bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Actions, Causes, and Mental Ascriptions
Authors: Gillett Grant
Published: November 2023

One of the pivotal axioms of a physicalist theory of mind is that actions are caused by physical events and explained by laws of causality. Indeed, if this were abandoned then physicalist theory could supply no explanation for human behaviour. Davidson has challenged physicalist theories of mind on this basis. However, he claims that mental events are, in some sense, supervenient upon the physical events denoted by mental ascriptions, and while arguing for the irreducibility of mental ascriptions, he also espouses a causal theory of action: ‘the primary reason for an action is its cause.’ I will argue, by using Kant’s analysis of action, that causality as normally understood has no place in mental explanation. This tends to undermine the (Humean) assumption that there are causally effective mental events and that actions are produced by causal impulses.
Truth, Physicalism, and Ultimate Theory
Authors: Wagner Steven J
Published: November 2023

I believe that the ideas behind physicalism are poorly understood. A better grasp of them encourages a position with significant physicalist elements. How one may reach that destination, then step far off the physicalist path, is recounted here. I will also shed light on the concern, found in Quine and elsewhere, with ultimate theories as standards of epistP.mic merit. Central to my project is the clash between Quinian epistemology and its pragmatic critics. This formulation may be surprising, since Quine ushered in the half-century by identifying the rational with the pragmatic, in opposition to Carnap and C. I. Lewis. But Quine in turn is charged with insufficient pragmatism.
Incorrigibility
Authors: Warner Richard
Published: November 2023

I will defend the spirit of the traditional doctrine of incorrigibility. The letter, I abandon. The spirit is that there is a fundamental epistemological difference between the mental and the physical. The letter is that the difference consists in having or lacking immunity to error; more fully: certain beliefs about mental items are immune to error, while beliefs about physical items exhibit no such immunity. One source of this view was the now discredited doctrine of the given. Traditional epistemology held that certain mental states could be ‘given’ to the mind. ‘Givenness’ involved no ‘conceptual interpretation’, and for this reason it was thought that certain beliefs about the given were immune to error. I will stand the traditional doctrine on its head: incorrigibility is the result of conceptual interpretation—or, more accurately, the result of the exercise of a recognitional ability. So conceived, incorrigibility turns out to be a kind of conditional immunity to error.
The Grain Problem1
Authors: Lockwood Michael
Published: November 2023

There is, today, no glimmer of a consensus amongst philosophers about the mind-body problem. Nevertheless, an increasing number of philosophers find themselves occupying a middle ground between physicalist reductionism, on the one hand, and dualism on the other. Physicalist reductionism I take to be the view that the physical story about what is going on in the brain and the world with which it interacts is in some sense the whole story. If there really are such things as mental states and processes—which eliminative materialists notoriously deny—then their existence must be logically implicit in facts statable in the language of physics. Space does not permit a detailed rebuttal of reductionist physicalism; nor do the arguments I have elsewhere presented admit of brief summary.
The Autonomy of Colour
Authors: Broackes Justin
Published: November 2023

This essay takes two notions of autonomy and two notions of explanation and argues that colours occur in explanations that fall. under all of them. The claim that colours can be used to explain anything at all may seem to some people an outrage. But their pessimism is unjustified and the orthodox dispositional view which may seem to support it, I shall argue, itself has difficulties. In broad terms, Section 2 shows that there exist good straight scientific laws of colour, constituting what one might call a phenomenal science. Section 3 offers a larger view of what we are doing when we attribute colours to things, a view which makes it a case of holistic explanation, similar in many ways to psychological explanation. Section 2 emphasizes the model of scientific explanation, and Section 3 the holistic model found in rational explanation; but it will emerge that colour explanation in different ways fits both models, as it also does the two principal notions of autonomy that the first section identifies.
Introduction
Authors: Krips Henry
Published: November 2023

Historically the interpretation of QT (non-relativistic Quantum Theory) has been dominated by two main traditions. There is the ‘orthodox interpretation’ (or Copenhagen interpretation) which grew out of the views of Bohr and has been promulgated by Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, et al. And there is the ‘realist interpretation’ which developed from Einstein’s criticisms of Bohr, and has been forwarded by Landé, Popper, Putnam, Bohm, and more generally the hidden variables school.
The State-vector and Probabilities
Authors: Krips Henry
Published: November 2023

One of the features of modern physics is the extensive use of quantitative concepts to enrich qualitative concepts. For example a comparative qualitative judgement that A is hotter than B will be redescribed quantitatively by saying that the temperature value of A is greater than that of B. This quantitative language has much greater expressive power than the qualitative language it replaces. For example it enables sense to be made of such claims as ‘A is as much hotter than B as B is hotter than C’. For our purposes, however, the important feature of quantitative language is that it enables the development of the idea of a possible state.
Heywood and Redhead
Authors: Krips Henry
Published: November 2023

