bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What is the ‘Problem of Induction’?
Authors: Lowe E. J.
Published: January 2009

This paper falls into three parts. In the first I retrace the steps which, have led many to consider that there is a ‘problem of induction’ which may have only a sceptical solution. In the second I explain why I think we cannot rest content with such a solution. In the third I try to show how a new approach to certain key concepts in the philosophy of science—in particular the concept of natural law—may help towards a non-sceptical resolution of the problem.
Causation in History
Authors: Cohen Mendel F.
Published: January 2009

Following the practice of human beings everywhere historians distinguish the real or most significant cause(s) of an occurrence or state of affairs from ‘less important considerations’, ‘precipitating circumstances’, or ‘mere conditions’. I shall term claims that some phenomenon is most basically to be attributed to some one (or few) of the factors causally necessary for its occurrence attributive causal explanations or causal attributions and discusshere the extent to which moral convictions are constitutive of them.
Freud and Sexual Ethics
Authors: Carr David
Published: January 2009

The common or lay view of the contribution of Freudian and psychoanalytic theory to our understanding of human sexual conduct seems to be that it is essentially subversive of traditional or conventional sexual morality. For does not the psychoanalytic discovery of psychological causes over which we have no direct control reveal that whatever we may be inclined to do from sexual motives is not a matterfor guilt or shame? Does it not show that much of the sexual guilt and shame that we do experience is merely the product of inhibitions and repressions which are the result of dubiously rational social taboos and parental prohibitions? The main impact of Freudian or psychoanalytic views on modern popular thought about sexual morality andconduct would appear to amount to little more than a collection of such vague beliefs.
On Saying and Showing
Authors: Moore A. W.
Published: January 2009

There is not, and may there never be, any treatise by me …onthese things, for the subject is not communicable in words, as othersciences are. Rather is it that, after long association in the business itself and a shared life, a light is lit in the soul, kindled, as it were, by a leaping flame, and thenceforward feeds itself (Plato).
Wrongdoing and Forgiveness
Authors: North Joanna
Published: January 2009

To forgive a person for a wrong he has done has often been valued as morally good and as indicative of a benevolent and merciful character. But while forgiveness has been recognized as valuable its nature as a moral response has largely been ignored by modern moral philosophers who work outside the confines of a religious context.1 Where it has been discussed, forgiveness has been thought particularly difficult to define, and some have thought the forgiving response paradoxical or even impossible. I shall discuss some of these difficulties and suggest firstly that the value of forgiveness lies in the fact that it essentially requires a recognition of the wrongdoer's responsibility for his action, and secondly that forgiveness typically involves an effort on the part of the one wronged: a conscious attempt to improve oneself in relation to the wrongdoer.
The Logical Impossibility of Collision
Authors: Kline A. David , Matheson Carl A.
Published: January 2009

Absolutely no one still believes that every physical interactionconsists of material bodies bumping into each other. Those who have tried to work out a completely mechanistic physics have been unable to explain common phenomena like liquidity, gravitation and magnetism. In fact, there is great reason to doubt that such a physics could ever account for attractive forces in general.
Religion, Secularization and Modernity
Authors: Graham Gordon
Published: January 2009

The ideas of modernity and post-modernity have recently come to figure prominently in social thought. Their importance for social thought about religion, however, has not generally been explored. Yet recent concern with modernity and its aftermath is closely related to the widespread interest that used to be taken in secularization. Indeed, I hope to show that some of the basic questions at issue are much the same.
Aquinas and the Active Intellect
Authors: Haldane John
Published: January 2009

Anyone who comes to read some of Aquinas' works and at the same time looks around for modern discussions of them will be struck by two things: first, the greater part of the latter is the product of American and European Catholic neo-scholasticism; and second, that, with a few distinguished exceptions,1 what is contributed by writers of the analytical tradition is often a blend of uninformed generalizations and some suspicion that what Aquinas presents is not so much independent philosophy as propaganda for the cause of Christian theology.
Dorothea and Casaubon
Authors: Lagerspetz Olli
Published: January 2009

Dorothea, an idealistic young lady, is the central figure of George Eliot's Middlemarch. She longs to devote her life to something valuable, looking up to people like St Teresa as her ideal. Contrary to all expectations, she decides to marry Casaubon, an elderly clergyman. For years, Casaubon has been preparing his magnum opus called ‘Key to All Religions’. In the milieu where Dorothea is living—a quiet English parish in the 1830s—Casaubon's scholarly project appears to her as the right object of her devotion. She would lighten the burden of his solitary labour; share his life of wisdom and pursuit of truth.
The Literal and the Figurative
Authors: Bredin Hugh
Published: January 2009

