bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Some Reflections on the New Cosmogony
Authors: Carr Herbert Wildon
Published: February 2009

Nothing is more surprising to the ordinary reflective man than the concept of a finite universe, yet it is to such a concept that the latest development of mathematical science, so admirably expounded in Jeans's Astronomy and Cosmogony, requires us to adapt ourselves. A finite universe is one in which anything moving outwards in a straight line, and maintaining its direction, must after an interval return to its starting-point. This seems a self-contradiction. A straight line, we think, must go on for ever.
Cosmic Purpose
Authors: Harvey J. W.
Published: February 2009

The phrase “Cosmic Purpose” and others akin to it are familiar enough, particularly in the literature of edification. It is the aim of this article to examine the idea the words convey rather more closely than we do in our common use of them; to deflate the expression, so to speak, of those gaseous suggestions of “uplift” which too often hang about it. The question involved is, of course, in what sense, if in any, purpose may be attributed to the Cosmos, to the universe in its totality. And we have to ask, in case the term so used should turn out to be really misused, Is it a sheer error that dissolves away under criticism, or is there some valid core of meaning which may be restated in other terms? If these are well-worn questions, yet the problem is too fundamental for them ever to be altogether trite.
Is Moral Progress A Reality?
Authors: Field G. C.
Published: February 2009

Is there really such a thing as moral progress? Do we get any better as time goes on? It is a question which must often exercise the minds of those who reflect on moral questions at all. And it is a frequent topic of discussion, both in private conversations and in the written contributions of a good many of our popular philosophers. Of some of these contributions one may safely say that their chief value is as a warning against the dangers of hasty generalization on a subject such as this. And, taking advantage of such a warning, I shall make no attempt to give a final or dogmatic answer to this question. All I can try to do, within the limits of a single lecture, is to disentangle some of the most important considerations that seem to be in people's minds in discussing this question, and to estimate their importance as arguments on one side or the other.
Philosophy in Germany
Authors: Knight Helen
Published: February 2009

Summary This survey deals with five books: (i) Ethical Questions, by Moritz Schlick; (ii) Significance, Genuineness, and Love, by Paul Feldkeller; (iii) Neo-Kantian Tasks, by Kurt Sternberg; (iv) Kant's Ethics, by Arthur Liebert; and (v) Contemporary Philosophy of the History of Art, by Walter Passarge
Spinozistic Substance and Upanishadic Self
Authors: Modak M. S.
Published: February 2009

The Upanishadic thinkers arrived at the conception of the Atman—the self—through psychological reflection. By an analysis of consciousness, they concluded that the self was the primary reality. Further, they discovered that it was the same primary reality—the same principle—that formed the basis of the Universe. In this capacity the self was called the Brahman This psychological approach to the problem of ultimate reality is characteristic of the Upanishadic philosophy. It is interesting to note that the writers of the Upanishads have also offered cosmological speculations which led them independently to the positing of absolute existence.
Cause and Ground
Authors: England F. E.
Published: February 2009

It is the true function of thought, Lotze said, to show “how absolutely universal is the extent, and at the same time how completely subordinate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world.” I do not propose to discuss the problem of mechanism versus teleology, but rather to point out and emphasize the importance of a distinction, drawn alike by Plato and Kant, between a narrower and a wider kind of determination, and to indicate the subordinate character of the former.
The Place of Mathematics in the Interpretation of the Universe
Authors: Lindemann F. A.
Published: February 2009

Recent advances in physics render a reconsideration of the Place of Mathematics in the Interpretation of the Universe particularly timely. On the one hand, we have the introduction of non-euclidian geometry, which has given rise to much controversy informed or otherwise; on the other hand, we find mysterious forms of mathematics, invented to cope with the quantum difficulties, which so far have escaped metaphysical investigation or criticism. It would seem most desirable that these modes of interpreting reality should be examined from the broader philosophical point of view.
Physics and Philosophy
Authors: Eddington Arthur S.
Published: February 2009

I think it will be agreed that there is a domain of investigation where physics and philosophy overlap. There are branches of philosophy which do not approach the subject-matter of physics, and a great part of the work of practical and theoretical physicists is not aimed at extending our knowledge of the fundamental nature of things; but questions which concern the general interpretation of the physical universe and the significance of physical law are claimed by both parties. I suppose that ideally the physicist should be allowed to elucidate his own universe up to a point, and then hand it over to the philosopher to ascertain its exact status in relation to a wider outlook.
Immanence and Transcendence
Authors: Leon Philip
Published: February 2009

