bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Pros and Cons of Consequentialism
Authors: Stubbs Anne
Published: January 2009

This paper is not another attempt to refute, or even primarily to criticize, consequentialist accounts of moral assessment; though I shall indicate the kind of criticism of such accounts which I consider to be philosophically appropriate. My primary aim is to examine the validity of some of the claims made by consequentialists themselves on behalf of their own standpoint. It is frequently maintained that an exclusively consequentialist morality uniquely possesses certain advantages; I shall argue that the case for the superiority of consequentialism has yet to be made out.
Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner's Foundations
Authors: Minogue K. R.
Published: January 2009

Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is primarily of interest to philosophers not for its excellent account of European thought about the state but for the self–conscious philosophy which has gone into it. It is a rare historian who pauses to get his philosophy in order before he embarks on a major enterprise, though such a policy is possibly less unusual in intellectual history than in other fields. In Skinner's case, however, this order of doing things has been pushed so far that he counts as a philosopher in his own right, rather than as merely someone who is unusually careful to think about what he is doing. The publication of this major work thus provides a convenient opportunity to make a few remarks about the relation between historical theory and practice.
‘Saints and Heroes’
Authors: Pybus Elizabeth M.
Published: January 2009

In his article ‘Saints and Heroes’, Urmson argues that traditional moral theories allow at most for a threefold classification of actions in terms of their worth, and that they are therefore unsatisfactory. Since the conclusion of his argument has led to the widespread use of the term ‘acts of supererogation’, and since I do not believe that such acts exist, I propose to argue that the actions with which he is concerned not only can, but should, be contained within the traditional classification.
Moore and the Paradox of Analysis
Authors: O'Connor David
Published: January 2009

In 1942, replying to a criticism put to him by Langford, G. E. Moore confessed that he was unable to solve the paradox of analysis. But while conceding inability to solve the puzzle Moore offered the following suggestion, which he did not further develop: I think that, in order to explain the fact that, even if ‘To be a brother is the same thing as to be a male sibling’ is true, yet nevertheless this statement is not the same as the statement ‘To be a brother is to be a brother’, one must suppose that both statements are in some sense about the expressions used as well as about the concept of being a brother. But in what sense they are about the expressions used I cannot see clearly; and therefore I cannot give any clear solution to the puzzle.
A New Look at Fictional Reference
Authors: Martin Graham D.
Published: January 2009

In Chapters 6 and 7 of Language, Truth and Poetry I attempted to solve the ancient problem of fictional reference by claiming that a fictional construct (such as ‘Pickwick’ or ‘centaur’) ‘points’ or refers to certain features of reality in rather the same way as an abstraction like ‘gravitation’ or ‘cruelty’ does. I now believe that this theory of mine is unsatisfactory; and I should like to propose a new solution to the problem.
Hume and the Delightful Tragedy Problem
Authors: Hill Eric
Published: January 2009

‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure’, Hume writes, ‘which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.’ It is with this opening remark that Hume introduces the main subject of his essay, ‘Of Tragedy’. In that essay he attempts to account for the pleasure spectators of well-written tragedies receive, i.e. he attempts to solve what might aptly be called the ‘delightful tragedy’ problem, which, in essence, is the paradoxical phenomenon of pleasure being aroused from the ‘bosom of uneasiness’. In this paper I shall critically analyse Hume's solution to the problem; the ultimate point of my discussion will be to determine whether his solution is adequate. I shall begin by focusing briefly upon two accounts of the paradoxical pleasure which Hume mentions and criticizes. Then I shall set out and analyse Hume's own account, and thereby determine its adequacy.
The Aesthetic and the Artistic
Authors: Best David
Published: January 2009

In the literature and discussion on aesthetics there is a widespread failure either to recognize that there is any significant distinction between the aesthetic and the artistic, or to characterize the distinction adequately. While in some cases the conflation of the two concepts is of little or no consequence, in others it can lead to serious misconception. Although it is widely overlooked the distinction is often of central importance, and is more complex than is commonly supposed.
Bradley and Moral Engagement
Authors: Kendal Gordon
Published: January 2009

One minor problem in understanding Bradley's moral philosophy is that of how he manages to combine a reverence for the ordinary man's moral sense with what amounts almost to contempt for the actual precepts of popular morality. The reverence seems clear. At the outset of Ethical Studies Bradley appears as the great defender of the plain man against the depredations of theorizing and cultivation. Contemporary moral philosophers were too sophisticated, with their cavalier disregard of the moral feelings and convictions of uneducated people. Admittedly popular moral views had their limitations: they were neither all-comprehensive nor everywhere consistent. Still, ‘if we want a moral sense that has not yet been adulterated, we must not be afraid to leave enlightenment behind us’.
Intolerable Wrong and Punishment
Authors: Wolgast Elizabeth H.
Published: January 2009

