bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Are Workers Forced to Work?
Authors: Ehring Douglas
Published: June 2016

G. A. Cohen, in his ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,’ addresses the classical Marxist claim that workers are forced to sell their labour power under capitalism. This claim has been the object of much debate and controversy. Cohen brings his very considerable analytical skills to bear on this question with the result that he supports, in distinctive but non-conflicting ways, both sides of the controversy. On Cohen’s analysis this claim is ambiguous, i.e., the term ‘proletariat’ has two importantly different senses. In the distributive sense, workers need not be coerced, but in the collective sense, they are coerced, i.e., each individual worker is free to leave the working class, but the class of workers' as a whole does not possess a similar freedom. In this paper, I will argue that Cohen’s argument does not establish that the proletariat qua individuals are not forced to sell their labour power. It will also be argued that, in fac;t, there is no definite answer to the question of whether or not workers are forced to sell their labour power. Freedom and coercion are matters of degree, for the relevant range of cases, and, hence, it is not appropriate to ask whether or not the workers are coerced. I will, however, attempt to show that, contrary to the spirit of Cohen’s thesis, proletariat as individuals suffer from a diminished degree of freedom in the sale of their labour power.
Truthmongering: An Exercise
Authors: Knezevich Lily
Published: June 2016

The Problem of the value of truth came before us – or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.

– Nietzsche

Arthur Fine, in his defense of the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA), has argued that any attempt to analyze truth will fail because any such analysis presupposes an untenable essentialism. In particular, he asserts that the anti-realist analysis of truth commits itself to there being an essential property which all true statements possess, qua true statements. It is this commitment which he castigates.

For the concept of truth is the fundamental semantical concept. Its uses, history, logic, and grammar are sufficiently definite to be partially catalogued, at least for a time. But it cannot be “explained” or given an “account of” without circularity. Nor does it require anything of the sort. The concept of truth is open-ended, growing with the growth of science …. Thus there is no projectible sketch now of what truth signifies, nor of what areas of science truth is exempt from - nor will there ever be.
What Is a Marxist Today?
Authors: Levine Andrew
Published: June 2016

Much as what we now call ‘the Marxism of the Second International’ long ago passed from the scene, the Age of ‘Western Marxism’ has apparently come to an end. Internal theoretical developments, changes in intellectual culture and, above all, political circumstances have joined together to hasten the demise of this episode in the history of radical theory. It would be instructive to trace the trajectory of Western Marxism, and to reflect on the political conditions for its decline. In both Western and Eastern Europe, Marxian politics has been in crisis at least since the watershed year of 1968, and in disarray for more than a decade. Western Marxism has always been joined programatically to currents within these political movements and has suffered grave, indeed fatal, damage in consequence. But it is not my intention to reflect on the vicissitudes of Western Marxism here. What follows will consider instead a style of theorizing that has effectively superceded Western Marxism, just as Western Marxism earlier replaced the Marxism of the Second International. This new kind of radical theory is widely designated—approvingly by some, disparagingly by others—‘analytical Marxism.’
What is Living and What is Dead in Marxism?
Authors: Norman Richard
Published: June 2016

I make no apology for what is by now a hackneyed title. It derives, of course, from Croce’s book on Hegel, and I choose it because I want to suggest that the question ‘What is living and what is dead in Marxism?’ is the right question to ask. The analytical approach is appropriate if it means distinguishing and discriminating between different aspects of Marxism, and refusing to reject or embrace it en bloc as a monolithic creed. However, this does not mean that Marxism can be chopped up into a number of disconnected theses, with a view to producing an inventory of those which are true and those which are false. Marxism claims to be a systematic theory, whose various elements hang together in an organised way. Some would say that this creates an unbridgeable gulf between Marxist and analytical philosophies. Nevertheless, though Marxism’s claim to be systematic should be taken seriously, there are different readings of the theory and of how its components are connected, and different versions will see different elements as central. This is where the careful discrimination of meanings and interpretations is needed. It is not simply a question of deciding whether each of the various elements, in isolation, is true or false, more a matter of deciding where the emphasis should lie if Marxism is to continue to illuminate our understanding of the social world. It is in this sense that we can talk about Marxism or any other theory as ‘living’ — not just as containing true assertions, but as being capable of playing a vital and creative role in human thought and action. In what version, then, if any, is Marxism a living philosophy?
Exploitation and Equality: Labour Power as a Non-Commodity
Authors: Laycock Henry
Published: June 2016

