bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Time and the Static Image
Authors: Poidevin Robin Le
Published: January 2009

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo (unless very damaging) is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time.
Constructing a Hall of Reflection
Authors: Mulhall Stephen
Published: January 2009

Tom Phillips' painting for the dustjacket of the hardback edition of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals depicts a faintly translucent, darkly-coloured, multi-layered lattice of letters, in which each character abuts directly upon others above, below and beside it, each overwrites or is overwritten by others of varying dimensions, but none is immediately decipherable as part of a word; and at the centre of this array is a geometrically precise, illuminated circle—perhaps emanating from a light located behind or under the layers of letters, perhaps from one directed at them from above. This image is open to many interpretations. It could represent the sun from Plato's myth of the cave shining through the dialogue in which he presents it (a myth that irradiates Iris Murdoch's text); it could also represent the light of Miss Murdoch's attention playing over the palimpsest of texts that make up the Western tradition of metaphysical thought. But for anyone encountering it upon closing the book after a first reading, it may also seem very precisely to crystallize one's initial impression of that text.
Principle Ethics, Particularism and Another Possibility
Authors: Reader Soran
Published: January 2009

One of the most striking contributions of particularism to moral philosophy has been its emphasis on the relative opacity of the moral scene to the tools of rational analysis traditionally used by philosophers. Particularism changes the place of the philosopher in relation to the moral life, pointing up the limits to what philosophy can do here. The modern moral philosopher who takes particularism seriously no longer has the luxury, endemic in our tradition, of imagining that moral philosophy can be done with only passing illustrative reference to experience, or that the truth about the whole of our moral life may be read of a list of a priori moral principles, whose rationality is underwritten by the mechanistic account of what it is to follow a rule that pre-Wittgensteinian philosophers took for granted.
On the Link Between Frege's Platonic-Realist Semantics and His Doctrine of Private Senses
Authors: Ellenbogen Sara
Published: January 2009

Frege's doctrine that the demonstrative ‘I’ has a private, incommunicable sense creates tension within his theory of meaning. Fregean sense is supposed to be something objective, which exists independently of its being cognized by anyone. And the notion of a private sense corresponding to primitive aspects of an individual of which only he can be awaredoes violence both to Frege's theory of sense as well as to our notionof language as something essentially intersubjective. John Perry has arguedthat Frege was led to the doctrine of private senses in spite of his beliefin the objectivity of sense through his attempt to solve a problem which indexicals posed for his theory. And while philosophers have argued about whether the notion of a private sense is in fact problematic for Frege, they have tended to share Perry's assumption about its origin.
Aesthetic Value: Beauty, Ugliness and Incoherence
Authors: Kieran Matthew
Published: January 2009

From Plato through Aquinas to Kant and beyond beauty has traditionally been considered the paradigmatic aesthetic quality. Thus, quite naturally following Socrates' strategy in The Meno, we are tempted to generalize from our analysis of the nature and value of beauty, a particular aesthetic value, to an account of aesthetic value generally. When we look at that which is beautiful, the object gives rise to a certain kind of pleasure within us. Thus aesthetic value is characterized in terms of that which affords us pleasure. Of course, the relation cannot be merely instrumental. Many activities may lead to consequent pleasures that we would not consider to be aesthetic in any way. For example, playing tennis, going swimming or finishing a book.
Honour, Community, and Ethical Inwardness
Authors: Cordner Christopher
Published: January 2009

Daniel Putman thinks I am right to hold that for Aristotle a concern to appear before one's peers in a certain way is internal to virtue. He takes me to suppose that things are otherwise under a ‘modern concept of virtue’, and says that I am wrong about this. Putman rightly distinguishes between a desire to look good before one's peers which is a substitute for virtue, and a desire to look good to them because, acting virtuously, ‘we genuinely deserve to be viewed that way’. (He acknowledges that I recognize such a distinction in Aristotle.) Once this distinction is made, Putman thinks, we can appreciate that modern ethical understanding is as much dependent on ‘the communitarian foundation of character’ as is Aristotelian virtue. The only thing, says Putman, which gulls us into thinking otherwise is the sociological fact that Aristotle's political community was homogenous, while ours is heterogenous, so that more often virtuous people today will have to act in a way which goes against what many around them think.
The Aesthetics of Imperfection
Authors: Hamilton Andy
Published: January 2009