A common justification for retributive views of punishment is the idea that injustice is intolerable and must be answered. For instance F. H. Bradley writes:

Why … do I merit punishment? It is because I have been guilty. I have done ‘wrong’… Now the plain man may not know what he means by ‘wrong’, but he is sure that, whatever it is, it ‘ought’ not to exist, that it calls and cries for obliteration; that, if he can remove it, it rests also upon him, and that the destruction of guilt, whatever be the consequences, and even if there be no consequences at all, is still a good in itself; and this, not because a mere negation is a good, but because the denial of wrong is the assertion of right.

A wrong is something that ought not to exist and calls to be obliterated. If anyone is able to remove it, he is obligated to do so or the wrong will also be partly his. To deny or obliterate a wrong is to assert right, Bradley says—as if the two things were counterpoised, one able to cancel the other. It reminds us of the balance held by the figure of Justice, and of debts and credits in accounts. Paying a debt erases it; the debt no longer exists. In a similar way punishment is supposed to erase wrong.
Creating Facts and Values
Authors: Putnam Ruth Anna
Published: January 2009

Moral sceptics maintain that there are no objective moral values, or that there is no moral knowledge, or no moral facts, or that what looks like a statement which makes a moral judgment is not really a statement and does not have a truth-value. All of this is rather, unclear because all of it is negative. It will be necessary to remove some of this unclarity because my aim in this paper is to establish a proposition which may be summarized by saying: even if there are no objective moral values in one sense, there are objective moralvalues in another sense, and the latter values are good enough to do some of the jobs that objective values in the first sense would have done. A useful analogy might be that of a person who has lost her hand and has been given a prosthesis. In one sense the prosthesis is not as real (because man-made) as the hand, in another sense it is just as real (both are physical objects); most importantly, the person can do with the prosthesis enough of what she could do with the hand to make do.
Self-knowledge and Convention
Authors: Kekes John
Published: January 2009

This paper is a defence of the combination of three theses. First, selfknowledge is a requirement of good lives, but it must include knowledge of our limitations. Second, these limitations are set by certain unavoidable conventions whose observance is another requirement of good lives. Third, Sophocles's Oedipus the King is a moral text of the highest significance, for it contains a profound account of why self-knowledge must include knowledge of unavoidable conventions limiting human aspirations.
Simple Colours
Authors: Nathan Nicholas
Published: January 2009

[Colour is king in our innate quality space, but undistinguished in cosmic circles.] Most philosophers would agree with at least the second half of Quine's dictum. It is indeed on the general view wrong to believe that, as qualities, colours are extra-mentally actual in even the humblest role. Mind-independent material things have on the general view powers to cause sensations of red or blue, but if, in [sensations of red or blue], [red] and [blue] name qualities, we are not to believe that these qualities are possessed by things causing the sensations. My first thesis, defended in section 2, is that partly because we do count colours as eminent among qualities, we would on reflection want it to be true that some things have such qualities when they are not perceived. It would therefore be sad subsequently to discover the wrongness of believing that this is how things are. My second thesis, defended in sections 3 and 4, is that there is in fact no danger as yet of this kind of disappointment. So far, the philosophers have not shown that, if we believe that colour qualities exist as contents of experience, we ought not also to believe that things have these qualities when they are not perceived. One might of course deny that colour qualities exist even as contents of experience, so that the desire for them to be mind-independently exemplified evaporates on the realization that it lacks an intelligible object. Our pre-scientific concept of red, according to Armstrong, is, apart from being the concept of something falling under a determinable, [all blank or gap].
Wittgenstein's Indeterminism
Authors: Scheer Richard K.
Published: January 2009

Does it follow from Wittgenstein's views about indeterminism that irregularities of nature could take place? Did he believe that chairs could simply disappear and reappear, that water could behave differently than it has, and that a man throwing a fair die might throw ones for a week? Or are these things only imaginable? Is his view simply that if we adopted an indeterministic point of view (and language) we would no longer look for causes, or would not always look for causes, because we would no longer assume that there must be a cause of each event?
Do Animals Feel Pain?
Authors: Harrison Peter
Published: January 2009