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned.
The Subjection of John Stuart Mill
Authors: Stove David
Published: January 2009

‘There is no opinion so absurd but that some philosopher has held it.’ Cicero wrote this around 44 B.C., and even then he was only repeating a saying already current. The reputation of philosophers for holding absurd opinions is therefore very old. Equally undeniably, it is also a well-founded reputation.
Self, Reference and Self-reference
Authors: Lowe E. J.
Published: January 2009

I favour an analysis of selfhood which ties it to the possession of certain kinds of first-person knowledge, in particular de re knowledge of the identity of one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. My defence of this analysis will lead me to explore the nature of demonstrative reference to one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. Such reference is typically ‘direct’, in contrast to demonstrative reference to all physical objects, apart from those that are parts of one's own body in which one can localize sensations or which are directly subject to one's will. My conclusion will be that the semantic distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ demonstrative reference helps to delineate the metaphysical boundary between oneself and the rest of the world. But I do not contend that one is to be identified with one's own body: indeed, I shall try to show that one can know a priori that no such identity can obtain.
Love's Constancy
Authors: Martin Mike W.
Published: January 2009

‘Marital faithfulness’ refers to faithful love for a spouse or lover to whom one is committed, rather than the narrower idea of sexual fidelity. The distinction is clearly marked in traditional wedding vows. A commitment to love faithfully is central: ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part… and thereto I plight [pledge] thee my troth [faithfulness]’. Sexual fidelity is promised in a subordinate clause, symbolizing its supportive role in promoting love's constancy: ‘and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her/him.’
Loving My Neighbour, Loving Myself
Authors: Hanfling Oswald
Published: January 2009

The biblical injunction to love one's neighbour has long been regarded as a central pillar of morality. It is taken to be an ideal which gives direction to our moral aspirations, even though most of us find it difficult to live up to, owing to our selfish natures. But the difficulties I wish to raise are of a logical kind, as distinct from those depending on personal character. They fall under three headings: the first concerns the scope of ‘my neighbour’, the second the injunction to love, and the third the idea of loving oneself. The first will probably be the most familiar.
What's Wrong with Prostitution?
Authors: Primoratz Igor
Published: January 2009

Over the last three decades the sexual morality of many Western societies has changed beyond recognition. Most of the prohibitions which made up the traditional, extremely restrictive outlook on sex that reigned supreme until the fifties–the prohibitions of masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, promiscuity, homosexuality–are no longer seen as very serious or stringent or, indeed, as binding at all. But one or two traditional prohibitions are still with us. The moral ban on prostitution, in particular, does not seem to have been repealed or radically mitigated. To be sure, some of the old arguments against prostitution are hardly ever brought up these days; but then, several new ones are quite popular, at least in certain circles. Prostitution is no longer seen as the most extreme moral depravity a woman is capable of; but the view that it is at least seriously morally flawed, if not repugnant and intolerable, is still widely held. In this paper I want to look into some of the main arguments in support of this view and try to show that none of them is convincing.
Solitary Rule-Following
Authors: Champlin T. S.
Published: January 2009

Can a rule be followed by one person who has lived all his life in as complete isolation from other human beings as is consistent with his mere physical survival?

This question divides philosophers as sharply today as it did over thirty years ago when, prompted by their reading of Wittgenstein, they first asked it. My aim here is to suggest a way of reconciling the two opposing sides in the current debate. I also hope to explain why it was that Wittgenstein did not concern himself with the complexities I am about to discuss, which none the less are, I believe, at the root of the difficulties we experience when we try to understand what Wittgenstein said about following a rule and to think clearly about this question.
Induction: A Non-Sceptical Humean Solution
Authors: Nelson John O.
Published: January 2009

Pre-analytically at least some of our inductions seem to be possessed of rational justification. This comment would apply, for instance, to my present induction, ‘If that climber high on the Flatirons falls he will be killed,’ not to mention such more momentous inductions as, ‘If a full-scale nuclear war breaks out there will be greater destruction than in World War II.’ Notoriously, however, a few Humean reflections seem to strip even the most plausible of our inductions of all possible rational justification, leaving them mere bare psychological faits accomplis: in effect, section V of the Enquiry's ‘Sceptical Solution of these Doubts.’
Language and the Society of Others
Authors: Robinson Guy
Published: January 2009