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ (for proletarians) and ‘pay for labour services’ (for independent, self-employed ‘professionals’). Unlike labour services (living labour, living labour, i.e., work itself) but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value (it contains a specific amount of embodied labour) and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work (necessary labour) confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself (necessary and surplus labour) confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer.
In Defence of Abundance
Authors: Van Parijs Philippe
Published: June 2016

Every single day, every newspaper in the world carries some further evidence as to how limited the Earth’s resources are. Every single day, therefore, we should grow more deeply convinced that the notion of abundance has become hopelessly irrelevant and can safely be shelved forever. Or so it seems. In the final section of this paper, I shall defend the opposite view: that growing awareness of the limits of our resources should make the notion of abundance, suitably (though still plausibly) defined, more and not less relevant to our pursuits. Whether or not this defence turns out to be successful, I hope this paper will go some way towards clarifying this notoriously elusive notion, as well as its no less elusive and no less important antonym: scarcity.
True Contradictions
Authors: Parsons Terence
Published: June 2016

In In Contradiction, Graham Priest shows, as clearly as anything like this can be shown, that it is coherent to maintain that some sentences can be both true and false at the same time. As a consequence, some contradictions are true, and an appreciation of this possibility advances our understanding of the nature of logic and language.
A Great Philosopher's Not So Great Account of Great Virtue: Aristotle's Treatment of Greatness of Soul'
Authors: Curzer Howard J.
Published: June 2016

Once again it is becoming fashionable to ask ‘What character traits are virtues?’ Naturally, it behooves us to try to recapture the insights of our predecessors, as well as forging ahead on our own. In this paper I shall examine one such insight.
Openness
Authors: McMahon Christopher
Published: June 2016

… what would be wise expediency?-to try and determine the best consequences by concealment, or to brave other consequences for the sake of that openness which is the sweet fresh air of our moral life.

Common sense morality contains a concept of openness and accords positive value to behavior that exemplifies it. But it is unclear what morally valuable openness is and what sort of value it has in ordinary moral thinking.
Berkeley's Ideas and the Primary/Secondary Distinction
Authors: Nadler Steven
Published: June 2016

Part of Berkeley's strategy in his attack on materialism in the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous is to argue that the epistemological distinction between ideas of so-called primary qualities and ideas of secondary qualities, especially as this distinction is found in Locke, is untenable. Both kinds of ideas-those presenting to the mind the quantifiable properties of bodies (shape, size, extension, motion) and those which are just sensations (color, odor, taste, heat)-are equally perceptions in the mind, and there is no reason to believe that one kind (the ideas of primary qualities) represents true properties of independently existing external objects while the other kind does not.
Kant's Account of Sensation
Authors: Falkenstein Lorne
Published: June 2016

Kant defined ‘sensation’(Empfindung)as ‘the effect of an object on the representative capacity, so far as we are affected by it.’ This is, to put it mildly, not one among his more elegant, clear or helpful sayings. And it is merely an instance of a more general malaise. Kant did not say as much about sensation as he should have, and his account-or lack of it-can be seen at the root of many of the difficulties that have plagued his readers.
Developing the Idea of Intentionality: Children's Theories of Mind
Authors: Gopnik Alison
Published: June 2016

At least since Augustine, philosophers have constructed developmental just-so stories about the origins of certain concepts. In these just-so stories, philosophers tell us how childrenmustdevelop these concepts. However, philosophers have by and large neglected the empirical data about how children actuallydodevelop their ideas about the world. At best they have used information about children in an anecdotal and unsystematic, though often illuminating, way (see, for example, Matthews, 1980).
Thomas Hobbes and the Contractarian Theory of Law
Authors: Gauthier David
Published: June 2016

The revival of interest in contractarian theories of morals and politics may encourage us to enquire into the prospects for a contractarian theory of law. Such a theory would be normative, aiming, not at the best explanation or justification of our actual legal practices and institutions, but rather at a rational reconstruction of those practices and institutions from the perspective of agreement among maximizing individuals. It would offer a secular and instrumental rationale for law that requires no dubious assumptions about the objectivity of values or the existence of moral order in the universe. Of course, such a reconstruction might fail, leading to a skeptical conclusion. Rational individuals, in a position to decide on their terms of interaction, might reject any structure that we should recognize as a legal framework. But this must seem unlikely. We may compare law with morality, recognizing that both have arisen in a framework of teleological and theological understandings that are themselves no longer plausible to us, without supposing that either must therefore be wanting from the perspective of rational agreement.
Descartes on Sensory Representation: A Study of the Dioptrics
Authors: MacKenzie Ann Wilbur
Published: June 2016

The notion of representation figures centrally both in Descartes’ scientific theorizing about sense in humans and in his conceptual speculations about the nature of human cognition.

