bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Higher-Order Vagueness for Partially Defined Predicates
Authors: Soames Scott
Published: November 2023

In this paper I will talk about a perplexing problem that arises for the theory of vague and partia1ly defined predicates that 1 sketched in my book Understamlin3 Truth, and which can, I think, be expected to arise for other theories that employ partially defined predicates.’ The problem is that of making sense of so-called higherorder vagueness. This problem is often regarded as the chief difficulty facing analyses which treat vague predicates as partially defined. Although I can’t claim to have solved the problem, r will argue today that it is more tractable than it is often taken to be. I begin by rehearsing the basic framework that I presuppose.
Towards a Friendly, Transatlantic Critique of The Second Sex
Authors: Doeuff (trans. E. Grosholz) Michéle Le
Published: November 2023

I did n’t participate much in celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of The Second Sex.I felt I had done enough, since I began to address the work of Simone de Beauvoir in 1976, to defend her stature as a philosopher at a time when it was n’t at all fashionable to take her work seriously. Since this volume of essays seeks to put into perspective a life’s work which merits the attention of both philosophers and historians of ideas, I would like to say a few words about the circumstances that Jed me to devote part of my seminar on women and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure at Fontenay to the study of Beauvoir.
Complicity and Slavery in The Second Sex
Authors: James Susan
Published: November 2023

In the Introduction to The Second SexSimone de Beauvoir characterizes the category of the other as primordial (SS1972, 16; DS1986, L 16). To understand the relations between social groups, including men and women, we must start from Hegel’s insight that there is ‘in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility to every other conscious ness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed-he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object’ (SS 1972, 17; DS1986, i. 17). Here Beauvoir presents a framework for explaining the relations between the sexes which makes them continuous with other human relationships.
Simone de Beauvoir and Human Dignity
Authors: Wilson Catherine
Published: November 2023

Is human dignity a feature that is detected or one that is postulated? If it is detected, how reliably is it detected, and if errors are common are they more likely to be errors of over-attribution or of under-attribution? If dignity is postulated, is it postulated universally? Can one lose the feature by behaving in certain ways, or lose the entitlement to have it postulated in oneself? What are the social consequences of possessing or lacking human dignity? The answers to these questions are not obvious. An important contribution of The Second Sexto moral philosophy is its treatment of human dignity as a relational concept pertaining to our estimation of others and, at the same time, as a concept distinct from mere social prestige.
Introduction
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

The subject of this book is the idea of the Self, and I will start with that. But gradually there will emerge implications for life and death, and how we should view them. Parts of the book are more historical, others largely philosophical, although these categories are never separate.1 My original interest in the self stemmed from my discovery at the age of six that mortality applied to me and not just to insects. Initially, that interest led to a focus on certain types of question about the self, particularly whether it made sense to think of the same person as existing again after the interruption of death, and what made people distinct from each other. Those questions of personal identity and difference have indeed provided the main focus for much modern philosophy of the self.
The Varieties Of Self And Philosophical Development Of The Idea
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

I have said what I mean by ‘Self’ ; and why I think there is such a thing. The next task is to see whether ancient philosophers had accounts of self. I think they most certainly did. Again and again, they show the same interest in the individual person, and especially the individual viewed from the first-person point of view as ȁ8me’. Moreover, like ourselves, they often express these ideas of self just as we do, by the use of pronouns.
The Categorization of Colour
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

As pointed out in the Introduction, linguistics is concerned with categorization on two levels. On the one hand, linguists need categories in order to describe the object of investigation. In this, linguists proceed just like practitioners of any other discipline. The noises that people make are categorized as linguistic or non-linguistic noises; linguistic noises are categorized as instances of a particular language, or of a dialect of a particular language; sentences are categorized as grammatical or ungrammatical; words are categorized as nouns or verbs; sequences of words are categorized as examples of syntactic constructions; sound segments are classiﬁed as vowels or consonants, stops or fricatives, and so on.But linguists need to be concerned with categorization at another level. Many of the things that linguists study – words, morphemes, syntactic struc-tures, intonation patterns– not only constitute categories in themselves, they also stand for categories. The phonetic form [1ed] can not only be categorized as, variously, an English word, an adjective, a syllable with a consonant-vowel-consonant structure; [Ied] is used by English speakers to designate a range of physically and perceptually distinct properties of the real world (more precisely, a range of distinct colour sensations caused by the real-world properties) and assigns this range of colours to the category RED.
Linguistic and Encyclopaedic Knowledge
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In previous chapters we encountered cases where it seemed that the meaning of a linguistic form could only be characterized against speciﬁc cultural norms or practices. Various attributes of cups have to do with cultural norms for drinking hot liquids; bachelor of artsonly makes sense in the context of institutions of higher learning and their procedures for granting degrees; even in the sense “man who has never married” bachelorneeds to be understood against the cultural institution of marriage. The understanding of terms like cupand bachelorthus presupposes a certain amount of world knowledge on the part of the language user. In this chapter, we explore in more detail the relevance of background knowledge, and consider the ways in which this kind of knowledge can be incorporated into the characterization of word meanings.
Principles, mechanisms, and causes of change
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I will review the different mechanisms, principles, parameters, constraints, and, ultimately, explanations that have been put forward for language change within the grammaticalization and the P&P models. When comparing the two approaches, I will refer to all the factors that somehow condition change—whether as mechanisms, causes, or constraints—with the neutral term ‘factors’, so as not to prejudge the issue. The reason for this is the well-known problem that many of these determining ‘factors’ are themselves constrained by the nature of the theory in which they are employed. In fact, what may be seen as an explanation or cause in one theory, may not be considered more than a description or a mechanism in another.
A paradigm case: the story of the modals (and other auxiliaries)
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: November 2023