The following is an attempt at an analysis of some of the difficulties of a certain religious or metaphysical attitude which, common as it has been to many ages, and familiar as we are with it in what we know of the early Greek thinkers and the Sophists, may yet, in the status of settled and almost universally accepted dogma which it has assumed, be said to be the peculiar inheritance of our own generation. We meet it in formal philosophic garb in Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity and in Croce's idealism; with scientific claims it confronts us in Smuts’s Holism; with more emphasis but less exactness it speaks in J. S. Huxley’s Religion without Revelation and in Middleton Murry's God, Being an Introduction to the Science of Metabiology; in imaginative literature it has found its ample "iconography" in Shaw's Back to Methuselah; best of all, strong and silent, unquestioned and unexplaining, like any master secure of his position, we may find it enthroned each in his own mind. Though here referred to as a religious attitude, we may also call it antireligionor the religion of the professedly anti-religious, and its God the God of the "Godless."
The Place of Myth in Philosophy
Authors: Inge W. R.
Published: February 2009

My subject is the place of myth in philosophy, not in religion. If I were dealing with the philosophy of religion, I should, of course, have much to say on the place of myth in theology; and what I have to say may have some bearing on this subject; but I am not dealing with particular dogmas of Christianity or of any other religion. My thesis is that when the mind communes with the world of values its natural and inevitable language is the language of poetry, symbol, and myth. And, further, that philosophy has to deal with a number of irreducible surds which cannot be rationalized. They must be accepted as given material for reason to work upon. For example, we do not know why there is a world; we cannot unify the world of what we call facts and the world of values; there are antinomies in space and time which do not seem to disappear when we put a hyphen between them. Our reason–some would say reason itself— has reached its limits. We are driven to mythologize, confessing that we have left the realm of scientific fact. We give rein to the imagination, not exactly claiming with Wordsworth that it is reason in her most exalted mood, but hoping that the creative imagination may reveal to us some of the real meaning of questions which we cannot answer.
The Interest Theory of Value
Authors: Garnett A. Campbell
Published: February 2009

The connection of value-experience with activity has led to the widespread modern tendency to interpret value in terms of interest. To value a thing is certainly to take an interest in it, and there can be no doubt that the value any object has for us tends to vary with the interest we take in it. The suggestion readily arises, therefore, that the value of any object simply is the interest we take in it. The difficulty with views of this type is that interest is a distinctly subjective category while value is persistently spoken of as if it were somehow objective. Indeed, the term “value” would lose the most essential element of its meaning if it could not be applied to objects of common knowledge in such a way that two people could significantly discuss the question as to whether the object A is not more valuable than the object B and each, on the basis of his own interest and experience, defend a different view. I do not think the subjectivity of value can be as easily disposed of as does Laird1 in discussing the argument, “Beauty is not in the aurora. Therefore it is in the beholder's mind.” This, he says, leads to the absurdity, “Therefore the beholder's mind is beautiful.” The apparent absurdity is due to the ambiguity of the term “beautiful.” It is applied either to an experience or to the object of that experience.
Philosophic History and Prophecy
Authors: Outlook Arnold Toynbee's , Oakeley Hilda D.
Published: February 2009

Professor Toynbee observes in his Study of History that as he walked down Whitehall one day in the spring of 1918, and passed the Board of Education offices which had been commandeered for a new department of the War Office, “improvised in order to make an intensive study of trench warfare,” he found himself repeating the passage from St. Matthew's Gospel:
“The Status of Brain in the Concept of Mind”
Authors: Cohen Henry
Published: February 2009

It is with no feigned modesty that I acknowledge, as a limited and superficial student of philosophy, the honour you have done me by your invitation to deliver the Manson Lecture. But if the honour is undeserved, it is by fortuitous circumstance the more appreciated. Dr. Manson was a family doctor in Warrington, Lancs., with whom I was privileged to have close professional associations. He was a man of many parts who regarded the isolation of medicine from philosophy as an unintelligible and lamentable phenomenon of our time. He wished to see philosophy restored to its earlier and rightful basic rôle in medical education. He recognized that medicine and, indeed, the cognate basic sciences were occupying themselves almost exclusively with so rapidly accelerating an accumulation of facts, that little time remained for reflection and interpretation, and for pondering on the place of medicine in, and its contribution to, the general corpus of knowledge. And he was especially interested in the topic which I have chosen for this commemorative lecture, for he recognized, and translated into practice, the dictum that “No disease is wholly physical, and none wholly mental.” He saw in his patient the “whole” man, not a summation of such isolates as body, mind, environment, and family.
The Study of Politics
Authors: Kedourie E. A.
Published: February 2009

In his article on “The Nature and the Status of the Study of Politics”1 Professor White raises, whether explicitly or by implication, some of the most important and, probably permanent problems of the subject. The solutions that he attempts to provide seem to me, however, to be less satisfying than might be expected.
On Meaning in Literature
Authors: Brett R. L.
Published: February 2009