Descartes’ philosophical innovation in the Dioptrics is the claim that sensing in humans is a kind of representing rather than a kind of resembling. This provides the cornerstone for his attack on traditional theories of sense, and it underwrites his own position that sensing (in humans) is a kind of thinking, ascribable to the rational soul rather than to any Aristotelean sensitive soul.
The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: June 2016

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.

Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the Meditations

Substance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies.
Parthood and Persistence
Authors: Kazmi Ali Akhtar
Published: June 2016

It is a compelling idea that the calculus of individuals proposed by Leonard and Goodman articulates the concept of parthood.1 However, the persistence of material objects through some changes of parts, and their failure to persist through other changes in the organization of their parts present a serious challenge to this idea.
Mathematical Modelling and Contrastive Explanation
Authors: Morton Adam
Published: June 2016

This is an enquiry into flawed explanations. Most of the effort in studies of the concept of explanation, scientific or otherwise, has gone into the contrast between clear cases of explanation and clear non-explanations.
The Nature of Causation: A Singularist Account
Authors: Tooley Michael
Published: June 2016

Is a singularist conception of causation coherent? That is to say, is it possible for two events to be causally related, without that relationship being an instance of some causal law, either basic or derived, and either probabilistic or non-probabilistic? Since the time of Hume, the overwhelmingly dominant philosophical view has been that such a conception of causation is not coherent.
Chaos and Indeterminism
Authors: Hobbs Jesse
Published: June 2016

Laplacean determinism remains a popular theory among philosophers and scientists alike, in spite of the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with which it is inconsistent, has been around for more than fifty years. There are a number of reasons for its continuing popularity. One, recently articulated by Honderich, is that there are too many possible interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the subject is too controversial even among physicists to be an adequate basis for overturning determinism. Nevertheless, quantum mechanics is an enormously successful theory, considering the quantity and variety of its predictions which have been verified under conditions never dreamt of by its originators; and the Copenhagen Interpretation is the only widely accepted interpretation of it. Although a hidden variable theory consistent with the results of quantum mechanics is not impossible, one of its major advocates admits that it is highly speculative, and far from adequately developed. Yet such a theory would be needed to reconcile Laplacean determinism with quantum mechanics; most of the controversies alluded to by Honderich are irrelevant.
Latour’s Prosaic Science
Authors: Brown James Robert
Published: June 2016

The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (hereafter LL) which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science literature. It is in the form of field notes by an ‘anthropologist in the lab.’ This may seem an odd place for an anthropologist, but Latour finds his presence easy to justify. ‘Whereas we have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists … ’ (LL, 17).
A Semantics for Pictures
Authors: Malinas Gary
Published: June 2016