In an oft-quoted passage fromThe Principles of Morals and Legislation(1789), Jeremy Bentham addresses the issue of our treatment of animals with the following words: ‘the question is not, Can theyreason? nor, can theytalk? but, Can theysuffer?’ The point is well taken, for surely if animals suffer, they are legitimate objects of our moral concern. It is curious therefore, given the current interest in the moral status of animals, that Bentham's question has been assumed to be merely rhetorical. No-one has seriously examined the claim, central to arguments for animal liberation and animal rights, that animals actually feel pain. Peter Singer'sAnimal Liberationis perhaps typical in this regard. His treatment of the issue covers a scant seven pages, after which he summarily announces that ‘there are no good reasons, scientific or philosophical, for denying that animals feel pain’. In this paper I shall suggest that the issue of animal pain is not so easily dispensed with, and that the evidence brought forward to demonstrate that animals feel pain is far from conclusive.
Philosophizing
Authors: Palma A. B.
Published: January 2009

1. Many philosophers, including the later Wittgenstein, have concerned themselves with the question ‘What is philosophy?’ In this paper I shall say some things about the activity of philosophizing. What I shall say is not new or revealing; none the less, it might be worth saying what I do say. For philosophers, especially if they are professionally occupied with their subject, sometimes overlook some interesting, and some human, aspects of their profession.
Freedom and Human Nature
Authors: Flew Antony
Published: January 2009

The present paper is an attempt to show that Kolakowski's contention is fundamentally correct. But Part I begins by distinguishing, as here he does not, two very different senses of ‘freedom’. In one freedom is a possible but not a necessary condition and objective of human activity: it is a condition which may or may not obtain on particular occasions; and an objective which particular people may or may not choose to pursue. In the other freedom is indeed inescapably ‘rooted in the very quality of being human’. So the remainder of Part I is devoted to the elucidation of this second sense, and to showing that any study of human behaviour which is to deserve the diploma description ‘science’ must start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature. It is argued that no one would be able even to understand such a denial unless they were equipped with premises sufficient for a demonstration of its falsity. Part II goes on to make an example of a widely read work by a leading behavioural scientist. The author starts by insisting, contrary to the contentions of Part I, that any true science of human psychology must presuppose the truth of that denial. He then proceeds to make it clear that, in consequence, he himself places no value upon freedom in the first sense.
What is this Thing Called ‘Love’?
Authors: Berenson Frances
Published: January 2009

‘What is this thing called “love”?’, asks Cole Porter in his well known song, echoing our own doubts and confusions. Well, certain things can be said immediately in answer to his question: ‘Love’ is a four letter word but of the respectable variety describing a human emotion. Everybody wants it, seeks it, hopes for it but some are incapable of giving it; some doubt its existence, others are just confused, still others accept substitutes for the real thing. Often we find ourselves arguing about it, implying the possibility that love just means different things to different people. So while we all agree that love is desirable, very important, a good worth having and so on, our discussions of it reveal all kinds of inconsistencies in our understanding. This is a state of affairs which philosophers have tried to combat in various ways but always focusing on producing objective, general accounts of emotions which include love. Very few have concentrated on love independently of other emotions although love is a very popular example in general accounts. This practice, at the very least, tends to distort the importance of the concept and, at worst, kills dead its formidable significance.
The Art of Philosophy
Authors: Cooper Neil
Published: January 2009

Any account of knowledge has to take account both of the contribution of the world and the contribution of man. Every human endeavour, every activity, every art, every science is a product of a unique interaction between man and the world. Where man is most passive, he merely reflects and reports the world; this is pure discovery, if it ever exists. Where man is most active, the world's contribution lies merely in the provision of the raw material; this is pure invention, if it ever exists. All the arts, all the sciences can be ordered in a continuous array or spectrum ranging from pure discovery to pure invention. That they are all at some point on this continuum gives them a common but fragile thread, justifying our thinking and talking of the unity of the arts and sciences. Philosophy is neither pure discovery nor pure invention; it bears resemblances to both a science and an art. In this paper I propose to try to give reasons why we should regard the philosopher as an artist and philosophy as an art; or, at any rate, I shall try to show that there is an Art of Philosophy.
Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are Dead
Authors: Thompkins E. F.
Published: January 2009

Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are dead. Wittgenstein announces their passing in Philosophische Untersuchungen and he of all people should know when the brainchildren of his youth were no more. But it is surprising that he does not accord them more generous obsequies than a fragmented, offhand obituary. Their existence was a logical necessity in his erstwhile scheme of things, not a dispensable phenomenon of the contingent world:

Even if the world is infinitely complex, so that every fact consists of infinitely many Sachverhalte and every Sachverhalt is composed of infinitely many Gegenstände, even then there would have to be Gegenstände and Sachverhalte (T 4.2211)
Conflicting Emotions and the Indivisible Heart
Authors: Pugmire David
Published: January 2009