In his recent book, English Poetry; A Critical Introduction, Mr. F. W. Bateson makes the observation that as romantic criticism is now dead it should receive “decent and final interment.” By “romantic” criticism he seems to have in mind either what he calls the Pure Sound theory of poetry, which would have us believe that meaning has nothing to do with poetry, that poetry makes nothing but an emotional or physiological impact upon us; or the suggestion theory which argues that “a good poem should mean very little while suggesting a good deal.” Both of these, according to Mr. Bateson, attempt “to justify the exclusion of meaning from poetry.”
Use and Misuse of the Unknown
Authors: Unger Eric
Published: February 2009

There is, naturally, no more ambiguous factor in all human knowledge than the possible bearing of what we do not know on what we do know.
Conscience and Self-Love in Butler's Sermons
Authors: White Alan R.
Published: February 2009

Mr. T. H. Mcpherson has given, in a recent article in PHILOSOPHY (Vols. XXIII, 1948, and XXIV, 1949), various reasons for supposing that there was a development in Butler's ethics from the Sermons to the Analogy. He argues that Butler was in the Sermons a “rational egoist” or “Ethical Eudaemonist,” and in the Analogy an Intuitionist. By “Ethical Eudaemonism” he seems1 to mean that “the ground or criterion of rightness is conduciveness to the agent's interest” (XXIII, pp. 327, 330, 331; XXIV, p. 18, etc.) or that “it is the happiness-producing character of acts that makes them right” (XXIII, p. 327). I shall use the phrase “McPherson's view” to denote the theory that this was Butler's view in the Sermons.
Responsibility And Accountability
Authors: Haines Nicolas
Published: February 2009

His “practical purpose” was first to express the popular notion of responsibility and then to relate it to the philosophical theories of “freewill and necessity.” For he could not approve the suggestion that to understand popular comments on morality was a worthless occupation; indeed, while he respected the Westminster Reviewers for the blunt declaration that vulgar responsibility was a “horrid figment of the imagination,” he plainly considered it his business as a philosopher to examine ordinary morality and to reconcile it, if possible, with philosophical theory.
The Lesbian Rule
Authors: Lucas J. R.
Published: February 2009

The problem with which I wish to deal in this paper is the problem of singular reasons in the humanities, whether they exist, or rather, whether they can exist: for it would seem that the word “reason” carried with it some idea of generality, so that the phrase “singular reason” was a contradiction in terms, a specification which could never be fulfilled. But humanists are always sensing the singularity of their studies: and the philosopher wondering about the nature of humane thinking either must conclude that it is really only inadequate science, its singularity being the mark of the fact that we never really have an adequate basis for any of our generalizations, an unfortunate reminder that the whole structure is built on the shakiest of inductive foundations; or, if he is unwilling to allow that humanists are just bad, or at least amateur, scientists, he is tempted to vindicate the rationality of their reasoning by inventing a special faculty of particular ratiocination which is able to perceive particular truths—the intuition of the moralists or the insight of the Collingwoodian mode.
Poetry, Language And Communication
Authors: Meidner Olga McDonald
Published: February 2009

In the recent article Poetry, Language and Communication by Bernard Mayo, the author, intending to establish new distinctions between poetry and other uses of language, has overshot the mark, and arrived at a completely obscurantist view of poetry.
A Contemporary Moralist: Albert Camus
Authors: Roth Leon
Published: February 2009

I use the word Moralist, somewhat after the French fashion, in the sense of a commentator on the human scene. I apologize for Contemporary, but there was another Camus, way back in the seventeenth century, who is being resuscitated now and who, according to the new Encyclopaedia of Literature, “wrote besides theological works some fifty novels which make him a pioneer of religious edification through popular fiction.” Our Camus is very much of our century and is still a comparatively young man. And he is contemporary not only in the accidental sense that he happens to be alive and writing in our generation. He has suffered in his own flesh with our generation. He is both of us and with us. Born to a working-class French Colonial family in 1913 he knew none of the douceurs de la vie which held the memory in the first World War; while in the second he took an active part in the French Resistance movement and after the liberation edited the periodical Combat. His novels-L'Étranger (1942) and La Peste (1947)-are not so much works of imaginative creation as fictional records of the events of our time. His plays-Le Malentendu (1943), Caligula (1945), L'État de siège (1948), Les justes (1950) -are studies or allegories of moral and political collapse in its various and varying moods. Like Actuelles, a collection of his current writing from 1944 to 1948, both novels and plays are testimonies of the anxieties through which our generation has passed.
Fallacies In And About Mill's Utilitarianism
Authors: Raphael D. Daiches
Published: February 2009

Mill's Utilitarianism is widely used to introduce elementary students to Moral Philosophy. One reason for this, I trust, is a recognition that Mill's doctrines and interests have an immediate attraction for most people. But certainly another reason is the belief that Mill's arguments contain a number of obvious fallacies, which an elementary student can be led to detect, thereby learning to practise critical philosophy.
The Romantic Factor in Modern Politics
Authors: Barker Ernest
Published: February 2009