Two varieties of realism in QT (Quantum Theory) are distinguished. A strong form which endorses: (VR) If there is zero probability of the measured value of Q being q for system S at time t then Q does not have the value q for S at t; and a weaker form in which what we call the ‘eigenvector rule’ is endorsed. ((VR) is seen as a realist principle because it establishes a mirroring relation between the reality of possessed values and what is measured.) It is argued that if we adopt a minimum completeness condition for QT, one which is ,already incorporated within the standard de-Ockhamization strategy, then the distinction between these two varieties of realism collapses. Moreover adapting an argument by Heywood and Redhead (1983) it is shown that the strong form of realism just defined is inconsistent with Heywood and Redhead’s principle OLOC. But it is also argued that within a realist metaphysics OLOC emerges as a consequence of QT and certain ‘analytic’ principles which give meaning to physical quantities in sub-systems.
Wakingfrom Delirium
Authors: Clark Stephen R L
Published: November 2023

A literal reading1 of mythographic speculation assures us that the days of the very beginning were a long time ago, ‘before’ the everyday world of human life got started. Perhaps human beings as we now know them were involved in those beginnings, perhaps we came after; but certainly there was a time when gods and fairies walked upon the earth. Their sometime presence is recalled in ritual and story. But as I pointed out in Civil Peace and Sacred Order (1989: 27ff.), it is of the very essence of fairyland that it is ‘once-upon-a-time’: however far back along the normal run of history we look we shall find that the fairies have already ‘gone away’, and yet are ‘there’ alongside us. Their ‘pastness’ is not that of last year’s papers-though one could suggest, contrariwise, that last year’s doings very rapidly attain the other status of the Dreamtime Myth. Our childhoods are next door to Eden, as Augustine saw (Manchester 1986: 389). The dinosaurs of a ‘literal’ long-ago actually occupy an alongside world in our children’s imaginations. The ‘pastness’ of the Beginnings is better understood as their permanent alongsideness, their recall is their being. ‘To listen to the recital of the birth of the world is to become the contemporary of the creative act par excellence, the cosmogony’, so Eliade ( l 959: 83) declares with especial reference to Polynesian recitals. The world is always beginning, from the omnipresent centre of attentive consciousness, which we represent to ourselves under the style of myth. At the same time it is always breaking out into a wider world, waking up to judgement.
Language Contact and Change
Authors: Silva-Corvalan Carmen
Published: November 2023

In the past thirty years, sociolinguistic research has been concerned, among other questions, with the examination of language change (Romaine 1982). Labov (1972a; 1981a; 1981b), in particular, has successfully challenged the traditional structuralist position, which argued that change in progress could not be observed, by developing the necessary methodological techniques to identify and study possible changes in progress in apparent or real time. During this period, one of the most debated questions within the field of historical and socio-historical linguistics has been the interaction between internal linguistic factors and external social forces (including as such a different language) in what Weinreich et al. (1968: 186-7) call the actuation or motivation of linguistic change, i.e. the role that both society and the structure of language may play in stimulating or constraining linguistic change. With respect to this dilemma, these authors observe that if the theory that linguistic change is change in social behaviour is taken seriously, then it may not be possible to postulate predictive explanatory hypotheses. Rather, it is conceivable that all explanations may have to be offered a posteriori.
The Effect of Tense-Mood-Aspect Simplification on Narrative and Hypothetical Discourse
Authors: Silva-Corvalan Carmen
Published: November 2023

The preceding chapter has documented the simplification and loss of verbal inflections in the Spanish of Los Angeles bilinguals. This chapter proposes to examine the effect simplification and loss may have on the expression of meaning complexes (Klein and von Stutterhei mind.) in hypothetical and narrative discourse. Klein and von Stutterheim define a meaning complex (p. 1) as the set of temporally, spatially, logically, etc. ordered information expressed in such texts as route descriptions, narratives, and reports. I explore the question of what it is that cannot be said at the lower stages of the bilingual continuum or, at least, that cannot be said with the same degree of stylistic flexibility or semantic subtlety as a result of attrition of the verb system. In order to provide some answers, albeit far from definitive, to this general question, I analyse and compare narratives and samples of hypothetical discourse about hypothetical situations produced by Spanishas well as by English-dominant bilinguals.
Conflicting Loyalties
Authors: Silva-Corvalan Carmen
Published: November 2023