Ferruccio Busoni'sSketch of a New Aesthetic of Musicappeared in 1910. Schoenberg, in his copy of the little book, wrote critical marginal comments which crystallize two opposed outlooks in musical aesthetics. Busoni writes:

Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model…

…What the composer's inspirationnecessarilyloses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own…
The Concept ‘Mind’
Authors: Hunter J. F. M.
Published: January 2009

It is a curious thing about the philosophy of mind, that it includes surprisingly little about minds. In an average anthology on the subject, or a book like Ryle's, one finds discussions of thinking, imagining, believing, willing, remembering, and so on, but not of minds. It seems to be assumed that investigating these topics is investigating minds; but whether that is true is not itself made a topic for investigation.
Kant's Virtue Ethics
Authors: Louden Robert B.
Published: January 2009

Among moral attributes true virtue alone is sublime. … [I]t is only by means of this idea [of virtue] that any judgment as to moral worth or its opposite is possible. … Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition … is nothing but pretence and glittering misery.1
Intellectual Robotry
Authors: Palma A. B.
Published: January 2009

I shall discuss what I have chosen to call the phenomenon of ‘intellectual robotry’. Intellectual robotry is a disease which is manifested in various different ways by some intellectuals, though not by all. (I suffer from it myself so this is one of the reasons why I have written this paper. Writing is, one hopes, sometimes a form of therapy.) What do I mean by ‘intellectual robotry’? I mean, among other things, a habitual indulgence in clever words for their own sake (what I shall later refer to as a pathology of words), a fixation about the potency of arguments and a sort of involved commitment to certain fashionable ideologies. One of the main characteristics of intellectual robotry is that the practitioner of it invariably loses sight of the person he is talking to, or allegedly talking to. He, the intellectual, is intent on pursuing his own momentum of metaphysical or ideological or political or whatever talk because he believes he has something rather important to say, but as he talks—you can almost see it in his or her eyes—he is no longer talking to a person.
‘Is’, ‘Ought’ and the Voluntaristic Fallacy
Authors: Hanfling Oswald
Published: January 2009

The view that ‘ought’ cannot be deduced from ‘is’, credited to Hume as a major insight into the nature of morality, is surprisingly easy to refute. (1) What they are doing is evil. (2) Therefore, they ought not to do it. Here we have a case of deducing ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The conclusion follows, because ‘ought not’ is analytic to ‘evil’. ‘Ah, but that's just what is wrong with the example: the premise is not a pure “is”; it contains an “ought”, though this does not appear explicitly.’ This is true, of course; the inference would not be valid otherwise. Still, the example shows that the is/ought principle will not do as it stands.
Equality and Desert
Authors: Pojman Louis
Published: January 2009

Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give every man his due. The principles of law are these: to live virtuously, not to harm others, to give his due to everyone. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of the just and the unjust. Law is the art of goodness and justice. By virtue of this [lawyers] may be called priests, for we cherish justice and profess knowledge or goodness and equity, separating right from wrong and legal from the illegal. (Ulpian in the Digest of the Roman book of law Corpus Juris, ca 200AD)
Gene-juggling
Authors: Midgley Mary
Published: January 2009

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkins's bookThe Selfish Genehas succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie. What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkins's producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing—the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into hisa prioribiological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable. I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively selfinterested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood.
Two Theories of Civilization
Authors: Newman Jay
Published: January 2009