One of the marks of our times is a new eruption of the personal. Systems and institutions of politics are clouded over. The impersonal principles on which these systems and institutions depend are still more deeply obscured. Men turn for their inspiration to the living flow of personality. Some leader who has burst from hidden and elemental depths commands a passion of personal loyalty. Leadership has always been a great factor in the history of human communities. The deification of the ruler was the cement of the Hellenistic monarchies and of the Roman Empire which inherited their tradition. It may seem a strange atavism that we should now be apparently recurring, in the twentieth century, to a similar practice. But there are exigencies of contemporary life which explain the new vogue of leadership, and there is a tide of contemporary thought which leads on to the current doctrine of the emergent leader.
Scholasticism
Authors: Hope Felix
Published: February 2009

The quickening of interest in the great philosophical figure of Aquinas which has taken place during the last few years is a wellattested phenomenon. Of recent years there has been a distinct recognition that this mediaeval period was a most important time in the development of the human race, and that it has many urgent lessons for a modern age which has begun to realize that science and industry and mechanical efficiency have not succeeded in building such a perfect society as the optimistic Victorians had hastily hoped.
Philosophy in Italy
Authors: de Ruggiero Guide
Published: February 2009

Of late yeaxs Benedetto Croce's interpretation of the philosophy of G. B. Vico has been exposed to continual criticism from Catholic writers anxious to claim for themselves the figure of the great eighteenth-century thinker, wrested from them by Croce for inclusion in a setting of secular and immanentistic philosophy. The Catholic polemic was founded partly on a false supposition: it derived from the idea that Croce meant to deny entirely Vico's Catholicism. Instead, Croce made a distinction between Vico the man and Vico the philosopher. While he recognized that the man cherished Catholic sentiments and beliefs, he denied that the philosopher could reenter the circle of dogmatic and confessional philosophy. To confirm the accuracy of his interpretation, Croce has now republished an interesting monograph by an eighteenth-century Catholic writer, a little later than Vico, G. F. Finetti,1 who subjects the doctrine of Vico to a lively criticism. The motive of this exhumation is plain: “The protest of eighteenth-century Catholic criticism against the doctrines of Vico, or rather, against the doctrines of an author well known to be a blameless observant throughout his life, is of considerable importance because it is the first real acknowledgment of the revolutionary spirit, the anti-Catholic and generally anti-religious spirit, which informed his doctrines.”
Ethics, Christianity, and Nationalism
Authors: Webb Clement C. J.
Published: February 2009

In the first part of this article I propose to describe two strongly contrasted situations in the world of thought, one of fifty years ago and the other of to-day. In the second I shall submit to my readers some reflections suggested by the contrast between the two.
Hegel and Prussianism
Authors: Knox T. M.
Published: February 2009

Despite the efforts of Bosanquet, Muirhead, Basch, and many others, it is still frequently stated or implied, in both popular and scholarly literature, that Hegel (a) constructed his philosophy of the State with an eye to pleasing the reactionary and conservative rulers of Prussia in his day, and (b) condoned, supported, and, through his teaching, became partly responsible for some of the most criticized features in “Prussianism” and even of present-day National-Socialism.5 Ijn this article I propose to give reasons for denying (i) that Hegel the man is justly accused of servility to the Prussian Government, and (ii) that there is any warrant in the text of his Philosophie des Rechts for the charge that Hegel the philosopher was an exponent of “Prussianism” and “ frightfulness.”
Fascism and Nazism
Authors: Collingwood R. G.
Published: February 2009

When travellers are overcome by cold, it is said, they lie down quite happily and die. They put up no fight for life. If they struggled, they would keep warm; but they no longer want to struggle. The cold in themselves takes away the will to fight against the cold around them.
Is There A Social Contract?—II
Authors: Lewis H. D.
Published: February 2009

IN an earlier article I urged that the State presupposes an agreement to be governed on the part of its members. One common objection to this view was discussed at some length. It remains to deal with three further objections. (2) It will perhaps be urged that a particular individual, or a small minority, would not be able to withdraw from the State if they wished to do so. If anyone decided that he did not wish to have anything to do with the State, whether it be the State in general, or some particular State, he could not give effect to his decision. Compulsion, as exercised against such persons, cannot be said to rest in any sense on their own consent. To put the same point in another way, “The claim that government rests on consent would never be listened to by a magistrate.” 1
Why Do Archimedes and Eddington Both Get 1079 for the Total Number of Particles in the Universe?
Authors: Brown G. Burniston
Published: February 2009

There have been two attempts in the history of human speculation to estimate the number of particles in the universe. The first was that of Archimedes of Syracuse about 216 B. C., and the second that of Sir Arthur Eddington nearly two thousand years later. What is surprising is that they both arrive at the same number. This is the number obtained by multiplying ten by itself seventy-nine times.
“In the Beginning …”
Authors: Farrell B. A.
Published: February 2009