Weinreich (1974: 68) proposes a definition of language shift as the change from the everyday, traditional use of one language to that of another. He also proposes the term ‘ language loyalty’ to describe a state of mind in which a language, in opposition to other languages, is assigned a high value by its speakers, who are driven to defend this language from foreign interference and/or from an imminent language shift. Language loyalty is defined ‘as a principle ... in the name of which people will rally themselves and their fellow speakers consciously and explicitly to resist changes in either the functions of their language (as a result of a language shift) or in the structure or vocabulary (as a consequence of interference)’ (99).
Moral Theory
Authors: Gauthier David P
Published: November 2023

Hobbes writes on morals as a moralist. His primary aim is to demonstrate what men ought, and what they ought not, to do. In pursuing this aim he introduces, and explains, certain moral concepts, of which the most important are right of nature, law of nature, obligation, and justice. But his interest is in using these concepts in moral conclusions, not in explica ting them.
Initial Theory of Sovereignty
Authors: Gauthier David P
Published: November 2023

The title of this chapter indicates a departure from the usual interpretation of Hobbes’s political theory. Although scholars have noted that there are differences between the presentation of the theory in Leviathan and the presentation in Hobbes’s earlier political writings, little significance has been attached to these differences. There is a plausible explanation for this the differences do not affect the material content of the theory. We wish to argue, however, that the differences amount to a major alteration in the formal structure of Hobbes’s political theory-an alteration which adds both plausibility and interest to Hobbes’s view of political society, but which Hobbes is unable properly to exploit because of the inadequacies in his psychology.
Theory of Authorization
Authors: Gauthier David P
Published: November 2023

One of the more curious aberrations of Hobbesian scholar ship is found in the view that Leviathan is ‘a rhetorical and, in many ways, a popular Streitschrift’ in comparison with the more calmly argued statements of the same doctrine con tained in the Elements of Law’ (that is, De Corpore Politico) or the De Cive’. There are, it is true, elements of Hobbes’s moral doctrine-for example the connection of reason and right-which are stated more clearly in the earlier works. But the political doctrine of Leviathan represents a major advance in Hobbes’s thinking, an advance which depends almost entirely on the introduction of the concept of authorization.
Reflections on Ether
Authors: Saunders Simon , Brown Harvey R
Published: November 2023

There are special difficulties which obstruct the understanding of both ether and the elimination of ether from physical science. To be sure, there is an experimentum crucis—the Michelson–Morley experiment—and there is a rival theory which better accounted for the facts; but we know that in the history of ideas life is not so simple. The ether was a very great idea, and it dominated more than a century of science; it did not vanish overnight.
The Vacuum and Unification
Authors: Aitchison I J R
Published: November 2023

It is a common observation that fundamental physics seems to have progressed, over the last hundred years or more, in the direction of ever greater unification. It is fair to describe this movement as progress, because it does appear that the drive towards unification has, in many diverse ways, acted as a powerful heuristic device in constructing phenomenologically successful theories. Less widely noted, perhaps, is the crucial role that the vacuum (as currently understood) has played, and still plays, in many aspects of the unification programme. This is what I want to examine, very briefly, in the present contribution.
Making Everything Out of Nothing
Authors: Weingard Robert
Published: November 2023

I want to begin with Descartes. This may seem strange, since Descartes argues that a vacuum is impossible. But by this he meant simply that two things could not be separated by a distance and yet have, literally, nothing between them. If there were, literally, nothing between two objects, they would be in contact. If there is a distance or extension between two objects, then that distance is a property of something, namely an extended substance.
Things that Concern Us
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: November 2023

Our aim is to understand our capacities for ethics, and more widely, for practical reasoning in general. To do this we must give an adequate conception of the deliberating agent and of the moral commitments she forms. It is not my intention to defend one ethic or one specific style of ethics above others. So in this chapter I only sketch enough of the philosophy of the input side to enable us to proceed to the rest of the theory. We classify actions as cases of telling what is not true, or promise breaking, or killing, or theft, or alternatively as examples of loyalty, integrity, or principle. When such characterizations of action give us our input, the ethics that emerges will be one of right and wrong, obligations and duties, prohibitions and permissions. This gives us a duty governed or deontological system. The Ten Commandments and other lists of religious ordinances telling us what we may or may not do are the best-known examples of ethics of this type.
Introduction
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

