of ecology that have been a source of controversy since the emergence of ecology as an explicit scientific discipline. The controversies revolve around the idea of a balance of nature, the possibility of general ecological knowledge and the role of model-building in ecology. The Science of the Struggle for Existence is also a detailed treatment of these issues that incorporates both a comprehensive investigation of the relevant ecological literature and (...) the development of an explicit theoretical framework in the philosophy of science. It addresses issues in the philosophy of ecology that are of particular importance for the deployment of ecology in the solution of environmental problems. It will have a cross-disciplinary appeal and will interest students and professionals in science, the philosophy of science, and environmental studies as well as policy-makers. (shrink)

The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for "the good life." This book examines Rousseau's effort to show how and why, despite this challenge from science, nature can remain a standard for human behavior. While recognizing an original goodness in human being in the state of nature, Rousseau knew this to be too low a (...) standard and promoted the idea of "the natural man living in the state of society," notably in _Emile_. Laurence Cooper shows how, for Rousseau, conscience—understood as the "love of order"—functions as the agent whereby simple savage sentiment is sublimated into a more refined "civilized naturalness" to which all people can aspire. (shrink)

Paradigmatically, natural kinds are the kinds of thing or stuff that are classified by the natural sciences. The periodic table provides perhaps the best example of the potential importance of natural kinds for science. In the philosophy of psychiatry, debates over whether mental disorders can be natural kinds emerge because kinds of mental disorder are manifestly different from chemical kinds in various ways. While chemical kinds are precise, psychiatric kinds are fuzzy. While chemical kinds are objective, (...) the identification of psychiatric kinds is value-laden. Psychiatric classification involves classifying people, and unlike chemical elements, those people can respond to being classified in various ways. This chapter goes through these differences, one-by-one, and argues that despite them, mental disorders may be natural kinds. (shrink)

Consciousness and Politics begins with an analysis of the problem of the historicity of truth as it was formulated shortly before Voegelin abandoned his eight-volume History of Political Ideas. The analysis then follows a more or less chronological path, discussing the arguments developed in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin's most famous book, the differentiation of consciousness and the problems of myth and nature as presented in the early volumes of Order and History. Starting in the 1960s, Voegelin began a (...) lengthy argument in several volumes that resumed his concern with the philosophy of consciousness, which he had outlined in his early writings, and its connection to what we conventionally call philosophy of history. Voegelin's late and often difficult essays, lectures, and the final volume of Order and History, many scholars have noticed, emphasize the meditative origins of his political science and, more broadly, of philosophy. The concluding chapters analyze this subject-matter and a perennial question that so many of Voegelin's readers have raised: what is the relation of his political science or philosophy to Christianity? (shrink)

The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for "the good life." This book examines Rousseau's effort to show how and why, despite this challenge from science, nature can remain a standard for human behavior. While recognizing an original goodness in human being in the state of nature, Rousseau knew this to be too low a (...) standard and promoted the idea of "the natural man living in the state of society," notably in _Emile_. Laurence Cooper shows how, for Rousseau, conscience—understood as the "love of order"—functions as the agent whereby simple savage sentiment is sublimated into a more refined "civilized naturalness" to which all people can aspire. (shrink)

is a term introduced by Ian Hacking to refer to the kinds of people—child abusers, pregnant teenagers, the unemployed—studied by the human sciences. Hacking argues that classifying and describing human kinds results in feedback, which alters the very kinds under study. This feedback results in human kinds having histories totally unlike those of natural kinds (such as gold, electrons and tigers), leading Hacking to conclude that human kinds are radically unlike natural kinds. Here I argue that Hacking's argument (...) fails and that he has not demonstrated that human kinds cannot be natural kinds. Introduction Natural kinds Hacking's feedback mechanisms 3.1 Cultural feedback 3.2 Conceptual feedback. (shrink)

The balance of nature concept is an old idea that manifests itself in anumber of forms in population and community ecology. This paper focuseson population ecology, where controversy surrounding the balance ofnature takes the form of perennial debates over the significance ofdensity dependence, population regulation, and species interactions suchas competition. One of the most striking features of these debates, overthe course of the previous century in ecology, is the tendency to arguethe case on largely conceptual grounds. This paper explores twoquestions. (...) Why this tendency to settle on conceptual grounds what is soobviously an empirical issue? Are there any good conceptual arguments tobe had in this area? (shrink)