There is a curious reluctance in many quarters to try to apply to the philosophical questions the ordinary person in the street is continually raising, the technique and results of recent logical and philosophical analysis. Ordinary persons like Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary persist in asking questions about the meaning of the Universe and the destiny of the individual. Yet, on the whole, the only answers that are offered come from those quarters that find themselves to-day increasingly out of tune with the temper and idiom of the times and more and more out-manoeuvred by the “talkie” and the gossip columnist of the gutter press. This situation has certain unfortunate results, and consequently imposes on philosophical analysis a special function at the present time.
On The Use Of “The Use Of”
Authors: Cohen L. Jonathan
Published: February 2009

In the Philosophical Review of April, 1953 (pp. 167 ff.), Professor Ryle has drawn an interesting analogy between the use of words and the use of instruments or implements. He holds that this analogy helps us in two ways. Firstly, by asking ‘What is the use of that word?’ rather than ‘What is its meaning?’ we are not lead to suppose that for every word there is a correlate entity which is its meaning. Secondly, if we regard using words as exercising a technique, we admit that words can be misused as well as properly used; and part, at least, of a philosopher’'s task, on Ryle’s view, is to give an account of these proper uses.
An Aspect Of Sartre And The Unconscious
Authors: Grimsley Ronald
Published: February 2009

ALTHOUGH Sartre peremptorily rejects the Freudian concept of the unconscious as a ‘mere postulate’ which is refuted by the (for him) obvious truth that the ‘psychic factor is co-extensive with consciousness,’ the frequency with which Freud's name recurs in L'Être et le Néant and the important role assigned to ‘existential psychoanalysis’ inevitably suggest that the impact of Freud's doctrines on Sartre may be much greater than he admits or is even aware. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to review the general question of the relations of Sartre and Freud or to undertake a detailed examination of the more specific problem created by Sartre's rejection of the unconscious, but rather to discuss this latter point mainly in its bearing upon limited aspects of Sartre's treatment of ‘being-for-others.’ I hope, however, that this more precise enquiry will lead to certain general conclusions concerning the validity of the two attitudes considered, not simply as attempts to illustrate a priori principles, but as efforts to throw light on definite though complex psychological phenomena. In this way the merits of each viewpoint will be tested by its capacity to clarify concrete problems.
Philosophy In Italy
Authors: Abbagnano Nicola
Published: February 2009

About a year ago some important philosophical works were published in Italy which, both in the agreement and in the divergence of the trends they indicate, may be useful for characterizing the present situation of Italian philosophy. I think it opportune, therefore, for the information of the English reader, to give a fuller notice of these books than usual. One of them is by Ugo Spirito, La vita come amore (Life as love), with the subtitle “The downfall of Christian civilization ”(published by Sansoni, Florence, 1953). Ugo Spirito, who was one of the most intelligent and restless pupils of Giovanni Gentile, announced his secession from idealism in 1937.In that year he published a book entitled La vita come ricerca (Life as quest), in which, as sole alternative to idealistic philosophy, henceforth considered untenable, he pointed to a philosophy of never concluded enquiry, which, while positing numerous problems, never solves them. The intention of the book was to conclude in the impossibility of philosophy as “system” or as “metaphysics”, on the supposition that all the possibilities of metaphysics had been exhausted in the course of its historical development, culminating in Gentile. In a certain sense this presupposition remains in the book now under examination; but here it is a question of defining positively the way that philosophy, and with it human life, ought to take, which is, according to Spirito, the way of love.
Socrates and Plato
Authors: Duncan Patrick
Published: February 2009

The question as to the relation of the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues to the historical Socrates, over which an apparently endless and irreconcilable controversy has raged, is well raised by a passage from Cornford,Plato’s Theory of Knowledge, at page 28: “Anamnesis appears first in the middle group of dialogues and provides the link between the two Platonic doctrines—the eternal nature of the human soul and the ‘separate’ existence of Forms, the proper objects of knowledge. The probable inference is that Anamnesis was a theory which squared the professions and practice of Socrates with Plato’s discovery of the separately existing Forms and his conversion from Socratic agnosticism to a belief in immortality.”
Some Philosophical Questions about Telepathy and Clairvoyance
Authors: Price H. H.
Published: February 2009