The solitary language user is again stalking the critical fields of Europe (and America, one should add). This pre-social individual, abstracted from all social and historical context, has been seemingly revived after what many of us saw as a death-blow dealt by Wittgenstein in his analysis of the notion of following a rule, and his related discussions bringing out the impossibilities of a ‘private’ language—what has come to be known as Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’. Just what a ‘private language’ is has become the issue. Did Wittgenstein show that language-use and rule-following essentially and necessarily involved others, and were therefore necessarily social in character (thus showing that to be human and to be rational was necessarily to be social—as Aristotle had it)? Or did his arguments bear only against the notion of a language which was essentially and necessarily private, one which could not in principle be taught to another?
McTaggart at the Movies
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: January 2009

I shall argue that cinematic images do not have tense: not, at least, in the sense that has been ascribed to them by film theorists. This does not abolish time in cinema, for there can be temporal relations without tense, and temporal relations between cinematic images can indicate temporal relations between events depicted. But the dispensability of tense will require us to rethink our assumptions about what is sometimes called anachrony in cinema: the reordering of story-time by narrative, of which the flashback is the most common example.
Philosophy and its History
Authors: Copleston Frederick
Published: January 2009

The claim that philosophy and its history are two distinct, though interrelated, things would probably seem allmost people who have any idea of what philosophy is, to be so obviously true that it would be foolish or perverse to call it in question. Do we not assume, and rightly, that there is a real distinction between art and the history of art, between science and the history of science? Is there not also a real distinction between philosophy and history of philosophy? Artistic creation and telling the story of the development of the arts through the centuries are clearly not the same thing, though there is an obvious relationship between them. Similarly, the actual process of scientific inquiry and formulating scientific hypotheses and theories is not the same thing as recounting the genesis of such hypotheses and theories. Again, it hardly needs saying that there is a difference between Kant's original creative development of his philosophy and the activity of providing even a sympathetic and illuminating interpretative account of Kant's thought.
Wholes, Parts, and Infinite Collections
Authors: Johnson P. O.
Published: January 2009

In his book, The Principles of Mathematics, the young Bertrand Russell abandoned the common-sense notion that the whole must be greater than its part, and argued that wholes and their parts can be similar, e.g. where both are infinite series, the one being a sub-series of the other. He also rejected the popular view that the idea of an infinite number is self-contradictory, and that an infinite set or collection is an impossibility. In this paper, I intend to re-examine Russell's wisdom in doing both these things, and see if it might not have made more sense, and caused his enterprise fewer problems, if he had simply stuck to our commonplace ideas. To this end, I shall also be considering his treatment of certain paradoxes that he claims can only be resolved by the abandonment of the above notions, as well as certain others which his theories appear to have generated.
Caring about Justice
Authors: Dancy Jonathan
Published: January 2009

In the post-Gilligan debate about the differences, if any, between the ways in which people of different genders see the moral world in which they live, I detect two assumptions. These can be found in Gilligan's early work, and have infected the thought of others. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is Kohlberg's Kantian account of one moral perspective, the one more easily or more naturally operated by men and which has come to be called the justice perspective. (What I mean by calling this Kantian will emerge shortly.) This is the perspective whose claims Gilligan initially found suspect, not because she thought it a distorted account of the way in which male subjects operated, but because she disputed its claims to be the only account or the best or dominant one. Throughout the ensuing debate Kohlberg's account has been left in place, and challenged not for correctness but only for uniqueness.
The Definition of ‘Game’
Authors: Rowe M. W.
Published: January 2009

Besides its intrinsic interest, the definition of ‘game’ is important for three reasons. Firstly, in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations ‘game’ is the paradigm family resemblance concept. If he is wrong in thinking that ‘game’ cannot be defined, then the persuasive force of his argument against definition generally will be considerably weakened. This, in its turn, will have important consequences for our understanding of concepts and philosophical method. Secondly, Wittgenstein's later writings are full of analogies drawn from games—chess alone is mentioned scores of times—and a proper understanding of ‘game’ can lead us to exercise more caution when considering the parallels between games and non-games. Thirdly, games and play are intriguingly and closely related to art and ritual, and an analysis of games can throw considerable light on both of the latter.
On Kripke's and Goodman's Uses of ‘Grue’
Authors: Hacking Ian
Published: January 2009