In this beautifully written book David E. Cooper uses a gentle walk through a tropical garden, the view of the fields and hills beyond it, the sound of birds, voices and flute, the reflection of light in water, the play of shadows among the trees and presence of strange animals, as an opportunity to reflect on experiences of nature and the mystery of existence. Covering an extensive range of topics, from Daoism to dogs, from gardening to walking, from Zen to (...) Debussy, Cooper succeeds in conveying some deep and difficult philosophical ideas about the meaning of life in an engaging manner, and in showing how those ideas bear upon the practical question of how we should relate to our world and live our lives. A thought-provoking and compelling book, _Senses of Mystery_ is a triumph of both storytelling and philosophy. (shrink)

As recent research has shown, many of the activities of early modern (including eighteenth‐century) naturalists were carried out in the household. This article investigates the ways in which family members in particular, both male and female, ended up engaging in kinds of labor which furthered the pursuit of natural history in the eighteenth century. Examining evidence from various different parts of Europe and its colonies, the article argues that natural history can be seen to have often been what (...) might be termed a family enterprise, one to which many different family members might contribute in ways shaped by concerns of kinship and inheritance. (shrink)

We propose a shift in perspective from the view of natural languages as formal languages to natural languages as a collection of resources for constructing local languages for use in particular situations. This is suggested by our experience constructing natural language grammars for particular applications using the Grammatical Framework. It points to a research programme investigating how such resources play a role in linguistic innovation by agents constructing situation-specific local languages and how they can be made dynamic, (...) modified by the linguistic agent’s exposure to innovative linguistic data. (shrink)

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising that the question has been so long neglected by modern philosophy. Now at last there is a philosophy of gardens. David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the appreciation of (...) art and the appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural. (shrink)

This paper sympathetically explores Daoism's relevance to environmental philosophy and to the aspiration of people to live in a manner convergent with nature. After discussing the Daoist understanding of nature and the dao (Way), the focus turns to the implications of these notions for our relationship to nature. The popular idea that Daoism encourages a return to a way of life is rejected. Instead, it is shown that the Daoist proposal is one of living more than people generally do in (...) the modern, technological world, and of allowing other beings to do so as well. These themes are clarified in a final section, inspired by some Daoist remarks, devoted to the relationship of human beings with animals. (shrink)

This paper contributes to inquiries into the genealogy of governmentality and the nature of secularization by arguing that pastoralism continues to operate in the algorithmic register. Drawing on Agamben’s notion of signature, I elucidate a pair of historically distant yet archaeologically proximate affinities: the first between the pastorate and algorithmic control, and the second between the absconded God of late medieval nominalism and the authority of algorithms in the cybernetic age. I support my hypothesis by attending to the signaturial kinships (...) between, on the one hand, temporality and authority in our contemporary conjuncture, and, on the other, obedience and submission in Christian thought from late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. I thereby illustrate the hidden genealogical continuities between theological-pastoral technologies of power and technocratic-algorithmic modalities of governance. I conclude by suggesting that medieval counter-conducts may be redeployed in our present circumstances for emancipatory ends. (shrink)

In the final chapter of his Ineffability and Religious Experience, Guy Bennett-Hunter proposes that the ineffable may be ‘bodied forth’ through works of art and ritual, and hence engage with our lives. By way of supporting this proposal, this paper discusses some relationships between experiences of music and of natural environments. It is argued that several aspects of musical experience encourage a sense of convergence or intimacy between human practice and nature. Indeed, these aspects suggest a codependence between culture (...) and nature. The paper continues by proposing that a sense of this co-dependence fosters the further sense of cultural and environmental experience as an integrated whole whose ‘ground’ must be entirely mysterious and ineffable. It is concluded that, if this is right, then music and other cultural practices indeed bring the ineffable into engagement with human life. (shrink)

In this paper I extend the case for a necessitation account of particular laws in Kant's philosophy of science by examining the relation between reason's hypothetical use in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and the legitimate hypotheses identified in the Doctrine of Method. Building on normative accounts of reason's ideas, I argue that reason's hypothetical use does not describe the connections between objects and their grounds, which lie beyond the reach of the understanding, but merely prescribes the relations between (...) appearances and their conditions, for which the understanding must seek. A legitimate hypothesis, I suggest, is a proposition we hold to be true that fills in one or several of those relations. The problematic character of hypotheses requires that we evaluate our reasons for holding them to be true. While natural modality is grounded in the nature of things, which cannot be fully known, our reasons for assent can and must be grounded on features of objects that are epistemically available to us. (shrink)

The primary purpose of the paper is the broadly exegetical one of explaining and connecting Heidegger's many remarks, made in several different contexts of enquiry, on nature. The three main contexts are those of ontology, scientific methodology, and technology. After showing how Heidegger's central theses in these contexts are related to one another, I argue, in the final section, that his observations on scientific method are pivotal. Unless these are secured, his further claims about ontology and technology lose their essential (...) support. (shrink)