The founder of Psychical Research, though he has not yet received the honour due to him, seems to have been King Croesus of Lydia, who reigned from 560 to 546 B.C. He carried out an interesting experiment, recorded in detail by Herodotus,2 to test the clairvoyant powers of a number of oracles. He sent embassies to seven oracles, six Greek and one Egyptian. They all started on the same day. On the hundredth day each embassy was instructed to ask its oracle, “What is King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, now doing?” The answer was to be written down and brought back. The oracle of Delphi replied as follows, in hexameters, as its custom was: “I know the number of the sands and the measures of the sea. I understand the dumb, and I hear him who does not speak.” Then it went on: “There comes to my mind the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise, which is being cooked along with lamb's flesh in a brazen vessel; brass is spread beneath it, and with brass it is covered.” As a matter of fact, this answer was perfectly correct. Herodotus tells us that “having considered what would be the most difficult thing to discover and to imagine,” Croesus “cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and himself boiled them together in a brazen pot.” What happened afterwards illustrates the difficulties of this sort of investigation, difficulties which still perplex us to this day. Croesus argued, reasonably enough, that if the Delphic priestess had clairvoyant powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers which she claimed to have. But when he consulted the oracle later about his forthcoming expedition against the Persians, he received two answers, one of which was ambiguous—“When Croesus crosses the Halys he shall destroy a great empire”—and the other correct, but too obscure to be easily interpreted.
The Inter-relationship of Mind and Body
Authors: Kennedy Foster
Published: February 2009

When we climb in the high places of the earth, plodding slowly at mountaineer's pace with crampons on our boots, that we may keep foothold on the blue ice, we should stop from time to time and, steadying ourselves with our ice-axe for a moment, raise our downbent eyes, weary with guiding our steps between crevasses, to the great peaks we would conquer, and see, too, the foot hills we have left behind. Only by gazing thus can the Alpine climber find values, and often he catches too, just then, a glimpse of beauty. So it is profitable to turn from our work in laboratories and among the sick, to survey the general state of our knowledge in larger sweep. We cannot hope to have added by our deliberations to-day anything of solving value in this ultimate problem. But we clarify to ourselves the state of our small knowledge and the extent of our nescience, and, though we may throw on these matters no more light than that which Milton tells us shines in Hell, “enough to make darkness visible,” yet it were well done.
Spaces and Times
Authors: Quinton Anthony
Published: February 2009

We are accustomed to thinking of space and time as particulars or individuals—even if we should hesitate to describe them as things or objects or substances. We say ‘space has three dimensions’, ‘material things occupy space’, ‘the debris has disappeared into space’ and we talk in a comparable fashion about time. Not only do we think of space and time as individuals but, in many connections at any rate, we think of them as unique individuals. When we talk about spaces and times in the plural, when we say ‘fill up the spaces on the form’, ‘it could go in the space between the lamp and the door’, ‘there were peaceful times in the early years of their marriage’ we think of these multiple spaces and times as parts of the unique allencompassing space and the unique all-encompassing time. Kant believed that we could not help thinking of them in this way. We do, at any rate, in fact think like this and it is this conviction that I want to examine.
Thomas Hobbes's Doctrine of Meaning and Truth
Authors: Krook Dorothea
Published: February 2009

It is generally acknowledged that Hobbes's radical scepticism is intimately connected with his nominalism, and that his nominalism in turn rests upon the doctrine of meaning and truth set out in its best-known version in Chapters 4 and 5 of Leviathan.
Hegel's “Science” and Whitehead's “Modern World”
Authors: Whittemore Robert C.
Published: February 2009

“I have never been able to read Hegel: I initiated my attempt by studying some remarks of his on mathematics which struck me as complete nonsense. It was foolish of me, but I am not writing to explain my good sense.”—A. N. Whitehead.
Objectivity and Reason
Authors: Harris Errol E.
Published: February 2009

The need for objective standards of judgement is acutely felt in the bewilderment created by the world situation of our time, a bewilderment that is partly the result of the rapid advance of the natural sciences, with its profound effects upon metaphysical doctrines, religious beliefs and moral attitudes, and partly due to the intractable problems which have arisen in social and political fields. The progress of the sciences, while it seems to have given us secure knowledge of the world about us, has, at the same time, undermined confidence in the criteria of belief and judgement in the conduct of affairs which hitherto had served to guide mankind. Bereft of these the majority of men are unable to see a clear way through the complexities of modern political and economic life and are overwhelmed by the major problems that confront them. As examples of the major perplexities with which mankind is faced today, I shall mention only three:—
Art and Imagination
Authors: Morris-Jones H.
Published: February 2009

The vocabulary of the art-critic seems to consist of two groups of words, those that refer to the formal or surface properties of the work of art, and those which refer to properties we can at first loosely term imaginative. The first group consists of words and phrases like “unity” (sometimes “organic unity”), “coherence”, “consistency”, “compactness”, “elegance”, and so on. The way such words are cashed will consist in an analysis of the determinate formal qualities of the work of art as evidence of the skill of the artist as a craftsman.
Simplicity as a Criterion of Induction
Authors: Harré R.
Published: February 2009