This book is concerned with an increasingly popular aspect of the broad topic of linguistic change, namely change as it takes place in languages in contact, and more specifically in what are commonly referred to as ‘minority languages’. Following Dressler and Wodak-Leodolter (1977) and Giacalone Ramat (1979), we understand the term ‘minority language’ not only in a prestige or social value sense, i.e. a language whose speakers are socio-economically disadvantaged with respect to those of a ‘superordinate’ language, but also in a demographic sense, i.e. a language whose speakers are in numerical inferiority in comparison with those of a ‘majority’ language. It could be argued that ‘true’ minority languages are those which combine both aspects-and many indeed do-yet it is clear that only subordinate social value is a necessary and sufficient condition for minority-language speakers to shift to the superordinate language, since language shift can take place even in situations where the shifting population forms a majority, e.g. the Irish case, the Welsh case, the Québécois case before the advent of the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, etc. (for further discussion of the definition of ‘minority language’, see the papers in Haugen, McClure, and Thomson 1981).
Socio-historical Background
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this chapter is to provide historical, sociological, and demographic information concerning Ontario‘s francophone population. This will allow the reader better to situate the four Franco– Ontarian communities in which our adolescent speakers were selected, in terms of geographical location, local demographics, language maintenance and shift, local economic activity, etc. Because of the specific topic of this book, we shall pay special attention to the data on bilingualism and language shift among Franco-Ontarians.
French-language Spread
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

The overall tone of the preceding chapter was admittedly pessimistic. It is time now that we took a look at a different and more optimistic side of the situation of French in Ontario. Indeed, a number of primary causes traditionally invoked to explain language shift do not obtain in the case of the Franco-Ontarian minority. Probably foremost among these is the language of education (but there are also the mass media, community organizations, and government services). Most linguistic minorities around the world do not enjoy the privilege of having elementary and secondary schools in their own language, but Franco– Ontarians do. According to Fishman (1987), the elementary school ranks with the other ‘primary determinants of intergenerational language transmission’ that are the home and neighbourhood.
Methodology
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall provide a description of the speech corpus which we drew on in the sociolinguistic studies which are featured in Chapters 5 – II, examine the general theoretical hypotheses which guided our research, and finally say a word about our method of data analysis. As the corpus was drawn from two previous sociolinguistic surveys not entirely identical in terms of sampling procedures, interview schedules, questionnaires, etc., we shall consider each of these surveys separately. For additional details concerning the corpus, the reader is referred to Mougeon, Brent-Palmer, Bélanger, and Cichocki (1982).
Sociolectal Reduction
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

The breakdown of the Latin case system was offset in part by an expansion of its prepositional system. Two prepositions which underwent considerable expansion were ad and de. One aspect of their expansion saw them vie with one another to introduce nominal complements expressing the idea of possession. This rivalry developed in Vulgar Latin and is still extant today in marginal, popular, or simply informal varieties of French on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. la voiture à/de man père ‘my father’s car’). This long-standing case of variation has been commented upon by many linguists, yet certain aspects of its diachrony and synchrony remain unclear.
Aborted Sociolectal Reduction
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall examine another case of rather long-standing variation in Canadian French, with special reference once again to the French spoken in the province of Ontario. The variable belongs to the area of verbal morphology and involves the alternate forms of aller ‘to go’ and s’en alter ‘to go, leave’ in the Isg. indicative present (vais, vas, and m’as), in both their main verb and auxiliary functions. The historical part of the study will show that a comparative examination of sociolinguistic data on contemporary Canadian French and other colonial varieties of French (including French-based creoles) can, owing to their conservative nature, provide insights into the popular French of the pre-colonial period (i.e. allow one to reconstruct unattested forms like m’as) about which still relatively little is known.
Overt Interference
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

Any discipline which purports to be scientific practises self-criticism. Linguistics is no exception. One particular theoretical concept which has attracted more than its share of criticism in this field is inteiference. In our view, the generally bad press which it has received is due not to a flaw in the theory that languages in contact may influence one another–no serious linguist would deny this fact– but rather to shoddy methodology (and, to some extent also, ideological bias). The literature literally abounds in studies hastily and erroneously attributing language change to foreign influence due to lack of a proper methodology. This exaggerated appeal to interference will be illustrated with examples drawn from various subfields (e.g. historical linguistics, minority languages, pidgins and creoles, second-language learning), with particular reference to French.
Conclusion
Authors: Mougeon Raymond , Beniak Édouard
Published: November 2023

The primary purpose of this final chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of (r) the main types of linguistic change which were examined in Chapters 5– 11, (2) the extralinguistic parameters which were found to be associated with these changes, and (3) the particular effects these parameters have on the changes. With this purpose in mind, we have summarized the results of our investigation of the effects of the four extralinguistic parameters French-language-use restriction, locality of residence, social class, and sex on the various cases of change under study (see Table 12.1). This table provides information on the percentages associated with the different extralinguistic factors under study and, when a VARBRUL analysis was performed, on the effects of the different factors and on the predictive power (or rank) of the different factor groups.
Fillmore’s Case Theory
Authors: Ravin Yael
Published: November 2023