In many ways, the story of the modals in English could be said to constitute a paradigm case. From the moment that Lightfoot wrote his influential article on the development of the English modals in 1974, it has inspired a steady spate of studies on the history of the English modals both within the generative and the grammaticalization schools of thought. Lightfoot indeed called the modals his paradigm case when he introduced the notion of the Transparency Principle and ‘radical change’ in his study on diachronic syntax (1979). Unlike some of his other examples of radical change, this particular case seemed to follow most neatly the scenario in which a number of unrelated, superficial changes lead to an opacity in the grammar system, which then, as a result of the application of the Transparency Principle, undergo a ‘catastrophic’ change, evidenced by a number of simultaneous, related changes (cf. the third category in Table 3.1).
Subjectification, scope, and word order
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: November 2023

Subjectifcation (sometimes also termed ‘subjectivization’) is a phenomenon that often coincides with the process of grammaticalization, especially with the early stages of the process, which according to grammaticalization theorists are characterized by pragmatic enrichment. Traugott (1982, 1989), Sweetser (1990) (and see also the articles in Stein and Wright 1995, and Brinton 1996) show how in many cases of grammaticalization there is a development towards greater subjectivity in that there is a tendency for meanings to become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective attitude towards a proposition. Connections have also been observed between subjectivity and word order.
Toward a usage-based theory of morphosyntactic change: summary and conclusions
Authors: Fischer Olga
Published: November 2023

In this volume I have compared two models for morphosyntactic change which in many ways are each other’s opposites. Where grammaticalization theory is primarily interested in shifts in language utterances and in the semantic-pragmatic motivations behind the shifts, the generative model lays great store by the forms and structures of language, and considers the locus of change to be the individual grammar system rather than language output (cf. §§2.1, 2.2).
The Mental Problems of the Many
Authors: Unger Peter
Published: November 2023

Many years ago, I blush to recall, I published some arguments against the existence of all sorts of commonly supposed entities-against rocks and desks, plants and planets, stars and salt shakers, human brains and bodies, and, perish the thought, against us human thinking experiencers, including even the one who ‘s me. By contrast, now I ‘m trying to develop, in a book I ‘ve been long writing, a humanly realistic philosophy, wherein my existence, and yours, has the status of a quite undeniable philosophic datum.
Law, policy-making, and the contemporary family
Authors: Almond Brenda
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapter, family structure, marriage, and divorce were looked at in terms of the question, what do children want? Even apart from this question, however, policy-makers take seriously the effects changes in these areas may have on children, and so it would be useful to keep in mind a distinction that emerged in earlier chapters between two functions of marriage: the first, individual — two people’s emotional desire or need for each other — the second social — raising children who will later form the nucleus of society. People can, in the end, only determine for themselves how they will behave in relation to the first, and, in a free society, they must be allowed to do so.
Family, identity, and community
Authors: Almond Brenda
Published: November 2023

In widening discussion to the broader social and political functions of the family, it is worth recalling where we began: with reflection on the position of individual human beings, each driven by a need to form a deep bond with another person, not only to escape the loneliness of the human condition, but also to become, together with another person, part of something that could transcend the ephemeral nature of individual existence. However, this picture would not be complete without recognition of the wider context in which this basic nucleus of human communities functions. Whatever the origins of today’s human beings, there has undoubtedly been a dramatic increase from a small number of common forebears in the lost terrain of prehistory to the crowded contemporary world. Two centuries in particular saw a dramatic escalation of numbers.
Seriality and Demonstration in Aristotle’s Ontology
Authors: Fraser Kyle
Published: November 2023