Christabel Bielenberg must be one of the few people to have sought out an appointment with the Gestapo. An Englishwoman married to a senior German civil servant, she was determined somehow to free her husband, who was being held in the aftermath of the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler. As she related it on Desert Island Discs, her success in facing down the forbidding official who eventually received her owed to the sight of a uniformed female officer leaning over one of the reception desks and repeatedly slapping a rather gracious old man across the face. ‘All of a sudden my fear vanished and I was filled with pure rage.’ For it was in that condition that she entered the interviewing room. Reflecting on this decades later, she opined majesterially, ‘I don't think it possible to have two intense and opposite emotions simultaneously.’
The Origin of Speciesism
Authors: Lafollette Hugh , Shanks Niall
Published: January 2009

Anti-vivisectionists charge that animal experimenters are speciesists—people who unjustly discriminate against members of other species. Until recently most defenders of experimentation denied the charge. After the publication of The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research in the New England Journal of Medicine, experimenters had a more aggressive reply: I am a speciesist. Speciesism is not merely plausible, it is essential for right conduct .... Most researchers now embrace Cohen's response as part of their defense of animal experimentation. Cohen asserts that both rights and utilitarian arguments
Cambridge Philosophers IV: Whitehead
Authors: Emmet Dorothy
Published: January 2009

Alfred North Whitehead is rightly considered a Cambridge philosopher. His intellectual life falls into three periods, of which the first (1880-1910) was in Cambridge, the second (1910-1924) in London, and the third (1924-1947) in Cambridge, Mass. But he always saw himself as a Cambridge person, and was a Life Fellow of Trinity College. Moreover, though each of these periods is associated with a different kind of philosophy, some ideas and concerns from the Cambridge period carry right through.
Error, Hallucination and the Concept of ‘Ontology’ in the Early Work of Heidegger
Authors: McManus Denis
Published: January 2009

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail to examine how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission.
The Choice Between Lives
Authors: Locke Don
Published: January 2009

Are there circumstances in which we would be justified in taking one person's life for the sake of others? I am not here concerned with cases of self-defence, or what we might call ‘other-defence’, where one person has to be killed to prevent him taking the lives of others. Nor am I concerned with cases of self-sacrifice, or suicide more generally, or euthanasia; nor with capital punishment, or killing in warfare; nor even, for reasons we shall explore, with abortion. I am concerned with those cases where several people have an equal claim or right to life, the same claim or right which we typically accord to all human beings, but where not all can survive. In short we are faced with a choice, as to who shall live and who shall die.
Another Idea of Necessary Connection
Authors: Flew Antony
Published: January 2009

One of the greatest of Hume's philosophical achievements, which becomes in its turn an assumption presupposed by some of the others, is perhaps best stated at the end of the First Enquiry: ‘If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another’ (XII (iii) 164).
Inspecting Images
Authors: Wright Edmond
Published: January 2009

The inspectability of after-images has been denied. A typical claim is Ilham Dilman's: ‘I cannot say my apprehension of the after-image I see has changed but not the after-image itself’, for, he says, appearance and reality are one as regards the after-image. His reason is that this is a logical consequence of the fact that other people have no possible basis for correcting what I say about the after-image I see.
What Morality is
Authors: Maclean Anne
Published: January 2009

I shall in this paper defend a universalizability thesis against certain objections. It will shortly be clear that the thesis defended is not the universalizability thesis as generally understood but something which differs crucially from it in that it claims no role whatsoever in ‘the definition of morality’. My title may therefore be misleading in this respect.
Technē and Moral Expertise
Authors: Tiles J.E.
Published: January 2009

While it is generally accepted that we need to use our intelligence (toreason) in order to get what we want, it is thought to be a cardinal error to imagine that by reasoning we can discover what we ought to want. Reason can in no way constrain the choice of ends, it can only constrain the choice of means once an end has been (non-rationally) adopted. In Plato's philosophy we find a view strongly opposed to this (Humean) attitude towards reason. It is widely held, however, that to arrive at a position which is plainly opposed to (Humean) common sense, Plato must have grossly confused reasoning about means with reasoning about ends. Evidence of this confusion is found in Plato's use of analogies between statecraft and navigation, and between virtue and skill. But the diagnosis of confusion rests on a misunderstanding of how Plato wanted to use the word translated ‘skill’, i.e. ‘technē’, and this misunderstanding is shared even by those who see Plato as rejecting the virtue/skill analogy.
The Trouble with Kant
Authors: Quinton Anthony
Published: January 2009