Case Theory is proposed by Fillmore as a theory to account for ‘certain types of judgements human beings are capable of making about the events that are going on around them, judgements about such matters as who did it, who it happened to, and what got changed’ (Fillmore 1968: 24). According to Fillmore, such judgements are made on the basis of semantic relations that hold between predicates and their arguments. His theory is intended to represent these relations, since, as he observes, neither grammatical functions nor surface case markers can adequately represent them.
A Theory of Semantic Decomposition (I)
Authors: Ravin Yael
Published: November 2023

The thematic theories reviewed in the preceding chapters are based on the assumption that thematic information is an integral part of the linguistic competence of native speakers. However, several factors indicate that thematic roles are, in fact, superfluous concepts. The theories that use them exhibit a variety of syntactic problems. To describe the content of roles, the theories rely, implicitly or explicitly, on some decompositional analysis of meaning. The more semantic information they make use of, the more marginal and derivative thematic roles become within them, until, as for jackendoff, they serve as mere labels.
A Theory of Semantic Decomposition (II)
Authors: Ravin Yael
Published: November 2023

The structure of semantic representations is governed by a set of configurational rules and a set of projection operations. Configurational rules determine the relations holding among the components of semantic representations. They define the formal conditions on the well-formedness of semantic representations by specifying valid domination relations among nodes. They specify, for example, that an (Event) node can dominate a (Change) node, but cannot itself be dominated by it. Configurational rules often specify particular contexts, that is, types of semantic structures in which the domination relations hold. Thus, a (Causation) node is dominated by an (Event) node only in the absence of an (Intention) node.
The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Moore James
Published: November 2023

It has become common practice among historians, in the past thirty years, to describe the collective achievement of philosophers, scientists, builders, and educators in eighteenth-century Scotland as the “Scottish enlightenment”. The remarkable changes in thought and behaviour that occurred in Scotland at this time, in the church and in the universities, in agriculture and in commerce, in the arts and sciences, have been documented and described from various points of view.
Semantics and Subroutines
Authors: Morton Adam
Published: November 2023

Semantical theories relate symbol types to meanings and to referents. Symbols are abstract objects. So are most of their referents, according to most semantical theories. The ancestor of modern semantical theories, Frege’s theory, relates sentences ultimately to the most abstract of all possible objects, the True and the False, however concrete the ostensible subject matter of the sentences. Frege was characteristically careless of plausibility here. And characteristically correct. More recent semantical theories bear out Frege’s intuition. One example is given by the theory of models of formal languages, in which logical relations between sentences are described in terms of inter pretations of those sentences in set-theoretical domains. Another is given by possible-worlds semantics for modal con structions, which gives us, unfortunately, the best understanding we have of how this part of language works, in terms of an abstract framework that is just unbelievable if taken as repre senting part of solid, non-abstract reality.
Vision: The ‘Other’ Face of AI
Authors: Poggio T
Published: November 2023

The declared goal of Artificial Intelligence is to make machines intelligent and, at the same time, to understand the principles that make intelligence possible-both in natural and artificial systems. Consistent with the definition, Artificial Intelligence includes both the study of reasoning or problem-solving abilities and of perception, though the study of the former historically represents the first concern of Artificial Intelligence researchers and is still the major one.
Human Thinking and Mental Models
Authors: Johnson-Laird P N
Published: November 2023

Suppose that the brain is some sort of computational device, obviously not the familiar digital computer, but some as yet unknown parallel device that carries out computations on a physiological basis. In this case, the psychologists’ aim should be to discover the nature of the various procedures that the brain uses to carry out its various tasks. Its three major tasks are, of course, to perceive the world, to cogitate on it, and to control bodily actions. In this paper, I am going to concentrate on one aspect of cogitation, inferential reasoning, and to give an account of the sorts of computational procedure that underlie it.
Language in Alsace
Authors: Chloros-Gardner Penelope
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I shall describe the linguistic situation in Alsace in general terms so as to provide a background for the code-switching studies which follow. It is a mistake to focus on code-switching to the exclusion of other information on the distribution and evolution of the two codes in the community; for it is only by seeing it in association with other aspects of the linguistic picture that its true significance can become apparent (cf. Trudgill 1976-7).
The Surveys
Authors: Chloros-Gardner Penelope
Published: November 2023

One of the main premisses of this book, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is that code-switching is one of a range of possible manifestations of language contact which are interconnected in a complex fashion at a linguistic and at a psychological level. This argument rests partly on evidence presented in this chapter and in Chapters 5 and 6 (Conversational Analysis); partly on a view of the bilingual as a psychologically complex entity and not simply as the sum of two monolinguals (Hamers and Blanc 1989; Grosjean 1985b; Romaine 1989); and partly on the assumption that a ‘language’ in the abstract (i.e. as described in a grammar, dictionary, etc.) is not the same thing as ‘a language’ as known and used by an individual (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 188ff.)
Quantification
Authors: Chloros-Gardner Penelope
Published: November 2023