There are a number of semantic predicates which we intuitively employ when we talk about pictures. Pictures which illustrate episodes from the life of Jesus refer to him. An illustration of a Tasmanian Tiger in a zoological catalogue denotes the class of Tasmanian Tigers. Some of the things we say concerning pictures are true in them; e.g., it is true in Rembrandt’s ‘Changing of the Night Watch’ that a guard wears a helmet; it is false in Rembrandt’s painting that one of the guards is female; and it is neither true nor false in the painting that the guards had eggs for breakfast. Rather than talk of what is true I false in paintings, we can speak of what they depict; e.g., Rembrandt’s painting depicts a man wearing a helmet, and it does not depict a female guard. Nor does it depict what the guards had for breakfast. In order to distinguish between what is excluded by a painting’s content — e.g., the presence of a female guard — from what is just not depicted by it — e.g., what the guards had for breakfast — it is important to be able to speak of what is true or false in pictures. Such presystematic talk is both intelligible and useful. Nevertheless, there are pitfalls associated with it. The concept of truth belongs to a family of semantic concepts which also includes entailment. Are the logical consequences of propositions which are ‘true in’ a picture also ‘true in’ it? An affirmative answer to this question conflicts with intuition. That a guard wears a helmet entails that a guard wears a helmet or the moon is made of cheese. Intuitively, this latter proposition is not ‘true in’ Rembrandt’s picture. Further, propositions have infinitely many equivalent formulations. That a guard wears a helmet is equivalent to the proposition that either a guard wears a helmet and the moon is made of cheese or a guard wears a helmet and the moon is not made of cheese. Is this latter formulation of the proposition that a guard wears a helmet ‘true in’ Rembrandt’s picture? Such questions suggest that the concept of ‘true in,’ while sharing some properties of the concept of truth, needs to be distinguished from it. In addition to talk of what pictures refer to/ denote, and propositions which are true/false/neither in them, we classify some pictures by reference to their semantic properties. ]as trow’s duck-rabbit which Wittgenstein cites is an example of an ambiguous picture. Robert Stevens’ picture of a tidal pool which looks like a detailed study of part of the human anatomy is a visual pun.
Propositional Attitudes and the Language of Thought
Authors: Egan Frances
Published: June 2016

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: (1) propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and (2) the representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language.
Non-tuism
Authors: Hubin Donald C.
Published: June 2016

Contractarians view justice (or, more ambitiously, all of morality) as being defined by a contract made by rational individuals. No one supposes that this contract is actual, and the fact that it is merely hypothetical raises a number of questions both about the assumptions under which it would be actual and about the force of hypothetical agreement that is contingent on these assumptions.

Particular contractarian theories must specify the circumstances of the agreement and the endowments, beliefs, desires, and degree and type of rationality of the agents. How these issues are settled determines the force of the hypothetical agreement. The fact that ignorant people who desired only universal suffering would, under duress, agree to a certain principle gives us no reason to believe the principle is a correct moral principle or to think it rational to accept or act on it: some counterfactual assumptions undermine entirely the moral force of hypothetical agreement. On the other hand, to take people just as they are, with their current beliefs, desires, endowments, and all, is to endorse their ignorance and mistakes as well as any previous injustice that affects their bargaining power.
Plantinga, Presumption, Possibility, and the Problem of Evil
Authors: DeRose Keith
Published: June 2016

My topic is Alvin Plantinga’s ’solution’ to one of the many forms that the problem of evil takes: the modal abstract form. This form of the problem is abstract in that it does not deal with the amounts or kinds of evil which exist, but only with the fact that there is some evil or other. And it is modal in that it concerns the compossibility of the following propositions, not any evidential relation between them:

(1) God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good

and

(2) There is evil in the world.
Aristotle’s ‘Peri hermeneias’ in Medieval Latin and Arabic Philosophy: Logic and the Linguistic Arts
Authors: Black Deborah L.
Published: June 2016

In many fields within the history of medieval philosophy, the comparison of the Latin and Arabic Aristotelian commentary traditions must be concerned in large measure with the influence of Arabic authors, especially Avicenna and Averroes, upon their Latin successors. In the case of the commentary tradition on the Peri hermeneias, however, the question of influence plays little or no part in such comparative considerations. Yet the absence of a direct influence of Arabic philosophers upon their Latin counterparts does have its own peculiar advantages, since it provides an opportunity to explore the effects upon Aristotelian exegesis of the different linguistic backgrounds of Arabic and Latin authors.
A Thirteenth-Century Interpretation of Aristotle on Equivocation and Analogy
Authors: Ashworth E. J.
Published: June 2016

This paper is a case study of how a few short lines in two of Aristotle’s logical works were read in the thirteenth century. I shall begin with a quick look at Aristotle’s own remarks about equivocation in the Categories and the Sophistical Refutations, as they were transmitted to the West by Boethius’s translations. I shall continue with an analysis of the divisions of equivocation and analogy to be found in an anonymous commentary, on the Sophistical Refutations written in Paris between 1270 and 1280. I have chosen this author’s work to focus on, because it offers a remarkably full account which brings together the elements found in many other logical works from the second half of the thirteenth century. In the course of my analysis I shall attempt to show the part played by four different sources: (1) the Greek commentators of late antiquity; (2) the new translations of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics; (3) the reception of Arabic works, particularly the commentaries of Averroes; and (4) new grammatical doctrines, notably that of modi significandi. At the same time, I hope to throw some light on the development of the doctrine of analogy as it was understood by late thirteenth-century logicians.
Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance
Authors: Kretzmann Norman
Published: June 2016

Eleonore Stump argues in her article in this volume that Aquinas’s theory of knowledge is not classical foundationalism, as it has sometimes seemed to be, but, instead, a version of reliabilism. I'm convinced that her thesis is important and well-supported, and it has led me to begin a re-examination of one aspect of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the new viewpoint Stump’s work provides. I think the results tend to confirm her account while revealing further details of Aquinas’s reliabilism.