In Aristotle’s ontological framework, non-substances are defined as those entities that exist in virtue of inhering in a substrate On account of their essential dependency on the category of substance the non-substances are held to be definable only in a secondary and derivative way, which Aristotle designates at Metaphysics as definition ‘by addition’ Each non-substance contains, as part of its explanatory definition, the name or definition of the substance kind in which it essentially inheres, just as male and female must be defined as properties of animals, snubness as a property of noses, or colour as a property of surfaces. The non-substances are not only accidentally dependent on the category of substance; their derivative status is built into their essential being. Thus, for example, while pallor is per se independent of Callias or Socrates, or any individual who just happens to be pale, it is essentially dependent on ‘surface’ and must be defined by the inclusion of ‘surface’ in its explanatory account (1029616-17). Leaving aside the per accidens entanglements of the non-substances, we discover that every nonsubstance is essentially the predicate of some substance kind, and thus can be said to have an ‘essence’ only in a derivative way.
Qualities and Bodies: Alexander Against the Stoics
Authors: Kupreeva Inna
Published: November 2023

The goal of this paper is to examine the relation between the Stoic notion of quality and Aristotelian form on the basis of some discussions in Alexander of Aphrodisias, the leading Peripatetic of the late second century AD, who expended a considerable effort on criticism of the Stoic system, while recognizing a number of shared goals and principles.
Not Even Zeus
Authors: Graver Margaret
Published: November 2023

Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full tells how a clerical error-or so it seems-delivers an antiquated translation of Epictetus’ Discourses to a county jail outside Oakland, from which young Conrad Hensley had requested a spy thriller of similar title.
Revised proof for the uniqueness theorem for ‘no collapse’ interpretations of quantum mechanics
Authors: Clifton Rob
Published: November 2023

Bub and Clifton (1996) proved a uniqueness theorem for ‘no col­ lapse’ interpretations of quantum mechanics. The proof was repeated, with minor modifications, in Bub (1997). The original proof involved a ‘weak separability’ assumption (introduced to avoid a dimensionality constraint) that required several preliminary definitions and considerably complicated the formulation of the theorem. Sheldon Goldstein has pointed out that the proof goes through without this assumption. The question at issue is this: Consider an arbitrary ‘pure’ quantum state represented by a ray e on a Hilbert space 1t and the Boolean algebra or lattice, B(R), generated by the eigenspaces of a single observable R on Ji. The probabilities defined bye for the ranges of values of R can be represented by a probability measure over the 2­valued homomorphisms on B(R). What is the maximal
Lorentz­invariance in modal interpretations
Authors: Clifton Rob
Published: November 2023

Although Bell’s theorem tells us that any interpretation of quantum mechanics must fail to satisfy Bell’s locality condition, the question of Lorentz­invariance is apparently left open by Bell’s theorem. In­ deed, it has been argued by many that nonlocality is compatible with Lorentz­invariance, given certain interpretations of the latter, or of the former. Some give a ‘weak’ interpretation of Lorentz­ invariance, compatible with a ‘strong’ violation of locality. For example, Bohm’s (1952) theory violates locality in a way that requires a preferred frame; but empirical Lorentz­invariance is preserved in the Bohm theory ­ there is no experiment that could determine the preferred frame. (See, for example, Valentini (199la,b), Bohm and Hiley (1993), and Cushing (1994).) On the other hand, ‘orthodox’ interpretations of special relativity maintain a notion of ‘fundamental
Complementarity between position and momentum as a consequence of Kochen­Specker arguments
Authors: Clifton Rob
Published: November 2023

Complementarity is the idea that mutually exclusive pictures are needed for a complete description of quantum­mechanical reality. The paradigm example is the complementarity between particle and wave (or ‘spacetime’ and ‘causal’) pictures, which Bohr took to be reflected in the uncertainty relation LixLip 2: h. Bohr saw this relation as defining the latitude of applicability of the concepts of position and momentum to a single system, not just as putting a limit on our ability to predict the values of both position and momentum within an ensemble of identically prepared systems. Furthermore, right at the start of his celebrated reply to the Einstein­Podolsky­ Rosen (EPR) argument against the completeness of quantum the­
The subtleties of entanglement and its role in quantum information theory
Authors: Clifton Rob
Published: November 2023

For years, since the EPR ‘paradox’ (1935) and Schrodinger’s (1935, 1936) work on entanglement in the 1930s, philosophers of science have struggled to understand quantum correlations. By the end of the 1960s, Bell’s theorem (1964) became widely recognized as establishing that these correlations cannot be explained through the operation of local common causes. Yet it was also clear that, by themselves, quantum correlations cannot be exploited to transmit information between the locations of entangled systems. Many metaphors were developed by philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s to characterize these apparently nonlocal yet curiously benign correlations. They were variously taken to involve ‘passion­at­a­ distance’, ‘nonrobustness’, ‘relational holism’, and ‘randomness in harmony’ (see, respectively, the contributions of Shimony, Redhead, Teller and Fine to Cushing and McMullin (1989)).
Counterpossibles and Similarity
Authors: Laan David Vander
Published: November 2023