In this Chapter, aspects of the code-switched conversations described in Chapter 5 are broken down and quantified. The classification of the linguistic phenomena which make up code-switching is of fundamental importance, and some of the difficulties arising in such an analysis have already been mentioned in Chapter 3; a further discussion of this issue will be found in the final chapter.
Conclusions
Authors: Chloros-Gardner Penelope
Published: November 2023

The study of code-switching involves a constant refocusing of one’s point of view from very broad to ,cry detailed issues. Any intelligent layman can be made to understand within a couple of minutes what code-switching is and almost any bilingual would admit to practising it; many also have firmly held attitudes regarding its acceptability (Chana and Romaine HJ84). The reason for its existence is simple: there is more than one variety of language in the world and those different varieties are not kept in hermetically sealed boxes. Their mutual spill over and influence is one of the major keys to understanding how languages develop, change, and die.
Language and Moral Education
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

In this paper I am going to try to bring philosophy to bear on a practical problem. What then is philosophy, as I am using the term? It is the art or science which does for words what mathematics does for numbers. We all spend quite a lot of time talking; and some of this we spend arguing with one another, using words for this purpose. It is no accident that philosophy started in Greece, because the ancient Greeks were perhaps the most argumentative people the world has ever known. It was one of them, Socrates, who made for the first time the move which started philosophy in the sense in which I am using the word. He found some people arguing about some substantial question; and instead of joining in the argument on one side or the other, he insisted on having some key term in it explained to him. He did not put his questions as questions about the meanings of words; but they were that. To know what rightness is, is to know what we mean by ‘right’ (see H 1982: 27 and p. 178). In the same sort of way, a father and his son might be having an argument today about whether something is right or wrong (it could be about something important or about something unimportant—about whether it is right to fight for one’s country, or about whether it is right to grow one’s hair long); and one could imagine some modern Socrates coming along and saying to them ‘How can you possibly settle your argument if you don’t know what you mean by “right”?’ And this advice would be sound.
Platonism in Moral Education: Two Varieties
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

Plato can claim a pre-eminent place in the philosophy of education, for two reasons at least. The first is that he started the subject; the second is that he expressed with a force which has not since been surpassed a particular, seemingly authoritarian, view about it. Any liberal has to come to grips with this view, for which ‘Platonism’ is still the most appropriate name; and the first step is to determine more exactly what, in essence, the view is. This paper will not be concerned with the close examination of Plato’s text; there are some prolegomena to this in H 1982. I shall say nothing about the quaint details of the educational curriculum in the Republic or (quainter still!) the Laws, which have distracted the attention of some commentators from more fundamental problems. What I aim to discuss is the question ‘Can virtue be taught?’, with which Plato introduces the subject in the Meno—the question which more than any other provides the incentive for his entire philosophical enterprise.
Revolution, Contradiction, and Kantian Citizenship
Authors: Holtman Sarah Williams
Published: November 2023

To many critics, Immanuel Kant’s Rechtslehre has value principally as an example of what a theory of justice should not be. To wit, Kantian justice requires slavish adherence to rigid rules that are backed by harsh penalties and insensitive to real-world complexities and imperfections. These characteristics, critics often note, are nowhere more apparent than in Kant’s discussion of revolution. However unjust the legal system, however corrupt the public officials, revolution never is justified: ‘a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority … [and] its resistance to the highest legislation can never be regarded as other than contrary to law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution’ (MS 6:320). Friends of Kant’s practical philosophy too find this position on revolution at best overstated and at worst untenable, though unlike critics they typically do not further conclude that this has insurmountable consequences for the theory of justice as a whole.
Happiness as a Natural End
Authors: Johnson Robert N
Published: November 2023

These two claims from the Doctrine of Virtue seem inconsistent, if we assume that we do not freely do what we unavoidably do and that to wish for and to seek something is to have it as an end of action.The inconsistency, if genuine, is not harmless. The first claim (hereafter, ‘E’) and equivalent statements elsewhere express the extent of Kant’s belief in free will, as well as feature in his arguments that there are ends that are duties and that such duties cannot be constrained by others but only self-constrained.2 The second claim (hereafter, ‘H’) and equivalent statements elsewhere feature in Kant’s arguments that we can have no direct duty to pursue our own happiness, that prudential rationality is distinct from mere skillfulness, and that, unlike the Categorical Imperative (CI), the problem of the ‘possibility’ of a hypothetical imperative needs no solution.3 This is, in other words, an inconsistency between basic premisses of Kant’s moral philosophy.
Introduction
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