Once upon a time, when there was no psychoanalysis or cultural anthro-pology or meta-ethics, most philosophers believed that there was objective truth in such statements as, ‘Murder is wrong’, ‘One should not steal’, and ‘Heliogabalus was an evil man’. Many philosophers still believe that there is, and though their view is not wholly respectable in most English-speaking philosophical circles, it probably has the important merit of being true. There are serious reasons for worrying about the traditional view: it is not clear how an ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is’; there are problems s e in trying to translate evaluative terms into descriptive ones; reflective men disagree profoundly on ethical issues; ethical judgments appear to have an emotive component; etc. Still, there are also very good reasons for believing that murder is wrong and that Heliogabalus was an evil man. I shall not defend the objectivity of statements of the form, ‘X is good (bad, evil, right, wrong)’, for I am not at all worried about such statements passing out of the language of rational men. Even behaviourists and relativists and emotivists still make reasonably intelligent statements of this form. But I am worried about the future of a related class of statements, those of the form, ‘X is civilized (barbarous)’. These statements have been gradually disappearing from our discourse; perhaps they have been casualties of recent revolutions in social science and philosophy. And this state of affairs is a tragic one indeed, for not only is there a need for statements of this form, but of all ethical statements, these are the ones whose descriptive content is most incontrovertible. Non-cognitivistic moral philosophers generally dismiss statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ along with statements about the ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘right’, and ‘wrong’. But social scientists have made statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ special objects of attack. They have even suggested that people who make such statements are narrow-minded, naive, and ‘ethnocentric’. ‘Ethnocentrism’, an eminent social scientist tells us, ‘is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.’ Ethnocentrism is innocent enough up to a point, but reflective men should be careful not to allow it to blind their moral sense. The noted anthropologist, Herskovits, has given us the following warning:

Cultures are sometimes evaluated by the use of the designations ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. These terms have a deceptive simplicity, and attempts to document the differences implied in them have proved to be of unexpected difficulty.
Mental Conflict: Descartes
Authors: Gombay André
Published: January 2009

In a famous text Descartes has written this:

Whenever the thought of God's supreme power occurs to me, I cannot help feeling that he might easily, if he so wished, make me go wrong even in what I think I see most clearly with my mind's eye. On the other hand, whenever I turn to the matters themselves which I think I perceive very clearly, I am so convinced by them that I burst out: ‘let who will deceive me, he can never bring it about that I should be nothing at the time of thinking that I am something, nor that it be true that I never existed if it is true that I exist now; nor even that two and three together make more or less than five, or any such thing in which I see manifest contradiction’ (AT VII, 36; HR I, 158–159).
Hume's Idea of Necessary Connexion
Authors: Hanfling Oswald
Published: January 2009

The following beliefs can be ascribed to Hume on the basis of his writings:

(1) There is no more to our idea of cause and effect than constant conjunction and a resulting habit of mind.

(2) There is more to it than that, namely the interaction of bodies.

(3) Behind the constant conjunctions, including the interactions of bodies, there are ‘secret’ causes, not knowable by man.

(4) The principle of causality (nothing happens without a cause) is true.

(5) Our belief in the principle arises from experience.

(6) There is no justification for believing in the principle.

It is obvious that there are inconsistencies between these beliefs. (1) is contradicted by (2) and (3), and (3) appears to contradict (2). (4) and (5) are consistent, but (4) cannot be asserted consistently together with (6). There is apparently a contradiction between (5) and (6), although (as often happens when discussing Hume) the question arises whether ‘arising from experience’ is to be regarded as a justification. In the next section I shall offer support for ascribing these beliefs to Hume and in sections III-V I shall try to say why Hume wanted to hold all of them in one way or another and how they fit together in the context of his philosophy. What I shall say will I be broadly in line with Passmore's views about the diversity of Hume's intentions and Kemp Smith's thesis about Hume's primary interest in ethics.
What is so Wrong with Killing People?
Authors: Young Robert
Published: January 2009