Kripke's lectures, published as Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, posed a sceptical problem about following a rule, which he cautiously attributed to Wittgenstein. He briefly noticed an analogy between his new kind of scepticism and Goodman's riddle of induction. ‘Grue’, he said, could be used to formulate a question not about induction but about meaning:

the problem would not be Goodman's about induction—‘Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past, will be grue in the future?’—but Wittgenstein's about meaning: ‘Who is to say that in the past I did not mean grue by “green”, so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, “green”?’.
Norman Malcolm: A Memoir
Authors: Serafini Anthony
Published: January 2009

I first met Norman Malcolm in the fall of 1963 when, as a terrified sophomore, I took his course in Free Will and Determinism at Cornell. I believe I had already heard that Malcolm was a figure of almost legendary proportions.
Madness and Method
Authors: Beehler Rodger
Published: January 2009

The attention recently accorded to the writings of Oliver Sacks has once more recalled to a community wider than medical personnel the deeplymoving strangeness of human beings. I refer especially to Sacks' book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and to his earlier book Awakenings (which last has inspired a current commercial film of the same title). A comparison that comes immediately to mind is R. D. Laing's work, which was widely read and discussed in the decade from, roughly, 1965 to 1975.
The Concept of a University
Authors: Hamlyn D. W.
Published: January 2009

To those who think that an institution must be a function of its history it must seem a considerable anomaly that when universities were first set up in the Middle Ages their main aim, apart from being communities of scholars, was to produce theologians, lawyers and doctors of medicine. For arts and what then had some connection with what we now know as science, as incorporated in the traditional seven liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, were thought of as merely propaedeutic to the study of theology, law and medicine. Those seven liberal arts occupied the student during the course for the B.A., which gave the licence to teach, and some students went no further than that. But the main concern of a university lay in what happened after the B.A., in the attainment of a mastership or in what was in effect the doctorate in one of the three areas which I have mentioned before. Indeed, in some universities, particularly those in the south of Europe, the B.A. was given only scant attention and only lip service was given to the idea of liberal arts.
McDowell's Kant: Mind and World
Authors: Bird Graham
Published: January 2009

McDowell'sMind and Worldis a commentary on a traditional, dualist, epistemology which puzzles over, and offers accounts of, a fundamental division between mental, subjective items, and nonmental, objective items in experience. The principal responses to that tradition which McDowell considers are those of Davidson's coherentism, Evans's form of realism, and Kant; but it is Kant's famous B75 text which occupies centre stage:

‘Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer; Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind’. (Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind).
‘The more perfect the maker, the more perfect the product’: Descartes and fabrication
Authors: Gombay André
Published: January 2009

1. Legend has it that as Mozart lay dying, a stranger dressed in black entered the room. Without saying word, he walked to the death-bed, removed the manuscript sheets of the Requiem on which the composer had been working until his final hours, and departed. This was not as you might have thought an envoy from beyond—but the servant of a certain Viennese nobleman, Count Walsegg zu Stuppach. The Count was in the habit of commissioning music anonymously, and having it played in his palace as though it were his own. In extremis he was collecting the score for a forthcoming soirée.
Forgiveness and Loyalty
Authors: Benn Piers
Published: January 2009

Contemporary moral philosophy rightly gives an important place not only to theories of right action, but to the nature and value of our interpersonal moral attitudes, including such reactions as resentment, admiration and forgiveness. Whilst these concerns have always been of interest to theologians and psychologists, their philosophical importance partly derives from wider concerns about the nature of persons. The recent resurgence, for instance, of retributivist theories of punishment, which are finding favour among many philosophical writers, largely bases itself on the idea that a range of ‘participant reactive attitudes’ (to borrow P. F. Strawson's phrase) is both socially indispensable and morally legitimate. In this web of interpersonal responses is forgiveness, which cannot properly be examined without discussion of other responses such as indignation, anger and even hatred.
Cambridge Philosophers VI: Henry Sidgwick
Authors: Harrison Ross
Published: January 2009