This book explores the role of illusion in the free will problem, a problem at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. Understanding the role of illusion, I claim, is the key to the free will problem. Within our lives, insofar as they are affected by the issue of free will, illusion is descriptively central and normatively necessary. Beyond a specific exploration of the role of illusion, this book also attempts to crystallize insights gained by recent philosophical research into the free will problem into an integrated, coherent view. It is maintained that we have most of the resources for a general, albeit rough, understanding of the free will problem.
Philosophy of. …
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

If someone who doesn’t know how to cook should buy a cookbook, she hardly expects, on opening it, to find the first chapter devoted to the question of what cooking is. Presumably, she already knows that much about the subject. But it is quite likely that someone who buys a book called Introduction to a Philosophy of Music will not only not know what the philosophy of music is; she will not know what philosophy is either. So it seems not altogether inappropriate to begin with such a chapter as this. However, it is part of the nature of philosophy that to tell what philosophy is is itself a daunting task.
Narration and Representation
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

I have emphasized in the previous chapter the role of music’s expressive properties in the setting of operatic texts. There is good reason, I think. why the expressiveness of music has been such a major player in opera, and in other forms of music, in the modern Western tradition, where words are sung. The reason is this. The expressive properties of music, within a certain narrow range, as we have seen, are clearly discernible to all listeners. (I am speaking here, of course, only of Western music, and listeners practiced in listening to it.) Because of that, they—the expressive properties provide the most dependable, the most reliable, material for a composer trying to make her music appropriate to her text. For, because the emotive properties of music are so readily, so universally, recognized by even the most naive listeners, the composer can be sure that the appropriateness of music to text will be recognized.
Liberal Double-Mindedness
Authors: Kekes John
Published: November 2023

Double-mindedness is best understood in contrast with single mindedness. To be single-minded is to have a strong enough motive to override any other motive that may conflict with it. To be doubleminded is to have two strong motives that exist in a state of tension because acting on one excludes acting on the other. The agents feel the strength of both motives, but neither obviously overrides the other. Consequently they waver, they are ambivalent, they are of two minds about what they should do.

Double-mindedness may be a temporary state or a lasting disposition. As a temporary state, it is a common experience that most agents have when they try to decide, as they must, between immediate and more distant satisfactions, between the demands of morality and self-interest, between institutional and personal loyalties, between duty and pleasure, and so forth. Such a state is intrinsically undesirable because it involves frustration,
Kant
Authors: Sacks Mark
Published: November 2023

While Hume himself is a naturalist, rather than a sceptic, his conclusions are clearly significant for anyone committed to finding more than just the natural drive of nature with which to explain and underpin our belief that there are laws of nature (such as the causal law), or that there are objects that exist independently of us, or indeed that there is anything to me beyond the fleeting string of perceptions, something in virtue of which it will make sense to say that all these perceptions are mine. While Hume was prepared to close the door to his study and acquiesce in beliefs that could not be supported by critical reflection, this can look-and to philosophers like Kant did look like defeatism, or unacceptable quietude.
Conclusion: Objectivity, Insight, and the Place of Fictional Force
Authors: Sacks Mark
Published: November 2023

Traditionally, securing a handle on objectivity or the possibility of an absolute conception of the world has been regarded as part and parcel of a strictly realist outlook. A clear statement of this all too natural alignment can, for example, be found in one of its most determined advocates. Thomas Nagel thus writes: However often we may try to step outside of ourselves, something will have to stay behind the lens, something in us will determine the resulting picture, and this will give grounds for doubt that we are really getting any closer to reality. The idea of objectivity thus seems to undermine itself. The aim is to form a conception of reality which includes ourselves and our view of things among its objects, but it seems that whatever forms the conception will not be included by it. It seems to follow that the most objective view we can achieve will have to rest on an unexamined subjective base, and that since we can never abandon our own point of view, but can only alter it, the idea that we are coming closer to the reality outside it with each successive step has no foundation.
The Geography of the Mind
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

In this essay I intend to explore the nature of the mind: to delineate the different mental faculties such as the intellect, the imagination, and the fancy. I shall be, we might say, exploring the geography of the mind: the relations between the senses and the intellect; the contrast between outer senses and inner senses; the two kinds of imagination, fantastic and creative. I shall speak of the intellect as the capacity for operation with signs, and the will as the capacity for the pursuit of rational goals. I shall speak of the relation between the mind, the brain, and the body.
Note-for-Note: Work, Performance, and Early Notation
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