If killing another human being is morally wrong on at least some occasions (as it clearly is), what precisely makes it wrong on those occasions? I have framed the question thus to indicate that I shall not be considering the view that killing another human being is always and everywhere morally wrong. I take it as read that there are at least some morally justifiable killings (for instance, in self-defence where no other means of disarming one's attacker is available). Once it is clear what is wrong with killing on some occasions it should become possible to explain why it is not wrong on others. My immediate concern is with the killing of another human being, and with applying my answer to cases of voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia, but light will be shed on whether and, if so, why it is wrong to kill oneself, to kill unborn human beings, and to kill non-human animals especially those whose life has most in common with the life of human beings.
Natural Kinds and Unnatural Persons
Authors: Kitcher Patricia
Published: January 2009

Most people believe that extraterrestrial beings or porpoises or computers could someday be recognized as persons. Given the significant constitutional differences between these entities and ourselves, the general assumption appears to be that ‘person’ is not a natural kind term. David Wiggins offers an illuminating challenge to this popular dogma in ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’. Wiggins does not claim that ‘person’ actually is a natural kind term; but he argues hard for the advantages of regarding it as something like a natural kind classification. The problem is that, whatever its merits, there are obvious and fatal objections to the view that person is a natural kind. My aim is to present a modification of the natural kind thesis which avoids these objections and retains the attractions of the basic position.
The All-female Number
Authors: Midgley Mary
Published: January 2009

Your correspondents protesting in April 1979 against the all-female issue of Philosophy in April 1978 mystify me somewhat, first by making so much fuss about it, and second by their unrealistic attitude to the force of prejudice.
The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy
Authors: Kolnai Aurel
Published: January 2009

In 1952, having for the first time to give a lecture in Madrid, I said somewhat dejectedly to the able and witty young man entrusted with the tedious task of revising the Spanish of my text that I found my lecture didn't amount to much: it was but a long paraphrase of one single idea. Perhaps I hoped for an enthusiastic protest on his part. But he only offered as solace the terse remark: ‘Well, I have heard many a lecture that didn't contain even one single idea’.
The Real Private Language Argument
Authors: Candlish Stewart
Published: January 2009

It verges on the platitudinous to say that Wittgenstein's own treatment of the question of a private language has been almost lost to view under mountains of commentary in the last twenty years—so much so, that no one with a concern for his own health would try to arrive at a verdict on the question by first mastering the available discussion. But a general acquaintance with the commentaries indicates that opinion on the matter can be roughly divided into two categories: that of the Old Orthodoxy (both defenders and attackers of Wittgenstein are included), most recently represented by Robert Fogelin in his book Wittgenstein; and that of what may be termed the New Guardians of the Wittgenstein Tradition, apparently based in Oxford and headed by Anthony Kenny, who in his book Wittgenstein has proposed a new account of the argument of Philosophical Investigations §§256–271. The important difference between the old and new orthodoxies will be considered later.
The Parfit Population Problem
Authors: Locke Don
Published: January 2009

Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons is a long, difficult and fascinating book, inside which three shorter, clearer and better books are struggling to get out. The third of these shorter but better books deals with the problem of Future Generations, and that is the book I want to discuss. In it Parfit tries, but fails, to find a theory—Theory X, he calls it—which will deal with various problems and issues which he develops, and in particular the issue which I will call the Parfit Population Problem, the problem of how many people there ought to be. In this paper I offer not so much a theory as a suggestion as to what the solution(s) might be.
Brute Animals and Legal Rights
Authors: Nelson John O.
Published: January 2009

Various proponents of animal rights—for example, H. J. McCloskey— maintain that while brute animals (henceforth ‘animals’) cannot have; moral rights they can have legal rights. Indeed, McCloskey himself goes so far as to maintain that even inanimate objects are able to have legal rights.1 And why should not inanimate objects be able to? After f all, for there to be a legal right is anything more required than that whatever agency is empowered to issue legal rights simply legislate or proclaim that so-and-so has that legal right?
Definitions and Counter-examples
Authors: Cargile James
Published: January 2009