The philosophy department in Edinburgh is in David Hume tower; the philosophy faculty at Cambridge is in Sidgwick Avenue. In one way, no competition. Everybody (who's anybody) has heard of Hume, whereas even the anybody who's anybody may not have heard of Sidgwick. Yet in another way, Sidgwick wins this arcane contest. For if David Hume, contradicting the Humean theory of personal identity, were to return to Edinburgh, he would not recognize the tower. Whereas, if someone with more success in rearousing spirits than Sidgwick himself had could now produce him, Sidgwick would know the avenue. For he planned it; he partially paid for it; and he pushed it past the local opposition. He was its creator. And creator not just of the avenue: if Sidgwick is not quite the only begetter, it was he more than anyone who was responsible for building the school of philosophy in Cambridge which is being celebrated in this series of articles.
A Mind of One's Own
Authors: Lucas J. R.
Published: January 2009

Whatever good or ill it did to Guy Fawkes, his resuscitation at the hands of Bernard Williams has, by any utilitarian reckoning, been a Good Thing. A casual glance at the literature that has accumulated over the past thirty-five years leaves no doubt that the topic has been reduplicated many times over, to the great enjoyment of undergraduates, who have been able to write science fiction under the guise of essays in the Philosophy of Mind, and of dons, who in an age of cvs and Assessments, have been able to notch up page after page of counter-replies to replies to rebuttals of previous papers, not to mention an often welcome tally of references in the citation index. But the actual arguments adduced by Williams can be turned to support a much more traditional view of the self, as a necessarily unique agent whose individuality is established by his capacity for autonomous action.
Stroud's Dream Argument Critique
Authors: Nelson John O.
Published: January 2009

In his recent work, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud proposes to carry out an in-depth critique of the attempt by philosophers to invalidate all knowledge of an external world on the basis of Descartes' dream argument. His more particular aims in this endeavour are to uncover significant features of any such scepticism and to disclose in the process fundamental aspects of ‘human knowledge’ itself. Thus, among other features of knowledge that his study discloses, he thinks, is, echoing Kant, the idea ‘that a completely general distinction between everything we get through the senses, on the one hand, and what is true or not true of the external world, on the other, would cut us off forever from knowledge of the world around us.’ And a significant feature of Cartesian dream scepticism he believes to have uncovered is that its ‘effectiveness’ rests upon the philosopher's traditional assumption of an objectively existent world that is understandable ‘from a detached “external” viewpoint.’
The Need for Ontology: Some Choices
Authors: Martin C. B.
Published: January 2009

The aim of this paper is to set out some of the ontologies amongst which some forms of anti-realism must select. This provides the appropriate setting for presenting an alternative realist ontology. The argument is that the choice between the varieties of anti-realism and realism is inevitably a choice between ontologies.
Patience and Courage
Authors: Callan Eamonn
Published: January 2009

Suppose your friends had to ascribe a single vice to you in large measure, along with any virtues that could be coherently combined with that salient vice. Suppose further that the vice had to be either cowardice or impatience. Which would you choose?

I believe almost everyone would choose impatience without hesitation. There are sound moral as well as purely self-regarding reasons for despising cowardice, and to that extent our preference would be reasonable. If we say that a man who is a coward is also compassionate, we know that his compassion cannot be relied upon in any circumstances where it must contend with fear, and if he has a sense of justice, that will be useless if oppression has to be resisted. We cannot even expect him to pursue his own good whenever he perceives that to be hazardous, and so even the self-regarding virtues are corrupted by his dominating vice. On the other hand, a pronounced impatience may seem to be compossible with abundant virtue. Those who are just but cannot patiently endure tyranny are perhaps the most formidable threat to tyranny, and people who boldly go out to seize their own good often fare rather better than those who patiently await its arrival.
What Might not be Nonsense
Authors: Winblad Douglas G.
Published: January 2009

For Wittgenstein, as Cora Diamond interprets him in the essays collected in her recent The Realistic Spirit, there are no logical truths, and a host of other linguistic constructions, such as ‘A is an object’ are, contrary to appearances, nonsensical. In what follows, after outlining Diamond's account I argue that the position she ascribes to Wittgenstein is incoherent. I also reject some possible responses to this charge, among them an appeal to the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.
Reasonable Doubts about Rational Choice
Authors: Houghton David
Published: January 2009

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then we should cast the light of reason upon it. That is an old idea. It has lately been given a new direction by hope that the theory of rational choice can shed a suitable light.
The Incoherence of the Moral ‘Ought’
Authors: Richter Duncan
Published: January 2009