My topic is not reliabilism itself. Instead, I am focusing on Aquinas’s account of the reliability of the fundamental operations of the two human cognitive faculties, sense and intellect. Accounts of cognitive reliability have a place in most theories about the justification of belief, of course, and so they are found in more than one sort of epistemology; but reliabilism might be said to need them most.
Descartes’s Secular Semantics
Authors: Hausman Alan , Hausman David
Published: June 2016

… if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgment not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions… in accordance with my own principles. But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs, as I have explained at length in my Optics. Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. The ideas of pains, colors, sounds and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
Alston on Iterative Foundationalism and Cartesian Epistemology
Authors: Jacobson Stephen
Published: June 2016

In his influential paper ‘Two Types of Foundationalism,’ (TTF) William Alston distinguishes two important conceptions of foundationalism: ‘simple foundationalism’ (SF) and ‘iterative foundationalism’ (IF). SF is the view that there are immediately justified beliefs of some kind or other. IF is the stronger view that certain epistemic propositions are immediately justified. Alston favors a reliability account of immediate justification of the kind defended by externalists such as Armstrong, Dretske, and Goldman. Alston rejects IF by appeal to what he calls the ‘second level argument.’ He claims, further, that since IF is essential to the Cartesian project of reconstructing knowledge, the Cartesian project must be abandoned.
Reflections on Surfaces
Authors: Stroll Avrum
Published: June 2016

Can there be a first-order, philosophical or psychological theory that explains all the facts of surface perception? By ‘first-order’ I mean a theory about the constituents of what J.J. Gibson called ‘the ecological environment’; and by ‘surface perception,’ I mean the perception of the surfaces of any of those ecological constituents that have surfaces. The question about surfaces is important for two reasons. First, as we shall see, they are complex features and, as such, provide a difficult test case for any theory of perception. And, of course, if no theory can handle the case of surface perception it will follow by existential generalization that no first order theory of perception is possible. Second, surfaces play a key, virtually unique, role in human perception. Some account of that role is thus necessary; but if no first order theory is possible, that account will have to be something other than a theory. Since I shall be arguing that no first order theory is possible, I shall propose an alternative way of approaching the topic of surface perception. That surfaces play such an important role in the human perception of the ambient environment has been recognized by many writers.
Butler’s Argument Against Psychological Hedonism
Authors: Stewart Robert M.
Published: June 2016

It is widely thought among philosophers that Joseph Butler’s criticism of psychological egoism in his Sermons is, in the words of A.E. Duncan-Jones, ‘the classic refutation of it.’ Indeed, no less a philosopher than David Hume restated and put forth Butler’s central argument against hedonistic egoism — without due credit — as part of his own critique. Yet recent commentators have begun to question Butler’s arguments, albeit usually with sympathy and in the hope of saving what they take to be his insights. I propose to focus on Butler’s main objection to hedonistic psychological egoism, to show how and why it fails to refute plausible forms of the thesis, and briefly to indicate why philosophical attempts to disprove this theory of motivation are misguided. I will assume a basic familiarity with Butler’s psychological theory and ethics, and I must refrain from discussing important related topics, e.g., the ‘friendliness’ of self-love to conscience, benevolence, and particular affections.
Okin on Justice, Gender, and Family
Authors: Cohen Joshua
Published: June 2016

Susan Okin has written an important book on justice and the family. Animated by the experiences that contemporary feminism has sought to articulate, and guided by a principled hostility to the subordination of women that continues to disgrace American life, she argues that the current ordering of domestic life in the United States is unjust and that its alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.