In setting out to discuss the trouble with Kant I may seem to be suggesting that there is only one. I do think that there is one fundamental one, which is that he is a wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer. Any innate leaning that way must have been enhanced by the intellectual isolation of Konigsberg, which preserved him from serious criticism. I shall be sticking to one particular example of this failing. It is the account he gives of the way in which the common world of experience is constructed or synthesized by applying some piece of mental apparatus—the forms of intuition and the categories—to what he calls the manifold of sensation. The rather elementary question I want to raise about this theory is that of how the claim can be made good that the outcome of this process is just one, single world; for all of us, for each of us at different times, even for any one of us at a particular time.
Processes
Authors: Stout Rowland
Published: January 2009

A natural picture to have of events and processes is of entities which extend through time and which have temporal parts, just as physical objects extend through space and have spatial parts. While accepting this picture of events, in this paper I want to present an alternative conception of processes as entities which, like physical objects, do not extend in time and do not have temporal parts, but rather persist in time. Processes and events belong to metaphysically distinct categories. Moreover the category of events is not the more basic of the two.
On the Burden of Proof
Authors: Cargile James
Published: January 2009

The phrase ‘burden of proof’ or ‘onus probandi’ originally referred to something determined by a judge in a legal proceeding. Some claims would be accepted as true by the court, and other relevant claims would require proving. The burden of doing this proving could be assigned to one or another party by the judge. Success or failure to meet this burden could be determined by the judge or the jury, as could consequences of success or failure.
Truth Without People?
Authors: Glock Hans-Johann
Published: January 2009

There is a venerable tradition according to which the concept of truth is totally independent of human beings, their actions and beliefs, because truth consists in the correspondence of mind-independentpropositions to a mind-independent reality. For want of arespect. One way of doing so is relativism, the idea that whether a belief is true or false depends on the point of view of individuals or communities. A closely related position is a consensus theory of truth, according to which a belief is true if it is held by a (suitably qualified) group of people. In a similar vein, the pragmatist theory maintains that a true belief is one which it is expedient for us to accept.
On Wittgenstein on Cognitive Science
Authors: Proudfoot D.
Published: January 2009

Cognitive science is held, not only by its practitioners, to offer something distinctively new in the philosophy of mind. This novelty is seen as the product of two factors. First, philosophy of mind takes itself to have well and truly jettisoned the ‘old paradigm’, the theory of the mind as embodied soul, easily and completely known through introspection but not amenable to scientific inquiry. This is replaced by the ‘new paradigm’, the theory of mind as neurally-instantiated computational mechanism, relatively opaque to introspection and the proper subject of detailed empirical investigation. Second, in the constitutive disciplines of cognitive science (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science etc.) we have for the first time the theoretical, experimental and technological resources to begin this investigation. My concern here is to show that, despite its scientific and philosophical sophistication, the new (computational) paradigm is in certain striking ways very similar to the old paradigm and that Wittgenstein's criticisms of the former apply to much of the latter.
What is Conservatism?
Authors: Kekes John
Published: January 2009

The voice of conservatism is not much heard in contemporary political philosophy. There is no shortage of conservatives, but there is a shortage of systematic, articulate, and reasonable attempts to defend conservatism. The aim of this paper is to provide the outlines of such a defence. It is not possible, in a paper, to provide more than an outline. The argument proceeds by identifying several features of what is taken to be thestrongest version of conservatism. These features jointly define it and distinguish it from other versions of conservatism, as well as from other political outlooks.
Critical Notice: Freud, Philosophical and Empirical Issues
Authors: Cioffi Frank
Published: January 2009

Those who are interested in Freud and psychoanalysis will be familiar with questions such as ‘Is Freudian psychology pseudo-scientific?’ ‘Is Freudian psychology falsifiable?’ ’Is unfalsifiability an adequate criterion of pseudo-science?’, and they might naturally suppose that it is these questions of which Erwin has attempted a ‘final accounting’. Surprisingly, these questions hardly feature in Erwin's book. Though at the outset Peter Medawar's notorious judgment that psychoanalysis is ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’ is cited, Erwin does not seem to think it is part of his final accounting to say either whether he thinks it justified or, if not, why someone of Medawar's distinction should nevertheless have thought so.
Universals and Creativity
Authors: Westphal Jonathan
Published: January 2009