Elizabeth Anscombe's paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’1 seems clearly to have failed in its task. Kurt Baier describes the paper as ‘widely discussed and much admired’2 and Peter Winch has called one of its three theses ‘enormously influential’3 within moral philosophy.
Utilitarianism and Idealism: A Rapprochement
Authors: Sprigge T. L. S.
Published: January 2009

Utilitarian ethics and metaphysical idealism, especially of a Bradleyan sort, are not usually thought of as natural allies. Yet when one considers that it is a crucial part of utilitarian doctrine that the only genuine value is experienced value and almost the definition of idealism that for it the only genuine reality is experienced reality one should surely suspect that the two views have a certain affinity. The essential impulse behind utilitarianism is the sense that the only criterion of something really being intrinsically good is that it feels good. To the ordinary man to say that something feels good is much the same as saying that it is a pleasure, so that for him it is a small step from identifying good with what feels good to identifying it with pleasure. It suggests itself, then, that the utilitarian is essentially one who thinks that, so far as the good goes, esse ispercipi. In that case the utilitarian is an idealist about value. It does not follow that he should be an idealist about things in general, but it does suggest the converse, that the idealist about things in general might be expected to be a utilitarian in his ethics.
Negation: Bradley and Wittgenstein
Authors: Stock Guy
Published: January 2009

There are two main claims that Bradley makes concerning negative judgment in the Principles of Logic:

(i) Negative judgment ‘stands at a different level of reflection’ from affirmative judgment.

(ii) Negative judgment ‘presupposes a positive ground’.

I will consider what Bradley means by these claims, and draw comparisons with Wittgenstein's views on negation as they developed between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Remarks.
Utilitarianism and the Noble Art
Authors: Radford Colin
Published: January 2009

Utilitarianism tells us that actions are morally right and good if and to the extent that they add to human happiness or diminish human unhappiness. And—or, perhaps, therefore—it also tells us that the best action a person can perform is that which of all the possible actions open to him is the one which makes the greatest positive difference to human happiness. Moreover, as everyone will also remember, utilitarianism further tries to tell us, perhaps intending it as a corollary of that first, main claim, that the motive for an action has nothing to do with its moral rightness or goodness. (This, of course, is just a philosopher's excessive and incorrect way of making the platitudinous point that one may do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason.) But even if, as utilitarians, we accepted the dubious corollary, it would not follow, as many have thought, that utilitarians have no moral interest in motives. For unless, absurdly, a utilitarian believed either that there was never more than a fortuitous connection between on the one hand what we intended to do and on the other what we did and the consequences of what we did, or that, if there were such connections, we could not know of them, he must believe, as a moralist, that the best motive a person can have for performing an action is likely to be the desire to produce the happiest result. Indeed, utilitarians ought to be morally committed, it would seem, to trying to find out as much as they can about the consequences of our actions, e.g. what connections exist, if any, between how we raise children and what sort of adults they grow up to be.
Subjectivity
Authors: Malcolm Norman
Published: January 2009

In his book The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel says that ‘the subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality’ (op. cit., p. 7). He speaks of ‘the essential subjectivity of the mental’ (ibid., p. 17), and of ‘the mind's irreducibly subjective character’ (ibid., p. 28). ‘Mental concepts’, he says, refer to ‘subjective points of view and their modifications’ (ibid., p. 37):

The subjective features of conscious mental processes—as opposed to their physical causes and effects—cannot be captured by the purified form of thought suitable for dealing with the physical world that underlines the appearances. Not only raw feels but also intentional mental states—however objective their content—must be capable of manifesting themselves in subjective form to be in the mind at all (ibid., pp. 15–16).
Should Blackmail be Banned?
Authors: Owens David
Published: January 2009

There is no right to blackmail. So says the law and so say most moral observers. A few libertarian voices have been raised in defence of blackmail (e.g. Mack) but such a defence is liable to be treated as a reductio of the defender's own free market philosophy. However, it is surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong with blackmail.
Simulacra, Enactment and Feeling
Authors: Deutscher Max
Published: January 2009