In his paper ‘A Function for Thought Experiments’, T. S. Kuhn asks: Ought we demand of our concepts, as we do of our laws and theories, that they be applicable to any and every situation that might conceivably arise in any possible world? Is it not sufficient to demand of a concept, as we do of a law or theory, that it be unequivocally applicable in every situation which we expect ever to encounter?
Historical Incongruity
Authors: Cherry Christopher
Published: January 2009

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’
Weaving Seamless Webs
Authors: Putnam Ruthanna
Published: January 2009

On a hot sleepy summer day an old truck rattles along a dusty road. A turnip falls off the truck, the truck does not stop. Perhaps the old man who drives the truck does not know that the turnip fell off, or perhaps he does not care. He values his time or his ease more than he values the I turnip. We, who know not only that turnips are nourishing but that many people go hungry, may say that the man ought to have stopped to pick up the turnip.
Time Travel, Parahistory and Hume
Authors: Sorensen Roy A.
Published: January 2009

Should I have the opportunity to travel back in time to converse with great philosophers, Hume would be high on my itinerary. My gratitude for his insights and hospitality would surely tempt me to reciprocate by telling him about my time travels. But I fear he would not believe me. For the reasoning underlying Hume's famous scepticism about miracles dooms my tales of time travel to an incredulous reception. The ensuing paragraphs will be dedicated to an elucidation of this fear. This elucidation is of more than historical interest, since Hume's reasoning about miracles still strikes many contemporary philosophers y as cogent. Thus the scepticism about time travel that I attribute to Hume should also be shared by his followers. It should be noted that the scepticism at issue is epistemological rather than metaphysical. The key question will not be ‘Is time travel possible?’ We shall instead ask whether it is possible to justify a belief in a report of time travel. The metaphysical issue will only be addressed in response to the question of whether one can be an epistemological sceptic about time travel without being a metaphysical sceptic.
Is it True What Haack Says About Tarski?
Authors: Jennings Richard C.
Published: January 2009

In her paper ‘Is it True What They Say About Tarski?’, Susan Haack argues that Popper is wrong to regard Tarski's theory of truth as a correspondence theory of truth. For, she says:

… Tarksi does not present his theory as a correspondence theory. In fact Tarski explicitly comments that the correspondence theory cannot be considered a satisfactory definition of truth. And later he observes that he was ‘by no means surprised’ to learn that, in a survey carried out by Naess, only 15 per cent agreed that truth is correspondence with reality, while 90 per cent agreed that ‘It is snowing’ is true if and only if it is snowing (p. 324).
From Coffee to Carmelites
Authors: Phillips D. Z.
Published: January 2009

In his paper, ‘The Aroma of Coffee’, H. O. Mounce wants to expose what he takes to be a deep prejudice in philosophy, one which is at work in our culture more generally. Philosophers are reluctant to admit that there is anything which passes beyond human understanding. Of course, they are quite ready to admit that there are plenty of things that they fail to understand but this they would say simply happens to be the case. It does not mean that what they fail to understand is something which is beyond human understanding. Thus even when they fail to understand something, that ‘something’ remains, in principle, within the reach of their understanding. For Mounce this prejudice flies in the face of what is platitudinously obvious: that there is much that passes beyond human understanding.
Options in African Philosophy
Authors: Sogolo G. S.
Published: January 2009

Professor Peter Bodunrin's paper ‘The Question of African Philosophy’ (Philosophy 55 (1981) 161–179) has, as it were, become the first question for most African scholars, teachers or students, starting a course in African philosophy. In most of the discussions, the controversy over what constitutes an African philosophy tends to dominate, sometimes so much that it forms almost the entire content of the course.
The Nature of Artifacts
Authors: Losonsky Michael
Published: January 2009

In Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics Aristotle attempts to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. He begins by stating that a natural object ‘has in itself a source of change and staying unchanged, whether in respect of place, or growth and decay, or alteration’. But this is not sufficient to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. As he points out later, a wooden bed, for example, can rot or burn, and this is surely a change whose source is, in part, internal to the bed. To make his distinction, Aristotle writes that in a natural object the internal ‘source of change and remaining unchanged’ belongs to it ‘primarily and of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence’. The bed rots because it happens to be made of wood: the change is due to its material, not due to its essence, namely that it is a bed. A natural object, however, changes because of its essence, that is, because it is the natural object that it is.
Seven Moral Myths
Authors: Almond Brenda
Published: January 2009