Against the growing trend in philosophy toward naturalistic analysis, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment has gained significant attention. Some scholars suggest that Kant’s insights bear on our aesthetic appreciation of nature, others on our account of the life sciences. In this paper I draw these lines of inquiry together to identify two overlooked dimensions of Kant’s project: the role of moral hope in problematizing the limits of natural science and the role of culture in providing a solution. (...) Kant argues that we cannot think consistently unless we are able to conceive of nature as a domain that is hospitable to human freedom. His response is to identify the productive capacity of the imagination to transform the material of nature into something more. While the prevailing conception of nature today is at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic to human habitation, this dimension of Kant’s work has much to bear on contemporary thought. (shrink)

Buddhism, one increasingly hears, is an 'eco-friendly' religion. It is often said that this is because it promotes an 'ecological' view of things, one stressing the essential unity of human beings and the natural world. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment presents a different view. While agreeing that Buddhism is, in many important respects, in tune with environmental concerns, Cooper and James argue that what makes it 'green' is its view of human life. The true connection between the religion and environmental (...) thought is to be found in Buddhist accounts of the virtues - those traits, such as compassion, equanimity and humility, that characterise the life of a spiritually enlightened individual. Central chapters of this book examine these virtues and their implications for environmental attitudes and practice. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment will be of interest not only to students and teachers of Buddhism and environmental ethics, but to those more generally engaged with moral philosophy. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents an original conception of Buddhist environmental thought. The authors also contribute to the wider debate on the place of ethics in Buddhist teachings and practices, and to debates within 'virtue ethics' on the relations between human well-being and environmental concern. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has steadily been opening up for philosophical study an increasingly wide range of the philosophical literature of antiquity. We no longer think only of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and their pre-Socratic forebears, when someone refers to the views of the ancient philosophers. Julia Annas has been one of the philosophers most closely engaged in the renewed study of Hellenistic philosophy over the past fifteen years, enabling herself and other scholars to acquire the necessary ground-level knowledge of the widely-dispersed (...) texts and the problems of interpretation—both historical and philosophical—that they present. In her new book she takes the next step. She presents to the general philosophical public of today an extended reconstruction of the systems of moral philosophy that were developed and pitted in competition with one another during the period when refinement and professionalism were at their height in Greek philosophy—between the end of the 4th and the middle of the 1st centuries B.C. These include the moral philosophies of Epicurus and his followers, several generations of Stoics, sceptical philosophers both Academic and Pyrrhonian, and the “hybrid” theories put together by Antiochus of Ascalon and other Stoic-influenced philosophers as part of the modernizing revival of Aristotelian ethical thought that took place in the 1st century B.C. She finds significant commonalities among these otherwise very disparate theories, and much of the book is devoted to examining these and showing how the conception of ethics and morality that is common to the ancient theorists compares with and differs from what we are familiar with in modern and contemporary theory. She traces these commonalities back to Aristotle in his ethical treatises, and accordingly includes Aristotle’s theory as one among those to be examined—indeed, in a significant sense as the intellectual father or grandfather of the rest of them. She leaves Plato’s dialogues out of account, and she has nothing to say about ethics and moral philosophy in the revived Platonism that gradually came to dominate philosophical thought in later antiquity. Her book, then, is a book about the structure and content of ancient ethical theory during the Hellenistic period, the period when Greek philosophy was at its high-point in professionalism and sophistication. (shrink)

Computability theory concerns information with a causal–typically algorithmic–structure. As such, it provides a schematic analysis of many naturally occurring situations. Emil Post was the first to focus on the close relationship between information, coded as real numbers, and its algorithmic infrastructure. Having characterised the close connection between the quantifier type of a real and the Turing jump operation, he looked for more subtle ways in which information entails a particular causal context. Specifically, he wanted to find simple relations on reals (...) which produced richness of local computability-theoretic structure. To this extent, he was not just interested in causal structure as an abstraction, but in the way in which this structure emerges in natural contexts. Post’s programme was the genesis of a more far reaching research project. In this article we will firstly review the history of Post’s programme, and look at two interesting developments of Post’s approach. The first of these developments concerns the extension of the core programme, initially restricted to the Turing structure of the computably enumerable sets of natural numbers, to the Ershov hierarchy of sets. The second looks at how new types of information coming from the recent growth of research into randomness, and the revealing of unexpected new computability-theoretic infrastructure. We will conclude by viewing Post’s programme from a more general perspective. We will look at how algorithmic structure does not just emerge mathematically from information, but how that emergent structure can model the emergence of very basic aspects of the real world. (shrink)