Several themes of David Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals, especially their sensitivity to context, pave the way for a viable theory of non-trivial counter possible. If Lewis was successful in defending his account against the early objections, a semantics of counter possible can be defended from similar objections in the same way. The resulting theory will be extended to address ‘might’ counterfactuals and questions about the relative ‘nearness’ of impossible worlds. David Letterman once asked his audience, ‘Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? One, writing his memoirs of the Civil War. Two, advising the President. Three, desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.’ We are being asked to evaluate the counterfactual David Lewis has had some important insights into how we are to understand counterfactuals of this sort, and these insights help us see how to think about counter possibles, i.e., counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, such as if Hitler had time-travelled into the past and killed himself as an infant, then World War II would not have occurred.A Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals can be extended in such a way that counterpossibles are treated as false or as non-trivially true. The context-sensitivity of counterfactuals and a distinction between certain types of contextual influence, both highlighted by Lewis, take on an even greater importance in the case of counterpossibles. Though Lewis would endorse neither the semantics to be proposed nor its underlying ontology, the proposed account is Lewisian in spirit. In fact, the primary objection to the extended semantics parallels many of the early objections to Lewis’s original semantics. If Lewis was successful in defending his account against these, a semantics of counterpossibles can be defended from similar objections in the same way.
The Inference that Leaves Something to Chance
Authors: Sosa David
Published: November 2023

1. Ignorance is insufficient for incoherence: inferring subjects are in principle in a position to avoid invalidity, no matter what their state of knowledge (indeed, no matter what the truth of their premiss beliefs).
Socrates’ Dialectic in Xenophon’s Memorabilia
Authors: Natali Carlo
Published: November 2023

In recent years there has been a tendency to revise the harsh judgement given on Xenophon by philologists of the nineteenth century and the First part of the twentieth century. Some contemporary scholars maintain that it is interesting to study Xenophon’s Socratic writings, even if it is not possible to Find in them a historically accurate image of Socrates. Also the tendency to Find in Xenophon the remains of all the literature written by the Minor Socratics is not as strong as it was previously.
Types of DeWnition in the Meno
Authors: Charles David
Published: November 2023

It has become a commonplace to say that Socrates in the Meno and elsewhere did not have one clear idea of the type of answer he was seeking as an answer to his famous definitional question: ‘what is F?’ Recent critics have distinguished three different types of account which (in their view) Socrates overs in answer to this question. They have separated In their view, Socrates failed to determine which of these three types of definition of F is to be preferred.
Definition in Plato’s Meno
Authors: Karasmanis Vassilis
Published: November 2023

The Meno is considered to be a transitional dialogue between Plato’s early and middle period. Plato, in the Meno, goes beyond the ‘Socratic’ elenchus and proposes new theories and positive ways to arrive at knowledge. In the Meno, we find for the first time the distinction between knowledge and belief (together with a definition of knowledge), the theory of recollection and the hypothetical method, themes that we meet in other middle dialogues.
How do Linguists Classify Languages?
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

In this book we shall be considering a range of methods which can be used in the comparison of languages (and indeed dialects or other varieties). However, classification is not just comparison, but comparison with a particular goal in view—the goal being the discernment of meaningful resemblances in the data, which in turn may allow us to identify those languages which descend from a single common ancestor, and to recover the history which has produced that divergence. Resemblances do, in some cases, have other causes; and although in the chapters that follow we shall concentrate on grouping languages into families, in Chapter 8 we return to the issue of comparison more broadly.
Lexicostatistics
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

The essential first step in the development of any quantitative method is identifying something to measure. If we want to use a quantitative technique to establish whether languages are likely to be related, or whether they fall into the same subgroup, or how similar two languages are relative to a third language, we need to decide what we are going to count; and to ensure that we are comparing like with like, the something we are counting has to be the same across all the languages we are comparing. Indeed, to make the method as flexible as possible we need that something to be the same in all the languages we might ever want to compare. In comparative linguistics this is a tall order. Our first thought might be to turn to sociolinguistics, where quantitative methods have enjoyed such success, and adopt the strategies developed there. However, sociolinguistic studies tend to operate within a single speech community (Patrick 2002), where speakers share the same norms of behaviour and attitude, and the same variable elements of linguistic structure. It is possible, therefore, to isolate a set of variables and to study the circumstances, both linguistic and non-linguistic, under which the different variants emerge. For example, we might consider a phonological variable (t), with variants [t], used mainly by women, and glottal stop [?], mainly used by men. We might find a syntactic variable (negation), with multiple negation (I didn’t do nothing ) favoured by lower-class speakers, and single negative markers (I didn’t do anything) the dominant variant for middle-class speakers; or a lexical variable, where the meaning (be sick) might be expressed by vomit for older speakers and throw up for younger ones.
Climbing Down from the Trees: Network Models
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