Families, according to Okin, are not havens in an otherwise heartless world. Instead the current division of domestic labor marks them as the centerpiece of a broader system of inequalities between men and women. Justice condemns those inequalities and commands their remedy through the transformation of our domestic practices. Because the division of domestic labor is so fundamental to injustice, we need in particular to ‘encourage and facilitate’ (171) equal sharing by parents in the responsibilities of child-rearing, and in the more quotidian chores that provide the material foundation of modern domesticity.
Defending Backwards Causation1
Authors: Brown Bryson
Published: June 2016

Whether we’re reading H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, or Kurt Vonnegut, time travel is a wonderful narrative trick, freeing a story from the normal ‘one damn thing after another’ progression of time. But many philosophers claim it can never be more than that because backwards causation in general, and time travel in particular, are logically impossible.

In this paper I examine one type of argument commonly given for this disappointing conclusion: the time travel paradoxes. Happily for science fiction fans, these arguments fall far short of showing what they are intended to show. Why they fail can be better understood in the light of an analogy between these arguments and some arguments libertarians offer against determinism.
Identity and Necessary Similarity
Authors: Bahlul Raja
Published: June 2016

The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PH), commonly attributed to Leibniz, has given rise to much discussion and debate. Thus philosophers have argued over how it should be formulated, whether it is (necessarily) true, and what, if any, metaphysical consequences it has.

It is not my intention to add to these discussions here, having done so elsewhere. Rather, I intend to introduce and defend a closely related principle which I shall, for want of a better name, refer to as The Principle of the Identity of Necessary Similarity’ (PINS).

In section II, I briefly recapitulate some of the distinctions and other relevant points which are customarily made in connection with (PH). This is all too familiar material, but it is necessary in order to provide a general framework of concepts in terms of which we can discuss (PINS) in an intelligible fashion.
Analyticity and the A Priori
Authors: Casullo Albert
Published: June 2016

The analytic/synthetic distinction has played a central role in discussions of a priori knowledge throughout the twentieth century. One of the primary reasons for the prominence of this distinction is the widespread influence of the tradition of logical empiricism which endorsed the following principles:

(LEl) All analytic propositions are knowable a priori

and

(LE2) All propositions knowable a priori are analytic.

Hence, proponents of the a priori often argue in support of the contention that the propositions of a particular discipline, say mathematics or logic, are knowable a priori by arguing that it consists solely of analytic propositions. On the other hand, detractors of the a priori often reject such knowledge on the grounds that the analytic/synthetic distinction is not cogent. My primary goal in this paper is to challenge the prevalent acceptance of (LE1).
Kant’s A Priori Methods For Recognizing Necessary Truths
Authors: Brook J. A.
Published: June 2016

In the second edition, Kant summarized the question behind the Critique of Pure Reason this way: ‘How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?’ (B19) We can easily understand his interest in synthetic judgments; he thought that analytic ones could not tell us anything new (A5-6=B9). There are only two ways to get judgments that are analytic: by drawing out what is contained in our concepts and by combining the resulting propositions inferentially into arguments. Neither could ever tell us anything not already ‘thought in [the concepts we have used], though confusedly’ (A7=B10-ll), and even if either could, it could not give us anything against which to test it for truth or falsity. ‘In the mere concept of a thing no mark of its existence is to be found’ (A225=B272; cf. Bxvii-xviii). In the search for knowledge, analytic judgments get us nowhere.
Gaps, Gluts, and Paradox
Authors: Irvine A. D.
Published: June 2016

Consider the following sentence schema:

This sentence entails that ϕ.

Call a sentence which is obtained from this schema by the substitution of an arbitrary, contingent sentence, s, for ϕ, the sentence CS (for ‘Curry’s Sentence’). Thus,

(CS) This sentence entails that s.

Now ask the following question: Is CS true?

One sentence classically entails a second if and only if it is impossible for both the first to be true and the second to be false. Thus ‘Xanthippe is a mother’ entails ‘Xanthippe is female’ if and only if it is impossible for both ‘Xanthippe is a mother’ to be true and ‘Xanthippe is female’ to be false. CS makes a claim about a purported entailment. Thus, CS is true if and only if it is impossible for both the sentence it mentions as entailing a second to be true and the sentence it mentions as being entailed by the first to be false. In other words, CS is true if and only if it is impossible for both CS to be true and s to be false. In yet other words, CS is false if and only if it is possible for both CS to be true and s to be false.
An Essay on Material Necessity
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: June 2016