The present century has witnessed human crimes on an unprecedented scale. It has also seen the decline of ethics as a major element in higher education and as an academic study forming an important aspect of philosophy.
Pride, Prejudice and Shyness
Authors: Ewin R. E.
Published: January 2009

Those of us who were made to study Pride and Prejudice at school know that Darcy represents pride and Elizabeth represents prejudice. Those of us who have actually read the book know that the situation is a good deal more complicated than that. The motivation for a significant part of the action is Elizabeth's pride, a point that is made quite clearly and is recognized by Elizabeth herself in what sounds like a thoroughly rehearsed speech:

‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried.—‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself’ (pp. 236–7) (All page references are to the Penguin edition of the novel.)
Philosophy and Literature
Authors: Palmer Anthony
Published: January 2009

My writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive—what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more than shifting theory. I became more and more timid—with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through the medium of art.

George Eliot.

In his inaugural lecture, given in Birkbeck College in 1987, Roger Scruton, who has done as much as anyone else in recent years to bring the importance of art in general and literature in particular to the attention of philosophers, contends that ‘philosophy severed from literary criticism is as monstrous a thing as literary criticism severed from philosophy’. The first, he argues, aims to be science: strives after theoretical truth which it can never attain; and results in banality clothed in pseudo-scientific technicalities: while the second is liable to find consolation in the kind of nonsense which pretends that in the study of literature we are confronted with nothing other than an author-less, unreadable, ‘text’. Philosophy, he maintains, ‘must return aesthetics to the place that Kant and Hegel made for it: a place at the centre of the subject, the paradigm of philosophy and the true test of all its claims’.
A Farewell to Forms of Life
Authors: Thompkins E. F.
Published: January 2009

The little boy who announced to a shocked court that the emperor was dressed in nothing but his birthday suit was no mean philosopher in the Wittgensteinian mode. Immune from bewitchment by language he followed blindly, figuratively speaking, the rule of ‘look and see’; any explanation being superfluous since everything lay exposed to view, he described what he saw in everyday words stripped of metaphysical gloss and used in a language-game they could happily call home. Such impeccable philosophical credentials and his fearless pursuit of the truth encourage me to follow his example, though I feel a certain trepidation at the enormity of what I am about to suggest: To my ingenuous gaze the body corporate of Wittgensteinian scholarship displays some startlingly naughty bits that really ought to be decently covered.
Is Life Absurd?
Authors: Westphal Jonathan , Cherry Christopher
Published: January 2009

Thomas Nagel believes, with some existentialists, that life is absurd. We shall criticize his belief, as well as the anodyne he offers.
On Decadence
Authors: Duran Jane
Published: January 2009

When one visits Thailand, one is struck by the enormous number of temples in the urban Bangkok area, many of which are conspicuously absent from the more cherished art historical works on the art and architecture of south-east Asia. The Wat Po complex and Wat Reitmit, one discovers, whatever their virtues for the Western tourist, are not among the temples and archaeological sites mentioned in the text of such an authority as Benjamin Rowland. Nor are these temples—when cited at all—discussed in the same vein as, for example, the Konarak temples of Orissa (India), where at least some veneration is paid to the plasticity of the carving in its depiction of sexual variety, even if the depictions themselves were at one time held to possess little or no intrinsic merit as pieces of sculpture.
Aristotle on Dialectic
Authors: Hamlyn D. W.
Published: January 2009

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness, and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles. There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves (that is to say that they are essentially and thus in some sense necessarily true) and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ (Topics I.1, 100b21–3), and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions.
Validity and Practical Reasoning
Authors: Mitchell David
Published: January 2009