The fundamental problems with family trees are the degree of idealization they necessitate and their essential incompatibility with the forces of contact-induced change which, as we have been arguing throughout this book, are as important for at least some languages as descent with differentiation from a common ancestor. Some languages will have an essentially tree-like history, while others are primarily contact languages. Historical linguists, with their propensity for designing opposing methods, might suggest the tree model for one extreme and the wave model for the other: but this does not get around the problem that most languages will occupy some position on the cline between these two end points. We can foresee long and unproductive struggles over deciding when each model is to be used, missing crucial bits of data for each system in the process, whereas in a perfect world what we need is a single model which could sort out for us how much of a language is tree-like and how much non-tree-like, and display the two driving forces, and resulting language features, differently.
Dating
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

Embleton (2000: 143) provides an admirably concise summary of the goals of mathematical approaches to classification, and it is certainly worth quoting the relevant paragraph in full here:Since at least the 1930s, linguists have been seriously and practically interested in the development of mathematical techniques for assessing the closeness of the relationship between a pair of languages, using only information from the contemporary languages themselves. Applied pairwise, this leads to the reconstruction of a family tree for a group of genetically related languages, without the use of any actual historical information about the languages or language family. If one can either determine a rate of linguistic change, or calibrate one of the branch lengths of the putative tree against some external information, one can then assign dates to the splits in the family tree.
Serial Verb Constructions in Dumo
Authors: Ingram Andrew
Published: November 2023

Dumo is a Sko language spoken on the north coast of the island of New Guinea some 15-20km to the west of Vanimo, the capital of Sandaun Province and approximately 30-4okm east of the Sandaun Province (Papua New Guinea)Papua Province (Indonesia) border.
Serial Verbs in Olutec (Mixean)
Authors: Zavala Roberto
Published: November 2023

Olutec is a Mixe-Zoquean language of the Mixean branch. It is spoken in the town of Oluta, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico by approximately fourteen elderly people. Some of the prominent typological features of this language are: (1) it is highly polysynthetic with a very complex verbal template; (2) it shows complex verb compounds; (3) the pronominal proclitics on the verb follow an ergative/ absolutive pattern; (4) it shows the direct vs. inverse alternation; and (5) it includes most of the traits of an OV language, although synchronically the constituent order of the core arguments is quite flexible.
Verbal Compounding in Wolaitta
Authors: Arnha Azeb , Dimmendaal Gerrit J
Published: November 2023

Wolaitta, an Omotic (Afroasiatic) language spoken by approximately 12 million people in southwestern Ethiopia, has a restricted class of compound verbs with just two components, Vj + V2, where Vj is a (same-subject) converb, while V2 is a fully inflected verb. Vj can be any verb in the language, but V2 belongs to a closed class of (about fourteen) verbs. Such compound verbs are distinct from regular converb + main verb or clause-chaining constructions. With the latter, the converb is clearly a subordinate clause describing an anterior, sequential, or simultaneous event to that described by the main clause. With compound verbs, however, the converb plus main verb describe a single event, including, in some cases, the manner in which some action takes place, or the duration of the action expressed.
Preface
Authors: Hampshire Stuart
Published: November 2023

The standard edition of the works of Spinoza in Latin is that of Dr Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg, :1925); a more widely available edition is that of Van Vloten and Land in two volumes (The Hague, :1882). The first volumes of a complete and scholarly English version of Spinoza’s works have appeared, edited by E. M. Curley for Princeton University Press. There is an earlier and respectable translation of the Ethics and On the Correction of the Understanding by W. Hale White (better known as ‘Mark Rutherford’) and Amelia S. Stirling.
Politics and Religion
Authors: Hampshire Stuart
Published: November 2023

Spinoza, in spite of his debt to Thomas Hobbes, was scarcely less original as a political philosopher than as a metaphysician; and his approach to politics is today entirely intelligible and appears as an anticipation of methods which have become familiar in contemporary thought. His conception of political science, which was directly derived from his metaphysics, naturally shocked his contemporaries and successors for the same reasons which made his metaphysics repugnant.
Empiricism and Ramsey’s Account of Theories
Authors: Cruse Pierre
Published: November 2023