At the one extreme stands Hume, who -at least according to common conceptions - rules out entirely the possibility of material or non-logical necessity, and who therefore rules out also the possibility that we might enjoy that sort of certain knowledge that earlier philosophers had assumed as a matter of course to be correlated therewith. At the other extreme stands Adolf Reinach, the hero of our present story, who defends the existence of a wide class of material necessities falling within the domain of what can be a priori known. More precisely, Reinach holds that there are certain categories of entity whose factual instantiation brings with it as a matter of necessity the instantiation of certain other correlated categories. The instantiation of the category color necessitates in this fashion the instantiation of the category visual extension.
Rawls’s Communitarianism
Authors: Alejandro Roberto
Published: June 2016

Most discussions of Rawls’s philosophy tend to neglect the strong communitarian strand of his theory: so much so that in the debate between liberals and communitarians Rawls’s account of community has been for the most part intriguingly absent. This article is an attempt to fill in the gap by offering a discussion of the Rawlsian understanding of community as it was presented inA Theory of Justiceand its possible implications for a pluralist society. At the same time, I want to take issue with one of the most influential critiques leveled against Rawls’s conception of the self: namely, Sandel’s critique of the ‘individuated subject’ that, in his view, underlies justice as fairness. Rawls’s constructions, so Sandel argues, rest on an unencumbered self that is individuated in advance and whose identity is fixed once and for all.
Mathematical Structuralism and the Third Man
Authors: Hand Michael
Published: June 2016

Plato himself would be pleased at the recent emergence of a certain highly Platonic variety of platonism concerning mathematics, viz., the structuralism of Michael Resnik and Stewart Shapiro. In fact, this species of platonism is so Platonic that it is susceptible to an objection closely related to one raised against Plato by Parmenides in the dialogue of that name. This is the Third Man Argument (TMA) against a view about the relation of Forms to particulars. My objection is not a TMA against structuralism; the position avoids that objection, but is vulnerable to a different one precisely at the point where it avoids the TMA. The way structuralism avoids the TMA has in fact been considered, as one of Plato’s options, by at least one commentator on the Parmenides, Colin Strang, who explicitly rejects it on logical grounds. In the course of the discussion, I shall clarify the reason that I believe led Strang to reject this option, and shall modify his own statement of that reason.
Hume on the Ordinary Distinction Between Objective and Subjective Impressions
Authors: Kornegay R. Jo
Published: June 2016

Hume begins ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses,’ Section 2 of the Treatise, Book I, Part iv with the claim that it is otiose to ask whether or not there are bodies since belief in their existence is unavoidable. The appropriate question is rather ‘What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?’ (§2, 187-8; his emphasis). For Hume, belief is lively conception. Hence, he is also undertaking to answer the logically prior question: What causes induce us to form the concept of body? Hume wants to explain the ordinary notion of, and belief in, external objects as part of his science of human nature.
On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events
Authors: Gill Kathleen
Published: June 2016

In theMetaphysics, Aristotle pointed out that some activities are engaged in for their own sake, while others are directed at some end. The test for distinguishing between them is to ask, ‘At any time during a period in which someone is Xing, is it also true that they have Xed?’ If both are true, the activity is being done for its own sake. If not, it is being done for the sake of some end other than itself. For example, if I am thinking, it is true that I have thought. But if I’m making a blouse, it is not true that I have made a blouse, at least not this particular blouse. That’s not true until I have completed the project.

There have been a number of attempts to deepen our understanding of this distinction. Anthony Kenny devoted a chapter of Action, Emotion, and Will to this issue, exploring the effect tense has on implication relations, and using that as a basis for dividing verbs of action into state-verbs, activity-verbs and performance-verbs. In more recent years the trend has been to generalize these categories so as to include occurrences other than actions, i.e., occurrences which do not involve intentions. While interest in this area tends to focus primarily on linguistic issues, such as the categorization of verbs, or on the logical analysis of sentences, there has been some interest in related metaphysical issues. In 1978 Alexander Mourelatos published ‘Events, Processes, and States,’ a paper which has turned out to be quite influential, in which he proposes an ontological trichotomy of occurrences. In his view, processes and events form distinct categories within the general category of occurrences. In this paper I will examine the reasoning underlying Mourelatos’s claim, arguing that the differences between processes and events cannot provide the basis for an ontological subcategorization of occurrences.
Aristotle’s kinêsis/energeia Distinction: A Marginal Note on Kathleen Gill’s Paper
Authors: Mourelatos Alexander P.D.
Published: June 2016