There are many problems of universals, at least the four distinguished by Jenny Teichmann. Consider her second one. ‘How can we form a general term when we are faced with easily distinguishable, widely differing examples?’ The term ‘blue’, for example, covers a wide range of—well, whatdoesit cover a wide range of? A wide range of the colour blue? This is nonsense. What it covers is a wide range ofblues—shades of blue. But we do not form a general term when faced with orreferringtotheseitems. Wedistinguishthem: cerulean, ultramarine, cyan, cobalt, navy blue and so on. ‘Blue’ is not thenameof any of theseshadesof blue. It does not ‘cover’ anything except thecolour, of which it is the name. ‘Blue’ is the name of the colour blue. There are no widely differing, easily distinguishable examples ofthat. The colour blue cannot differ widely or easily be distinguished from the colour blue. Leibniz's law prevents it. It is shades of blue (blues, a blue, this blue, that blue) which differ and are easily distinguishable. The moment we try to say, ‘But this differs from that’, the question will be, ‘This and thatwhat?’ If the answer is, ‘This colour (the colour blue)’ and ‘That colour (the colour blue)’, then a mistake has been made. For there is no differing and distinguishing in this case. (But cf. ‘This colour blue’ and ‘This blue colour’.) Teichmann's problem cannot even be stated. If we say that what differ are this blue and that blue, which is the right thing to say, then we have two count nouns which mean ‘shade of blue’. There is no general term for these different shades. There is no answer to the question, ‘What isthename of all these differing shades?’ Certainly they are all blues, but each has its own name, and it is not ‘blue’. Teichmann's question cannot arise here either. The question, ‘What do blues have in common in virtue of which they are blue?’ is either elliptical or bad logical grammar. Which it is depends on the construal, or misconstrual, of ‘are blue’. The question should be either, ‘…in virtue of which they areblues’ in the plural—theyare not identical with the colour blue—or ‘…in virtue of which they areshadesof blue.’ The plural agreement must come somewhere.
Coming To Be Without a Cause
Authors: Sullivan T. D.
Published: January 2009

Quentin Smith contends that modern science provides enough evidence ‘to justify the belief that the universe began to exist without being caused to do so.’

There was a time when such a claim would have been dismissed because it conflicts with a principle absolutely fundamental to all human thought, including science itself. As Thomas Reid expressed the matter:

That neither existence, nor any mode of existence, can begin without an efficient cause is a principle that appears very early in the mind of man; and it is so universal, and so firmly rooted in human nature, that the most determined scepticism cannot eradicate it.
Knowing and Valuing Fairness
Authors: Hinton J. M.
Published: January 2009

Part I is about valuing fairness, II chiefly about not valuing it. Equally, I is about knowing fairness or taking yourself to know what it is, while II is chiefly about not knowing what it is: absolutely not knowing what it is, or not knowing what it is except when it is thought of in a narrow way. I want to know what all those states involve, e.g. whether knowing what fairness is involves valuing it, and most of all (in Part II) whether those two aforesaid ways of not knowing what fairness is involve some knowably undesirable kind of ignorance; in that sense, incur a cognitive penal sanction. But I begin elsewhere.
A Kantian View of Moral Luck
Authors: Moore A. W.
Published: January 2009

Some of the most interesting questions about Kant, and more particularly about his moral philosophy, arise when he is placed alongside the giants of antiquity. Where does he come together with Plato? Where with Aristotle? Where does he diverge from each?

He comes together with Plato in a shared conception of Ideas. When he first outlines how he is using the term ‘Idea’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, he insists that he is using it in none other than its original Platonic sense; and he explains away certain discrepancies with the comment:

It is by no means unusual… to find that we understand [an author] better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken… in opposition to his own intention.
Music and Imagination
Authors: Hagberg Garry
Published: January 2009

When we inquire into the nature of works of art we can see at a glance that there is a good deal of evidence against aesthetic idealism, the view that artworks are, in the final analysis, imaginary objects in the minds of their creators. We believe, for instance, that the National Gallery not only contingently but in some sense necessarily weighs more than merely the sum of the empty building, the people in it, and the assorted fixtures. This sum must also include the weight of canvases, the oils on them, carved stone and marble, and so on, all of which add up to substantially more than nothing, which is at least the approximate weight of imaginary things. We know that it takes considerably more than a verbal utterance or acoustical blast to transport an artwork, and we also know that a visit to the gallery is not going to amount to an afternoon spent with wax figures of unicorns, flying horses, present and bald kings of France or, for that matter, talking teapots. In short, intuition protests against the idealist theory that if works of art are imaginary objects, they cannot be the things we go to see in the gallery; and if they are imaginary objects then, like a waxen Peter Pan, they are surely not art. Mellon and Meinong simply have different kinds of collections.
Languages as Social Objects
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: January 2009