Suppose we propose a new scientific theory. Presumably we will do this because we want to explain some facts we already know about, and we will have a language to describe these facts that doesn’t get its meaning from our theory. This language we can call the ‘primary system’. However, typical theories also introduce new, or ‘secondary’, terms that are not in the primary system. These secondary, theoretical, terms tend to refer to things that are abstract and distant from observation. A plausible claim is that their meanings in some way derive from their connection with primary terms. The question arises how are we to understand this dependence.
A Nose By Any Other Name: Sameness, Substitution, And Essence In Aristotle, Metaphysics Z 5
Authors: Lewis Frank a.
Published: November 2023

There is yet another puzzle about them. For (i) if snub nose and hollow nose are the same, the snub and the hollow will be the same; but if not [El OE /L , rn3oh30], because it is impossible to speak of the snub without the thing of which it is the attribute per se (for the snub is hollowness in nose), [1’32] (ii) either to speak of snub nose is not possible, or the same thing will have been said twice, hollow nose nose (for the snub nose will be hollow nose nose), for which reason it is absurd that essence should belong to such things; but (iii) if not [El OE /L , h35], it will go to infinity: for in snub nose nose yet another (nose) will be present. It is clear, therefore, that definition is of substance alone. For if it is also of the other things predicated [rnT17yopuvv, I031"2], then it must be by addition [77p6a0w,,] ... That definition is the account of the essence, and that essence is either of substances alone, or above all and primarily and without qualification (of these), is clear. (Metaph. Z 5, rn3oh28-rn31"2, "11-14)
Aristotle On Being-As-Truth
Authors: Pearson Giles
Published: November 2023

In this paper I provide an account of Aristotle’s notions of being as-truth in E 4 and 0 10 of the Metaphysics.1 I divide my discussion into two parts. First, I consider Aristotle’s account of being-as truth as that applies to statements or beliefs concerning compound or composite entities (E 4 and first half of 0 10), and second, I consider how Aristotle then applies this notion of being-as-truth to the grasping of simple or incomposite entities (second half of 0 10 ). On my account, by ‘being-as-truth’ in E 4 Aristotle means the attaching of beings or entities in thought such that one thinks of things-that-are that they are or of things-that-are-not that they are not. He is thus not, I argue, intending to point to a signification of ‘is’ in statements in which it signifies truth. My view is supported by precise observation of the reasons why Aristotle wishes to exclude being-as-truth from his general enquiry into being qua being.
The Normative Character of Belief
Authors: Baldwin Thomas
Published: November 2023

Moore points to the absurdity of saying such things as ‘I don’t believe that it’s raining, though as a matter of fact it is’ and ‘I believe he has gone out, but he has not’ (Moore 1942: 543; 1959: 175; 1993: 207). He goes on to argue that this kind of absurdity is paradoxical because it disappears once these statements are conjugated into the past tense, as in ‘I did not then believe it was raining, though as a matter of fact it was’, or expressed in the third-person as ‘Moore does not believe that it’s raining, though as a matter of fact it is’ (Moore 1993: 208– 9).
Moore’s Paradox and the Transparency of Belief
Authors: Adler Jonathan E , Armour-Garb Bradley
Published: November 2023

A number of philosophers have thought to extend Moore’s Paradox to concepts other than belief, e.g., I want Tina to go out with me, but I’m indifferent to whether she does. The scope of Moore’s Paradox is the problem of what concepts besides belief will generate a Moore’s (or Moorean) Paradox from the following schema: (MP@) I @ that ( p, but it’s not the case that I @ that p), where @ is a schematic variable ranging over elements of a delimited class of propositional attitude verbs (e.g., desire, belief).
Masque Costumes
Authors: Ravelhofer Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the late 1620s, a popular engraving, The Funeral Obsequies of Sir All-in-New-Fashions , circulated in the English, French, and German satirical press (see Fig. 8). Its unknown artist portrayed the rites administered to a defunct city fop: his mortal remains are paraded in a theatrical pageant while insignia inform bystanders about his lifetime achievements. In best heraldic tradition, the engraving harks back to funerary processions as they were orchestrated for persons of consequence. Sir All-in-New-Fashions’s last outing resembles a macabre catwalk more than an attempt at heroic immortality: his coat of arms consists of his wardrobe.
Colours and Lights: The Costume in Motion
Authors: Ravelhofer Barbara
Published: November 2023