The general context of this writing is that of finding exits both from dualism and from reductive physicalism. Dualism—the attitude of seeing and taking things according to a fixed absolute distinction, with mind as invisible, conscious ‘containing’ the thought, feeling and sensation ‘hidden’ by body. Reductive physicalism—the attempt to grasp and be satisfied with body as left over by dualism's rape of its mentality, dualism's refusal to recognize the distinctiveness of point of view, as requiring a bodily mentality. Physicalism finally supplants an ‘inner life’ within the bodily vacancy after all, as in traditional dualist image, but now understands that ‘inner’, ‘conscious’ life in the terms pertaining to processes in the brain, rather than as deeds, passions, thoughts, reasoning as within the general ‘imaginary’ of our several minds.
Theodicy and Animal Pain
Authors: Harrison Peter
Published: January 2009

The existence of evil is compatible with the existence of God, most theists would claim, because evil either results from the activities of free agents, or it contributes in some way toward their moral development. According to the ‘free-will defence’, evil and suffering are necessary consequences of free-will. Proponents of the ‘soul-making argument’—a theodicy with a different emphasis—argue that a universe which is imperfect will nurture a whole range of virtues in a way impossible either in a perfect world, or in a totally evil one. The pain of animals is widely thought to constitute a major difficulty for both of these accounts, for if we ask whether the only evils present in the world result directly from the free actions of created agents, or contribute in some way to ‘soul-making’ of such agents, we are bound to admit that, on the face of it, much animal pain does not.
Heidegger's Quest for Being
Authors: Edwards Paul
Published: January 2009

An almost unbelievable amount of false philosophy has arisen through not realizing what ‘existence’ means…. [It] rests upon the notion that existence is, so to speak, a property that you can attribute to things, and that the things that exist have the property of existence and the things that do not exist do not. That is rubbish (Bertrand Russell).

I have dared to puncture several metaphysical balloons and nothing came out of them but hot air (Voltaire).
The Aroma of Coffee
Authors: Mounce H. O.
Published: January 2009

My title has been taken from the following passage in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

Describe the aroma of coffee—why can't it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded? (610).
Bat or Batman?
Authors: Pugmire David
Published: January 2009

Thomas Nagel claimed that subjectivity is what distinguishes those states known in the vernacular as conscious or as experiences. And he argued that subjectivity eludes reductivist theories of mind, which are obliged to ignore it and hence to fail. I shall be concerned here primarily with the formulation of the concept of subjectivity. Nagel tried to delineate subjectivity in a well known phrase: ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. Nagel offers to explain this condition of being host to conscious experience as the organism's having a point of view on the world, a point of view which is its own and nothing else's, however much or little the world as disclosed by it may agree with what is presented from other points of view.
Scepticism—Philosophical and Everyday
Authors: Hinton J. M.
Published: January 2009

Many years ago we often witnessed a testy insistence, on the part of some purist, that some very familiar philosophical ‘ism’ be defined before being discussed; when most people either thought that had been done already or were happy to wait for the discussion itself to identify the ‘ism’. The old new style, that featured those unexpected demands for definition, ended by trying people's patience in its turn. Today there is a widespread assumption that we know, well enough, what is meant in philosophy by Scepticism. Perhaps the majority view is something like this:

The philosophical term Scepticism admittedly covers a number of different stances. The one that a given philosopher wants to discuss may or may not be the most like that of the original ancient Skeptics. Still the context normally makes it clear enough what is meant, and there is more point in discussing whatever thing is meant than in quarrelling about the name. As for the way, or ways, in which the word scepticism with a small s is used when people are not referring to any traditional philosophical position—we can safely disregard colloquial usage in this context. As a rule the main point is to see how, if at all, the Scepticism in question is best combated or refuted.
Jews as a Metaphysical Species
Authors: Lurie Yuval
Published: January 2009

There are certain remarks in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein writes about Jews and about what he describes as their ‘Jewish mind’. In these remarks he appears to be trying to make a distinction between two different spiritual forces which operate in Western culture and which give rise to two different types of artists and works of art. On one side of the divide are Jews and works of art imbued with Jewish spirit. On the other side are men of culture and works of art which exhibit a non-Jewish spirit. Among the various remarks made in this context, he offers the following thoughts about the spiritual nature of Jews, their mentality, character and artistic achievements:

‘You get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish’ (1). Following Renan he writes: ‘The Semitic races have an unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete’ (6). This, he explains, is because Jews are attracted by ‘pure intellectualism’. ‘I think it would be possible now to have a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would simply be stylized human types.’ (In his opinion this suits Karl Kraus's plays and their abstract nature.) ‘Masked theatre is anyway the expression of an intellectualistic character. And for the same reason perhaps it is a theatrical form that will attract only Jews’ (12). ‘The Jew is a desert region, but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect’ (13). ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand somebody else's work better than that person understands it himself.’ But intellect, it seems, is not a mental attribute providing for genius and true creative powers. ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) … It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass which has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn't he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?)’ (18–19).
Virtue and Character
Authors: Walker A. D. M.
Published: January 2009

Moral theories which, like those of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, give a central place to the virtues, tend to assume that as traits of character the virtues are mutually compatible so that it is possible for one and the same person to possess them all. This assumption—let us call it the compatibility thesis—does not deny the existence of painful moral dilemmas: it allows that the virtues may conflict in particular situations when considerations associated with different virtues favour incompatible courses of action, but holds that these conflicts occur only at the level of individual actions. Thus while it may not always be possible to do both what would be just and what would be kind or to act both loyally and honestly, it is possible to be both a kind and a just person and to have both the virtue of loyalty and the virtue of honesty.
Anti-Social Determinism
Authors: Flew Antony
Published: January 2009

The general moral decline widely perceived to be in process in both the UK and the USA is no doubt the effect of many causes. The present paper attends to only one, the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state, and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic de-moralization of that machinery. It attempts to undermine a main assumption supporting that de-moralization, and thus contribute to the campaign for re-moralization waged in recent years by, among others, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU) in London and like-minded think-tanks in the USA.
Faith and Reason
Authors: Mounce H. O.
Published: January 2009

In a symposium with Roger Trigg, Renford Bambrough remarks that in discussing the difference between reason and faith philosophers too often raise the issue in a misleading form.1 The form is that of the ‘treacherous singular’. In other words, they assume that there is a single difference between reason and faith, that a line may be drawn with faith entirely on one side and reason entirely on the other. Against this, Bambrough argues that there is no sharp difference between the two, that they are related in many ways and that within the network of our discourse they come to different things at different points. Philosophers too often look only at one or two points, assume a radical divergence and produce a caricature alike of reason and of faith. A more extensive view will reveal no such radical incompatibility; rather it will enable us to see faith as a mode of reason.
Moral Certainty
Authors: Lichtenberg Judith
Published: January 2009

A man has sexual intercourse with his three-year-old niece. Teenagers standing beside a highway throw large rocks through the windshields of passing cars. A woman intentionally drives her car into a child on a bicycle. Cabdrivers cut off ambulances rushing to hospitals. Are these actions wrong? If we hesitate to say yes, that is only because the word ‘wrong’ is too mild to express our responses to such acts
What′s Old in Derrida?
Authors: Landau Iddo
Published: January 2009

Revolutions often retain more characteristics of the pre-revolutionary state than their makers like to admit. Characterizing the pre-revolutionary state as bad (otherwise there would have been no need for revolution), and wishing to accentuate the greatness of their doings, revolutionaries like to stress the differences between the previous state of affairs and the new one, and prefer to see the similarities as few and insignificant. They are frequently wrong.1
Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations
Authors: Cordner Christipher
Published: January 2009

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could be its preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness.
Ten Answers For Psycho-analysis
Authors: Dilman Ilham
Published: January 2009

Professor Phillips′s short paper ‘Ten Questions for Psycho-Analysis’ (Philosophy 68, 1993) goes back a long time to 1964 or 65. The questions were originally directed to me after a paper I read to the Philosophical Society in Swansea. I have answered some of these questions in my books on Freud, though perhaps not to Phillips′s satisfaction. Here I shall try to do so again, however briefly.
Moral Beliefs and Blameworthiness
Authors: Fields Lloyd
Published: January 2009

It is a commonly-held belief that ignorance excuses. But what of moral ignorance? Is a person blameless who acts from “false” moral principles? In this paper I shall try to show that such a person is blameworthy. I shall produce an argument that connects the acceptance of moral principles with character, character with moral responsibility, and moral responsibility with the justifiability of blame.
Spinoza on Religious Choice
Authors: Mason Richar
Published: January 2009

Here are three sets of circumstances: (i) On 27 July 1656, at the age of 23, Spinoza was thrown out of his religious community–the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. During the remaining 21 years of his life it would have been easy enough for him to have returned, in practical if not in personal terms, but he chose not to do so. Despite close association with members of various Protestant sects, he chose to live without affiliation to any religious group. At that time, this was rare.