1. There is a tendency nowadays for linguists, philosophers and other theorists of language, to dismiss the notion of an object like the English language or the Polish language as simply mythological or mythopoeic—as of no interest to any serious science of language. Some theorists even appear to deny that there are such things as languages (in the plural). ‘This notion [of a public language] is unknown to empirical inquiry and raises what seem to be irresolvable problems’, Chomsky said in a lecture he gave recently in London (1994).
Moral Incapacities
Authors: Beld Ton Van Den
Published: January 2009

There has been a time in my teaching career that I used to cite in my introductory classes ‘Moral Philosophy’ from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (a best seller of the 1970's). The situation leading up to the quote is that the main character, Isadora, is asked a sexual favour by her brother in law, Pierre. Her answer and the subsequent dialogue read then as follows: ‘I can't’, I said. ‘Come on,’ Pierre said, ‘I'll teach you.’ ‘I didn't mean that… I meant that I can't; morally, I can…’
Kant's Political Philosophy
Authors: Rickman H. P.
Published: January 2009

These comments on Professor Gallie's paper, ‘Kant's View of Reason in Politics’ (Philosophy January 1979) are focused on a particular issue, and I shall explain at the outset what it is and why I have concentrated on it. Gallie's account of the details of Kant's political philosophy and his specific comments on them strike me as interesting and reasonable and I have, therefore, little to add. Instead I want to question Gallie's assumptions about, and dissatisfactions with, the philosophic framework on which Kant's political philosophy rests. There is, firstly, his complaint that reason is insufficiently defined (p. 23) though he takes a somewhat more positive view later. There is, secondly, his claim that Kant's moral philosophy is inferior to his epistemology (i.e. ‘less original, less illuminating, less architectonic’, p. 24). On these points Gallie is, in my view, not convincing and not even completely clear. Without disagreeing totally with Gallie's assessments—still less claiming that Kant is invariably right—I want to argue that Kant's conclusions are formidably supported by, and can best be understood in terms of, his own arguments. To me the question about the cogency of his case is more interesting than the details of his political philosophy. How rational are, in fact, his conclusions? So, at the risk of covering some familiar ground, I want to stress some of the general features of Kant's philosophy and argue, in particular, that his political philosophy is based on and, in turn, supplements, his moral one. The latter seems to me to be as intricate, interesting and fruitful as his epistemology and exhibits a similar architectonic. (This would also account for the parallel between the roles of reason in politics and knowledge on which Gallie comments (p. 28).)
Privacy and the Right to Privacy
Authors: McCloskey H. J.
Published: January 2009

The right to privacy is one of the rights most widely demanded today. Privacy has not always so been demanded. The reasons for the present concern for privacy are complex and obscure. They obviously relate both to the possibilities for very considerable enjoyment of privacy by the bulk of people living in affluent societies brought about by twentieth-century affluence, and to the development of very efficient methods of thoroughly and systematically invading this newly found privacy. However, interesting and important as it is as a socio-philosophical inquiry, the concern of this paper is not with why privacy has come to be so highly prized, but rather with whether it is rightly prized, and if so, when and why. This means that my concern will be with what privacy is, what is its domain, whether there is a right to privacy, and, if so, whether it is an ultimate, basic, albeit, a prima facie right, or simply a conditional right.
Actuality and Possibility
Authors: Morris W. E.
Published: January 2009

Philosophy, according to a prominent conception of its nature and method, consists primarily of conceptual or linguistic analysis. Because the relations between concepts are logical, and because the propositions which express them are necessary, philosophy is taken to be an a priori activity.
Arm Raising and Arm Rising
Authors: Hornsby Jennifer
Published: January 2009

I. It is a necessary condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’ that my arm rose; but it is not a sufficient condition. Is there some further necessary condition which, when conjoined with the condition that my arm rose, does give a sufficient condition of the truth of ‘I raised my arm’?
Hobbes and ‘The Beautiful Axiom’
Authors: Coady C. A. J.
Published: January 2009

The ‘beautiful axiom’ to which Dickens refers is a central feature of Thomas Hobbes' thinking but its precise role in his moral philosophy remains unclear. I shall here attempt both to dispel the unclarity and to evaluate the adequacy of the position that emerges. Given the high level of contemporary interest in Hobbes' thought, both within and beyond philosophical circles, this is an enterprise of considerable importance. None the less, my interest is not merely interpretative, since the assessment of Hobbes' attitude to ‘the beautiful axiom’ raises important and difficult questions about what might be termed the preconditions of morality.
Chesterton's Philosophy of Education
Authors: Haldane John
Published: January 2009

‘Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life it is not education at all’ (Chesterton).