If we tried to restage a court masque based on literary scholarship we would end up with a black-and-white performance. The subject of colour has eluded even groundbreaking studies of Jonesian festival iconography. It was not so in the seventeenth century, when eyewitnesses loved to dwell on colours and fabrics far more than on the literary contents of a performance. For Bulstrode Whitelocke, the colours of his masquers in The Triumph of Peace (1634) embodied the event itself. Twenty years later, he still kept their silver and blue for his own embassy to Sweden.
Animadversions on Burnyeat’ S Theaetetus: on the Logic of The Exquisite Argument
Authors: Wedin Michael V
Published: November 2023

In book Gamma of the Metaphysics Aristotle criticizes Protagoras’ doctrine that man is the measure of all things. This he understands as the thesis that what appears to be the case is the case. I shall refer to this as Protagoras’ Thesis.
Explanation, Deliberation, and Reasons
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality defends a strikingly nonpsychologistic account of motivating reasons for action. When we explain what people do by citing their reasons, we are trying to isolate the considerations that were actually effective in moving them to act. But it is crucial, Dancy contends, that these considerations be understood in a way that preserves their connection to the normative contexts in which the concept of a reason also has a place. The considerations that move agents to act are considerations that agents take to cast a favorable light on the actions they perform, and it is at least sometimes the case that peoples’ motivating reasons are also good reasons for action, considerations that really do recommend or speak in favor of the action that was undertaken.
The Logical Form of Action Sentences
Authors: Lepore Ernie , Ludwig Kirk
Published: November 2023

Strange goings on Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately, ... ‘ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways. Asked for the logical form of this sentence, we might volunteer something like, There is an action x such that Jones did x slowly and Jones did x deliberately and Jones did x in the bathroom, ... ‘ and so on. But then we need an appropriate singular term to substitute for ‘x’. In fact we know Jones buttered a piece of toast.
Intending
Authors: Lepore Ernie , Ludwig Kirk
Published: November 2023

Someone may intend to build a squirrel house without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention to do it, or reasoned about it. And despite his intention, he may never build a squirrel house, try to build a squirrel house, or do anything whatever with the intention of getting a squirrel house built. Pure intending of this kind, intending that may occur without practical reasoning, action, or consequence, poses a problem if we want to give an account of the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science. When action is added to intention, for example when someone nails two boards together with the intention of building a squirrel house, then it may at first seem that the same problem does not necessarily arise.
Mary and Max and Jack and Ned
Authors: Perry John
Published: November 2023

There is more in Ned Block’s rich chapter than I can discuss with the allotments of time, space, and, especially, wit and acumen, that various higher authorities have allotted me. I confine myself to replying to some of his criticisms of my treatment of the knowledge argument in Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (Perry 2001), mainly by restating my view in ways that connect with at least some of his reservations.
Goodbye Growing Block
Authors: Merricks Trenton
Published: November 2023

Eternalism says that all times are equally real. Objects existing at past times and objects existing at future times are just as real as objects existing at the present. Properties had at past times and properties had at future times are had just as much as properties had at the present. Indeed, there is no metaphysical difference at all between past, present, and future. They differ only as a result of one’s perspective, akin to the way ‘‘right here’’ differs from ‘‘over there’’. And so the eternalist takes ‘the present’ to be an indexical, like ‘here’ or ‘this place’. With all this in mind, let’s say that the eternalist believes in a subjective present.
Aristotle’s Constituent Ontology
Authors: Loux Michael
Published: November 2023

In both Aristotle and Nicholas Wolterstorff we meet with a distinction between two styles of metaphysical explanation. They use different language in setting out the distinction. Wolterstorff speaks of relational and constituent ontologies; whereas Aristotle tells us that we can make the substance of sensible particulars either something that exists ‘‘apart from the sensible objects’’ or something that is ‘‘immanent in them’’ (994a15–16); but the contrast they want to mark is, I believe, the same contrast. The context for the distinction is a certain philosophical project, the project Aristotle calls identifying the substance of familiar sensible particulars. Put in general terms, this project is that of explaining why familiar particulars have the character they do, why, that is, they fall under the kinds and exhibit the properties we, in our prephilosophical thinking, associate with them.
Richard dawkins: intellectual plumber—and more
Authors: krebs John
Published: November 2023

The other week I was enduring one of those dinner parties at which the strength with which opinions are held is matched only by the weakness of their foundation. When the conversation turned, as it all too often does, to the possible health benefits of Organic Food, I was asked for a view in my capacity as the recently demitted Chairman of the UK Food Standards Agency. As I embarked on a brief, but pithy, exegesis of the scientific evidence, I was cut short in the middle of my first paragraph by the braying voice of the woman seated opposite me who interjected: ‘But we don’t believe in science in our family’. Suppressing my immediate inclination towards some form of physical response, I diverted my thoughts, as I often have before in similar situations, to the idea that there really should be an ‘Emergency Dawkins Service’.
Deep Commonalities Between Life and Mind
Authors: Pinker Steven
Published: November 2023