In this paper I extend the case for a necessitation account of particular laws in Kant's philosophy of science by examining the relation between reason's hypothetical use in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and the legitimate hypotheses identified in the Doctrine of Method. Building on normative accounts of reason's ideas, I argue that reason's hypothetical use does not describe the connections between objects and their grounds, which lie beyond the reach of the understanding, but merely prescribes the relations between (...) appearances and their conditions, for which the understanding must seek. A legitimate hypothesis, I suggest, is a proposition we hold to be true that fills in one or several of those relations. The problematic character of hypotheses requires that we evaluate our reasons for holding them to be true. While natural modality is grounded in the nature of things, which cannot be fully known, our reasons for assent can and must be grounded on features of objects that are epistemically available to us. (shrink)

The formal systems of logic have ordinarily been regarded as independent of biology, but recent developments in evolutionary theory suggest that biology and logic may be intimately interrelated. In this book, William Cooper outlines a theory of rationality in which logical law emerges as an intrinsic aspect of evolutionary biology. This biological perspective on logic, though at present unorthodox, could change traditional ideas about the reasoning process. Cooper examines the connections between logic and evolutionary biology and illustrates how logical rules (...) are derived directly from evolutionary principles, and therefore have no independent status of their own. Laws of decision theory, utility theory, induction, and deduction are reinterpreted as natural consequences of evolutionary processes. Cooper's connection of logical law to evolutionary theory ultimately results in a unified foundation for an evolutionary science of reason. It will be of interest to professionals and students of philosophy of science, logic, evolutionary theory, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology claim that function talk is consistent with naturalism. Yet recent work in biology places new pressure on this claim. An increasing number of biologists propose that the existence of functions depends on the organisation of systems. While systems are part of the domain studied by physics, they are capable of interacting with this domain through organising principles. This is to say that a full account of biological function requires teleology. Does naturalism preclude reference to teleological causes? Or (...) are organised systems precisely a naturalised form of teleology? In this paper I suggest that the biology of organised systems reveals several contradictions in the main philosophical conceptions of naturalism. To integrate organised systems with naturalism’s basic assumptions—that there is no theory-independent view for metaphysics, and that nature is intelligible—I propose an idealist solution. (shrink)

Scholars often draw attention to the remarkably individual and progressive character of Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. What is less often noted, however, is that Kant's project builds on several transformations that occurred in natural science during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Without contextualising Kant's argument within these transformations, the full sense of Kant's achievement remains unseen. This paper situates Kant's essay within the analogical form of Newtonianism developed by a diverse range of naturalists (...) including Georges Buffon, Albrecht von Haller and Thomas Wright. It argues that Kant's universal conception of natural history can be viewed within the free-thinking and anti-clerical movement associated with Buffon. This does not mean, however, that it breaks from the methodological rules of Newtonianism. The claim of this paper is that Kant's essay contributes to the transformation of natural history from a logical system of classification to an explanation for the physical diversity of natural products according to laws. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new account of living natural products in Kant’s physical geography. I argue that Kant adopts Buffon’s twofold conception of natural history, which consists of a general theory of nature as a physical nexus of causes and a particular account of living natural products in the setting of the earth. Yet in contrast to Buffon, who placed the two parts of natural history on equal epistemic footing, Kant’s physical geography can be (...) understood as a second, pragmatic level of inquiry that stands under the formal conditions of nature outlined in Universal Natural History. On the higher, formal level, natural history provides a physical account of time and space as an expanding causal sequence. On the lower, pragmatic level, physical geography provides a causal account of particular natural products as developing within a specific place. I argue that this two-tiered account not only clarifies the relation between metaphysics and experience in Kant’s pre-critical philosophy, it also sheds light on the continuity between the method of physical geography and the systematisation of nature presented in the critical philosophy. (shrink)

The DSM is the main classification of mental disorders used by psychiatrists in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. Although widely used, the DSM has come in for fierce criticism, with many commentators believing it to be conceptually flawed in a variety of ways. This paper assesses some of these philosophical worries. The first half of the paper asks whether the project of constructing a classification of mental disorders that ‘cuts nature at the joints’ makes sense. What is (...) mental disorder? Are types of mental disorder natural kinds (that is, are the distinctions between them objective and of fundamental theoretical importance, as are, say, the distinctions between the chemical elements)? The second half of the paper addresses epistemic worries. Even if types of mental disorder are natural kinds there may be reason to doubt that the DSM will come to reflect their natural structure. In particular, I examine the extent to which the DSM is theory-laden, and look at how it has been shaped by social and financial factors. Ultimately, I conclude that although the DSM is of immense practical importance it is not likely to become the best possible classification of mental disorders. (shrink)