There is now a well-established distinction recognized in the ways simplicity considerations enter into science. Laws of nature (and theories built out of laws of nature) may be graded either with regard to their simplicity of form or with regard to the fewness of the concepts employed to express them. I shall distinguish these as formal simplicity and conceptual simplicity respectively. Dr. J. O. Wisdom suggests that it should be fewness of non-instantial concepts that serves as the guide for making judgements of relative simplicity; a “non-instantial” concept being a concept which is constructed for the purpose of theory, its meaning not being derived simply from experience. Hence non-instantial concepts are, from a logical point of view, to be contrasted with the concepts used to express and record observations directly, that is with instantial concepts representing observables. This seems to be too narrow a restriction on the reduction of concepts. Clearly an advance towards simplicity has been made not only when e.g. a non-instantial concept like “force of gravity” is eliminated from our technical language, but also when the number of instantial concepts is reduced by redefinition, in terms of a smaller number of observables. For example a great simplification was surely made when space-traversed, time taken and mass were chosen as the dynamic “simples”, for the multiplicity of kinds of motion were found to be expressible as functions of these concepts. “Motion” is not non-instantial in the same way as “force of gravity” or “kinetic energy” is non-instantial. However, once this extension to instantial concepts is made there is no need to quarrel with the form/concept distinction as marking a pritma facie difference in criteria of some methodological importance; for a choice say to concentrate on using the fewest concepts does, and one would be inclined to think must, lead to a “decrease” in the formal simplicity of the laws of nature.
A Note on the Emotive Theory
Authors: Wheatley Jon
Published: February 2009

I am going to take the statement: “Value judgements are simply expressions of emotion”, as the kernel of the Emotive Theory and any variant of the Emotive Theory not covered by this statement is left untouched by what I have to say.
Russell's Philosophical Development
Authors: Quinton Anthony
Published: February 2009

The story that is told in Lord Russell's recent book My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin, 18s.) is one that has been told before, by him and by others, but this particular presentation of it stands out by reason of its comprehensiveness and its authority. It is a rather austerely intellectual autobiography, sticking firmly to the topic announced in its title, and the non-philosophical aspects of the author's character and interests take as modest a place in it as Collingwood's do in his not altogether dissimilar Autobiography. What makes a comparison of these two intellectual self-portraits so tempting is the almost diametrical opposition of their authors. Russell is an aristocrat, an influential public figure too lively and multifarious to be contained for long in a university, a communicator who writes to be understood and believed, a mathematician still despite many years away from mathematics, a moral and political radical, an atheist and a lifelong defender of science as the most solid and enduring achievement of the human intellept. Collingwood was a scholarship boy, the son of an unsuccessful literary man, a pure example of the obscure and ineffectual don, who made out that he was too busy to answer criticism or to take part in college administration or university politics, an elaborately conscious stylist, almost as much a historian and an archaeologist as he was a philosopher, essentially a reactionary for all his autumnal flirtation with Marxism, a Christian (up to a point) and an embattled critic of the pretensions of science.
A Re-Examination of the Russellian Theory of Descriptions
Authors: Lejewski Czeslaw
Published: February 2009

The theory of descriptions occupies a very prominent place in Russell's system of logic and indeed in his system of philosophy. Since the publication of the now classical paper “On Denoting” inMindfor 1905 the theory had been incorporated intoPrincipia Mathematica, the first volume of which appeared in 1910. In 1918 Russell discussed descriptions in his lectures on the Philosophy of Logical Atomism, which subsequently were published inThe Monistfor 1919. A very lucid exposition of the main tenets of the doctrine is to be found in theIntroduction to Mathematical Philosophydating from the same year. Epistemological aspects of the theory of descriptions are examined in “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description“, in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1910–11, and also in Chapter V of The Problems of Philosophy, first published in 1912.
Russell's Moral Theories
Authors: Monro D. H.
Published: February 2009

If Bertrand Russell had lived in an earlier century, no one would have hesitated to call him a moral philosopher. In our more finicking age, some academics may want to say that, great as his achievements have been in other branches of philosophy, he is less a moral philosopher than a moralist. That is to say, he has consistently advocated ideals and expressed beliefs which have made him, along with Shaw and Wells, if not quite with Marx and Freud, one of the formative influences on the modern mind; but he has usually addressed these writings to the general public, and, although writing always with great force, clarity and skill, he has not always troubled his readers with the minutiae of philosophical argument. But this point should not be exaggerated. Even in his most popular works, Russell never loses sight of the philosophical problems in his concern for the political or psychological ones, and he certainly has views on meta-morals and meta-politics as well as on morals and politics. Indeed, his attempts to reconcile the two are highly illuminating; for they show one of the clearest minds of our time faced with one of the central problems of our time: how to justify passionately-held moral convictions when all the evidence seems to lead to moral scepticism. (To guard against misunderstanding, I should perhaps say that I do not mean religious scepticism. It is demonstrable, though it would be irrelevant here to demonstrate, that religious beliefs, whether justified or not, cannot provide an intellectually satisfying basis for morality.)
“Ought” and “Is”
Authors: Atkinson R. F. , Montefiore A. C.
Published: February 2009