US television talk-show host Jay Leno, interviewing a passerby: How do you think Mount Rushmore was formed? Passerby: Erosion? Leno: Well, how do you think the rain knew to not only pick four presidents—but four of our greatest presidents? How did the rain know to put the beard on Lincoln and not on Jefferson? Passerby: Oh, just luck, I guess. I am a cognitive scientist, someone who studies the nature of intelligence and the workings of the mind. Yet one of my most profound scientific influences has been Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. The influence runs deeper than the fact that the mind is a product of the brain and the brain a product of evolution; such an influence could apply to someone who studies any organ of any organism.
The Perverse Primate
Authors: Sterelny Kim
Published: November 2023

Richard Dawkins has had an enormous influence on my professional life. I had always been interested in the interface between philosophy and science, but until the 1980s, the sciences in question had been psychology and linguistics. (Physics was too damned hard.) But in 1983, at the urging of the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, I read The Extended Phenotype—a truly great book—and was hooked on evolutionary biology. My copy disappeared under successive waves of marginal annotations as my career irrevocably changed course. In this essay I shall explore Darwinian visions of a somewhat neglected aspect of human nature: our paradoxical mix of astute intelligence and blindness to the obvious. I shall suggest that Richard’s Darwinism, with its emphasis on conflict, helps us understand this paradox rather better than do alternative evolutionary approaches to our cognitive foibles.
Dawkins and the Virus of Faith
Authors: Grayling A C
Published: November 2023

Richard Dawkins is surely the most frequently-cited champion or demon, depending upon point of view, in the science versus religion wars. His detractors portray him as a humourless, soulless reductionist, a threat not just to faith but to all beauty and brightness. His admirers applaud the devastating blows he lands on the votaries of superstition and unreason. I am with the applauders; and the lucidity, clarity, and force of his contributions are a major part of what makes me so. Having encountered a Dawkins in his writings who is eloquently and indeed poetically alert to the astonishing and beautiful world revealed by science—so much more wonderful than anything the limited imaginings of religion offer—it always used to surprise me when Dawkins’ detractors charged him with sourness.
To Rise Above
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

Understanding what Margaret Thatcher means to Richard Dawkins is the key to understanding what society means to him. Misunderstanding his relationship to her is the basis of a widespread misreading of his place in the political scheme of things. One way and another, the woman has haunted him since she and he rose to prominence in the mid-1970s. Their ascents were not unconnected. Dawkins took the opportunity to begin what became The Selfish Gene during power cuts that ensued from disputes between the coal miners’ union and the Conservative government, led by Edward Heath. These struggles eventually led to Heath’s electoral defeat, which then led to his replacement as Conservative leader by Thatcher in 1975, the year during which Dawkins completed his book.
Richard Dawkins and the Golden Pen
Authors: Ridley Matt
Published: November 2023

Before The Selfish Gene, scientists wrote books for each other, or for laymen, but rarely for both. The great interpreters of science, such as Peter Medawar, J. B. S. Haldane, or Arthur Eddington might write with fluency, wit, and verve, but they were still more inclined to explain established ideas than to explore new mysteries. Gracefully and graciously they gave you the answer rather than the argument. More than anybody before him, Richard Dawkins thought that if he was to persuade his fellow scientists of a new truth that seemed to him ‘stranger than fiction’ he might as well try to enlighten the rest of us while he was at it. The result was that he gave laymen a chance to eavesdrop on scientific debate in action. He was quite explicit about it in his preface: ‘Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate this book to them. First, the general reader, the layman . . .’ The other imaginary readers were the expert and the student.
Representativeness in Corpus Design
Authors: Biber Douglas
Published: November 2023

Some of the first considerations in constructing a corpus concern the overall design: for example, the kinds of texts included, the number of texts, the selection of particular texts, the selection of text samples from within texts, and the length of text samples. Each of these involves a sampling decision, either conscious or not. The use of computer-based corpora provides a solid empirical foundation for general purpose language tools and descriptions, and enables analyses of a scope not otherwise possible. However, a corpus must be ‘representative’ in order to be appropriately used as the basis for generalizations concerning a language as a whole; for example, corpus-based dictionaries, grammars, and general part-of-speech taggers are applications requiring a representative basis (cf. Biber, 1993b). Typically researchers focus on sample size as the most important consideration in achieving representativeness: how many texts must be included in the corpus, and how many words per text sample. Books on sampling theory, however, emphasize that sample size is not the most important consideration in selecting a representative sample; rather, a thorough definition of the target population and decisions concerning the method of sampling are prior considerations. Representativeness refers to the extent to which a sample includes the full range of variability in a population.