In an essay written for the thirtieth volume of the British Journal of Educational Studies, R. F. Dearden surveyed philosophy of education during the period 1952–82. As might be imagined he was largely concerned with the emergence in and development through these years of analytical philosophy of education, as the influence of linguistic or conceptual analysis spread beyond the somewhat ill-defined boundaries of core philosophy and was taken up by those interested in the theoretical presuppositions of educational practice. After charting the course of this development, and having reached the point at which certain worries arose about the limits of conceptual analysis as a method, Dearden turned to consider what if any alternatives might be available. The first possibility which he mentions in expectation of its having received explicit articulation is Catholic philosophy of education. However, as he notes, nothing meeting this description was developed during the period in question—in effect, since the war. The one book which he mentions, viz. Jacques Maritain's Education at the Crossroads, is barely known of in professional philosophy of education and in style and content is quite out of the mainstream.
Malcolm on Language and Rules
Authors: Baker G. P. , Hacker P. M. S.
Published: January 2009

In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers (and hence with actual agreement) as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter.’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments.
Naturalism and Scepticism
Authors: Bell Martin , McGinn Marie
Published: January 2009

In this paper we argue that a dominant view of Humean naturalism involves a fundamental misconception of Hume's naturalist project. We shall show that the naturalist project as Hume conceives it is philosophically much more interesting than the form of naturalism commonly attributed to him. We shall also argue, however, that Hume's commitment to principles of empiricist epistemology prevented him from bringing his naturalist project to a satisfactory conclusion. Finally, we shall suggest that Wittgenstein shares Hume's conception of a philosophically satisfactory form of naturalism, and that, unencumbered by empiricist doctrines, Wittgenstein was able to provide the sort of undogmatic unravelling of the sceptical problem that eluded Hume.
Hume and Intrinsic Value
Authors: Thomas D. A. Lloyd
Published: January 2009

In this essay an ‘objective’ account of intrinsic value is proposed and partly defended. It is claimed that a kind of value exists which is, or may reasonably be supposed to be, a property of certain objects. The presence of such value is not to be wholly accounted for as the ‘projection’ of certain human feelings elicited by the object thought to be of value, nor by the object's meeting certain operative human conventions prescribing what is to be admired, nor by its being conformable, in some way, to human needs or desires. Hume, of course, would have none of this. It is hoped to show that if one adopts Hume's account, then his attempt to show (in his essay ‘Of The Standard Of Taste’) that there nevertheless will be convergence in the long run as to what is of aesthetic value is forced and unsuccessful. By contrast, on the ‘objective’ account (and given certain assumptions) convergence is to be expected. This, of course, only shows the superiority of the ‘objective’ account so long as there is an expectation of long-term convergence. This is not an expectation of most contemporary value ‘subjectivists’, and therefore the argument will not be directly relevant to their positions.
Moral Depth
Authors: Kekes John
Published: January 2009

Few would disagree that depth is an admirable, highly desirable, and yet rare quality. One would expect to find, therefore, that much has been written on the subject. But this is not so. Perhaps the topic appears forbidding, because the nature of depth is itself a deep and difficult question, since it forces those who ask it to decide what is ultimately worth caring about. Be that as it may, I shall venture on to this rarely explored ground. My strategy is to begin with some introductory remarks about depth in general and about moral depth as a particular form of it; then discuss Sophocles' dramatic treatment of the development of Oedipus toward, as I shall interpret it, greater depth; and then go on to formulate a more discursive account based on Sophocles' poetic intimations.
Going Nowhere: Nagel on Normative Objectivity
Authors: Friedman Marilyn
Published: January 2009

InThe View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel develops a theory of practical reasoning which attempts to give the personal, or subjective, point of view its due2 while still insisting on the objectivity of ethics.

On the objective side, Nagel affirms that there are truths about values and reasons for action which are independent of the ways in which reasons and values appear to us, independent of our own particular beliefs and inclinations (p. 144). The objective foundation for these truths consists in a certain distinctive process of understanding. Objective understanding is explicated in terms of an objective standpoint, a standpoint defined as impersonal, that is, as detached from the subjective point of view. The objective standpoint is structured by a conception ‘of the world as centerless—as containing ourselves and other beings with particular points of view’ (p. 140). As with scientific reasoning, ‘we begin from our position inside the world and try to transcend it by regarding what we find here as a sample of the whole’ (p. 141).