There is probably no student of modern philosophy, and certainly no listener to the Third Programme, who has never received the warning that he must on no account deduce an “ought” from an “is.” This prohibition, it is claimed, is securely based in established and unchallengeable principles of logic. Professor Flew was speaking for many others when he said, in the course of a broadcast entitled “Problems of Perspectives”, “I think it is very important indeed to make as clear as we can and to underline with all possible emphasis that this is a point of inexorable logic”. And Professor Popper, to take but one other example, has expressed himself no less trenchantly: “Perhaps the simplest and most important point about ethics is purely logical, I mean the impossibility to derive nontautological ethical rules—imperatives, principles of policy, aims or however we may describe them—from statements of fact”—a view that is fully endorsed by Mr. Hare in his Language of Morals.
A Logical Limitation On Determinism
Authors: Mayo Bernard
Published: February 2009

I begin with some elementary observations about assertion. In spite of recent criticisms of philosophers who have been too ready to take the subject-predicate indicative sentence as the standard form of assertion, there is no doubt that this form of sentence does represent something very fundamental about assertion. To put the matter in a rough-and-ready way: if we are to assert anything at all, it seems obvious that we must first draw our listener's attention to something that we propose to talk about, and then, when we have secured his attention, go on to say something about that to which we have drawn attention.
Knowledge Of God
Authors: Smith Constance I.
Published: February 2009

In his interesting discussion of Mr. C. B. Martin's Mind article “A Religious Way of Knowing,” Mr. W. D. Glasgow (PHILOSOPHY, July i957);“Knowledge of God”), agrees with Martin that emotions and feelings are part of what we call an aesthetic experience, and also that emotions and feelings are part of what we call a religious experience. “In this sense, at any rate,” Glasgow writes, “there is an analogy between aesthetic experience and religious experience. But...” he goes on, “are aesthetic statements more than statements about emotions and feelings? Are statements about religious experience anything more than statements about emotions and feelings? A person could accept the analogy and yet maintain that for him aesthetic judgments have an objective reference. In this case the analogy confirms rather than destroys the existential claim of the theologian.”
A Reply To Miss Smith
Authors: Glasgow W. D.
Published: February 2009

The word “objective” is of course the trouble–maker here, Miss Smith assumes that if an aesthetic statement is held to be objective (or to have an objective reference) then it is the physical existence of the work of art (the picture or the sound of the music) that constitutes the objectivity: i.e. if a work of art is exteroceptively perceivable, then an aesthetic statement involving it is objective. Some writers, however (usually philosophical idealists) have held that in genuine works of art there is manifested an ultimate spiritual Reality (it might be called God) which we apprehend when we appreciate such works. On this theory, an aesthetic statement (“This picture is beautiful”) has an objective reference if the subject of it (the work of art) succeeds in expressing or communicating such a supersensible Reality: if it fails to do so, then the statement is subjective, i.e. it can be analysed completely into a statement about our feelings or emotions (e.g. “I like this picture”).
Finite Automata
Authors: George F. H.
Published: February 2009

I would like to make some further clarifying remarks about the nature of learning machines, or finite automata as they are more generally known these days. It is clear from much that has recently been written on this subject that there are still many misunderstandings about their capacity and significance.
Moore And Philosophical Analysis
Authors: Lazerowitz Morris
Published: February 2009

Occasionally there has appeared in the history of philosophy a thinker who has become aware of the chaotic condition of philosophy and of the intellectual anarchy that exists in all of its branches, and has attempted to remedy the situation. Descartes cast about for a guiding principle, a compass which would show him the way through the treacherous terrain of philosophy. As is well known he devised the method of systematic doubt, by means of which he hoped to discover an axiom on which he could securely erect a system of basic and reassuring beliefs. Leibniz had before his mind the notion of an ideal language which would by calculation solve problems with certainty. With this he thought we “should be able to reason in metaphysics and morals in much the same way as in geometry and analysis.” Descartes' attempt was a failure; and nothing came of Leibniz's ideal, even with the development of modern symbolic logic. Russell's claim that “logic is the essence of philosophy” frightened many philosophers and gave new hope to others; but his claim was as empty as the proverbial political promise. With G. E. Moore we have a further attempt to introduce sobriety and certainty into philosophy and to make fruitful research possible in it. He has made prominent a method for obtaining results in philosophy; and he has also formulated a philosophical platform, i.e., set out a list of Common-sense propositions which he says are known to be true by everyone, philosopher as well as non-philosopher, and are not, therefore, open to debate. The method, which he used extensively and with great skill, is the method of analysing concepts.
Thinking And Machines
Authors: Roberts H. R. T.
Published: February 2009

Professors A. D. Ritchie (Philosophy, January 1957) and F. H. George (Philosophy, April 1957) both miss the question: What is the use of saying that machines think? Does the extension in the use of the word “think” to cover the complicated activity of modern machines (actual or possible in theory) enable us to explain better the nature of such activity? Extensions in usage are common and necessary in science.