I am grateful to the editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for inviting me to write a comment on Kathleen Gill’s ‘On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events’ (above, 365-84). I readily concede that she is right in the central criticism she makes of my 1978 paper: that a properly metaphysical or ontological distinction between processes and events, if it is to be made at all, cannot be sustained on the basis of the informal linguistic criteria I offered in ‘Events, Processes, and States.’ My main concern in that paper was to show that discussions (back then) of the Kenny-Vendler typology of activities, performances (i.e., accomplishments and achievements, taken together), and states had focused too narrowly on verb types, on adverbial phrases, on the domain of human action, and on English-language intuitions. Mine was one of several voices urging in the late 1970s that issues of tense logic and of the logic of verb types had to be placed in the broader context of verb aspect — a salient and pervasive structure in natural languages generally, and one that had been studied by philologists and linguists since the nineteenth century. Captivated, as I and others had become at the time, by evidence that the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns appears to be mirrored in verb predications, I went on to make some rather venturesome ‘ontological’ claims. It is satisfying, of course, that Gill accepts not only that there is ‘substantial evidence in favor of recognizing a grammatical distinction between the language of processes and [the language of] events’ (369) but also that ‘similarities with count and mass expressions will allow us to apply techniques for han dling nominal expressions to verbal expressions’ (368). It is more than satisfying that the phenomenon of verb aspect is now noticed and investigated by philosophers as well as by linguists.
The Just War and The Gulf War
Authors: McMahan Jeff , McKim Robert
Published: June 2016

Discussions of the morality of the Gulf War have tended to embrace the traditional theory of the just war uncritically and to apply its tenets in a mechanical and unimaginative fashion. We believe, by contrast, that careful reflection of the Gulf War reveals that certain principles of the traditional theory are oversimplifications that require considerable refinement. Our aims, therefore, are both practical and theoretical. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics both of war in general and of the Gulf War in particular.
The Historical Discourse of Philosophy
Authors: Allen Barry
Published: June 2016

What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?

Michel Foucault

It may be that we can learn nothing from history but the fact that we have a history ... but there is simply no other way of gaining sensitivity to a future than through insight into the uniqueness and irretrievability of what is past.

Hans Blumenberg
Philosophy as a Discipline
Authors: Sparshott Francis
Published: June 2016

I once characterized philosophy as 'deliberative discourse about meanings.' The point was, first, that in philosophy one is concerned to decide not what is the case but what and how one is to think; and second, that differences in philosophical approach and practice can best be construed in terms of disagreements about what can be said to be meaningful and about what it is to have meaning.
Wittgenstein, Davidson, and the Myth of Incommensurability
Authors: Stein Stan
Published: June 2016

Philosophers have been spending a considerable amount of time discussing whether or not they are doing anything of substance. This of course is the 'end of philosophy' debate. I am perverse enough to bring myself out of my dogmatic slumber to join the debate. I am also perverse enough, or at least out of my slumber enough, to join with the nay sayers such as Richard Rorty, Kai Nielsen, and others who declare the end of the tradition, at least with respect to what has been called Metaphysical Realism, or its alter-ego, Idealism. My contribution to the philosophy of philosophy is the observation that at least in some areas philosophy has, and rightly so, lost its subject matter.
Confessions of a Modest Bayesian
Authors: Kaplan Mark
Published: June 2016

I have never been shy about admitting to fellow philosophers that I am a Bayesian, but I confess that I have rarely made the admission without discomfort. It is because I know what people usually think. They think I am an orthodox Bayesian. They think I am convinced that everyone (unbeknownst to herself) harbors a real-valued degree of confidence assignment that satisfies the axioms of the probability calculus.
Certainty and Phenomenal States
Authors: Hales Steven D.
Published: June 2016

The sort of knowledge we have with regard to the nature and kind of our own phenomenal states has enjoyed considerable prestige in the history of philosophy. Hume claims that ‘The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions, which being immediately present to us by consciousness, command our strongest assent, and are the first foundation of all our conclusions’ (A Treatise of Human Nature, I 4.2). In the New Essays (II 27.238), Leibniz remarks that ‘if the immediate inner experience is not certain, we cannot be sure of any truth of fact.’