One of the most extraordinary and valuable aspects to me of Leo Treitler’s work as a Medievalist-and I am thinking, here, particularly about the work on the origins and early history of Western musical notation-is its implications for the philosophy of music. Nor is Treitler, I hasten to add, unaware of these implications, for he combines the skills and learning of a historian with a love and instinct for the big, speculative questions-a rare combination indeed, much to be admired.
Music, Will, and Representation
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

Music has perennially, most of the time peripherally, figured in the writings of the great philosophers. ln antiquity, Plato and Aristotle wrote at some length about something our translators render as ‘music,’ but what it sounded like-whether music in our sense of the word-is difficult, if not impossible to determine. 1n the early mod ern era, Descartes, Leibniz, Thomas Reid, and Kant treated music seriously if not at length. But it is Arthur Schopenhauer who first among the first rank of modern philosophers gave music a prestigious place in a philosophical system. For that reason alone, if for no other, what Schopenhauer said about it deserves our attention as philosophers of art.
On Hanslick’s Inconsistency
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

In an essay of mine called ‘Something I’ve Always Wanted to Know about Hanslick,’ I wrote about an inconsistency I thought I detected in Hanslick’s famous little book, Vom Musikalisch-Schonen, between what Hanslick calls his ‘negative thesis’-namely, the thesis that music cannot represent or embody in any way the ordinary, garden variety human emotions-and a passage concerning Gluck’s aria, ‘Che faro senza Euridice.’1 At the end of that essay, I suggested, very briefly, that there was an inconsistency, as well,between the negative thesis, as a theoretical pronouncement, and Hanslick’s practice as a critic of music. Because it was a brief coda to an essay on another subject, I did not amplify my views on this latter inconsistency, or make them as clear as I would like to have done. I would now like to take the opportunity to repair this defect.
Introduction
Authors: Mulgan Tim
Published: November 2023

If you are reading this, then you are very privileged. In a world of starvation, poverty, misery, and war, you have time to enjoy the luxury of philosophy. Obviously enough, so do I. One of the purposes of this book is to ask whether such behaviour is justified. There are very many very needy people in the world. About 20 million people a year starve to death. About one billion people live in severe poverty. Gross domestic product per capita is over $20,000 in the twenty wealthiest countries, and under $250 in the poorest fifteen. Life expectancy is over 76 in Japan, virtually all of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. It is under 50 in Afghanistan, Angola, Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Somalia. In Sierra Leone, Malawi, and Uganda it is under 40.
Other Forms of Collective Consequentialism
Authors: Mulgan Tim
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I discuss a recent alternative to the Rule Consequentialism discussed in the previous chapter—namely, the theory of Liam Murphy. I also attempt to draw some conclusions concerning the viability of Collective Consequentialism in general. Many of the problems faced by Rule Consequentialism were caused either by the shift from compliance to acceptance or by the need to discover exactly what action would follow from the ideal code of rules in a particular situ- ation. As we shall see, Murphy’s theory avoids such problems, as it lacks these troublesome features. However, I shall conclude that Murphy’s approach is not ultimately acceptable, and that no form of Collective Consequentialism can avoid the fate of either Rule Consequentialism or Murphy’s view.
The Stoics on Sign-inference and Demonstration
Authors: Allen James
Published: November 2023

In the previous study I argued that the close relation between the Stoic theory of signs and the framework of commemorative and indicative signs presupposed by Sextus Empiricus does not survive examination. In particular, the assumption that the Stoics were to be identified with the partisans of indicative signification is mistaken. If the argument I presented is right, the opposition between commemorative and indicative signification belongs to a debate between medical Rationalists and Empiricists, and Sextus’ discussion of signs was shaped by the concern, shared at that point by Empiricists and Pyrrhonists, to abolish the indicative sign while upholding the commemorative sign.
Pleasure and Reflection in Ross’s lntuitionism
Authors: Stratton-Lake Philip
Published: November 2023

Ethical intuitionists build their moral theory on a set of general moral convictions about the right and the good, which they regard as self-evident. This epistemology and associated methodology has, however, come under serious criticism. Two common objections are that it is dogmatic and especially vulnerable to bias. Both of these worries focus on the supposed selfevidence of the moral convictions on which intuitionist theories rest. It is claimed that intuitionists are dogmatic because the supposed self-evidence of their basic moral convictions means that if someone does not see the truth of these propositions, then all the intuitionist can do is dogmatically assert that they are true. Christine Korsgaard, for example, says that if one asked an intuitionist whether one really ought to do some particularly demanding act, all he can say is ‘simply “Yes”. That is, all he can say is that it is true that this is what you ought to do.’ It doesn’t help to say to someone who denies that some moral proposition is true, that it is self-evident, for if they deny that it is true, they will, a fortiori, deny that it is self-evident. Staring at the proposition doesn’t help.