It has been argued by several writers that practical reasoning is capable of a kind of validity that is unlike the validity which theoretical reasoning can possess. One can gain an initial impression of this view's appeal, as well as of its content, by seeing how it could issue from analytical reflection upon the idea that actions, decisions and intentions all can be, and frequently are, reasonable. An inviting first step in such reflection is to say that for a certain intention, say, to be reasonable on a certain occasion is, roughly, for it to be true that a person could come to have that intention as a result of reasoning well about what to do. One might then add the further thought that, so far as regards what it is for a piece of reasoning to be well done, reasoning falls into at least two basic kinds: reasoning about what to do differs generically from reasoning about what is the case. The view which I mentioned at the outset can now be seen as a specific proposal regarding where this difference lies: reasoning about what to do has distinctive validity-conditions not shared by reasoning about what is the case.
The Mind's I Has Two Eyes
Authors: Martin J. E. , Engleman K. H.
Published: January 2009

In ‘Minds, Machines and Gödel’, 1961, J. R. Lucas proposed that Godel's theorem made possible a refutation of mechanism—the thesis that mind is wholly comprehensible as a consistent, rule-governed machine. A sympathetic reading of Lucas's argument might run something as follows: ‘If I am a machine then it will be possible in principle to give a specification of the consistent formal system, L, that represents me. If this formal system were handed to me, I would be able to prove a Gödel sentence, G, which L could not generate—that is, L could not model my proving G. But since I have proved G, L is inadequate as a model of my cognitive process.’
The Compatibility of Justice and Kindness
Authors: Putman Daniel
Published: January 2009

In ‘Virtue and Character’ A. D. M. Walker claims that kindness and justice are incompatible in certain important ways and that a person can be kind or just without possessing the other virtue. Walker argues that virtues must lead to ‘effective and intelligent action’ and that a virtue ceases to exist if ‘it leads to violation of the minimal requirements of any other virtue’. On this view kindness and justice function independently to produce effective action. Kindness requires a direct caring for the individual in particular circumstances, while justice involves a commitment to impartiality that abstracts from an individual's situation. Walker argues that, as long as the minimal requirements of other virtues are met, one can be kind without weighing considerations of justice. He cites with approval kind behaviour which human beings learn as young children. Such behaviour may be a deeply engrained personality trait, and the individual passing through different situations in life may have no need to consider questions of justice. ‘He will merely need to be able to recognize and respond to certain types of considerations as overriding the values promoted by kindness’.
Healthy Scepticism
Authors: Franklin James
Published: January 2009

Like Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics, or Communism in California, scepticism about the external world is a doctrine that maintains its health not by being held by many, but by being attacked often. Though there were actual sceptics in ancient times, in various degrees, the history of scepticism in medieval and modern times has been entirely a history of arguments, not of schools.
Bodily Theory and Theory of the Body
Authors: Giles James
Published: January 2009

What is it about having a body that might dispose us to think it a plausible candidate for the basis of personal identity? The answer seems plain: the body is a physical object which, as long as it exists, is spatio-temporally continuous throughout the different moments of its existence. In consequence, myself of today can be said to be the same person as myself of twelve years ago so far as my body of today is spatio-temporally continuous with my body of twelve years ago. Exponents of this view are not, of course, denying that over time a person's body will or may undergo various changes; rather they are claiming that so long as these changes occur within a body which maintains a spatio-temporal continuity, then the identity of the person whose body it is will be ensured.
In Defence of Heidegger
Authors: Janusz Sharon , Webster Glenn
Published: January 2009

Paul Edwards' October 1989 essay, ‘Heidegger's Quest for Being’ illustrates the wisdom of the dictum that the only legitimate criticism of a philosopher's position is a constructive criticism. His negative critique amounts to no more than expressions of distaste, dislike, and displeasure, and nothing of philosophical interest follows from his assertions, as the discourse is primarily an argument ad hominem. He grossly misinterprets Heidegger on some elemental and fundamental matters as well. In particular, he sorely misinterprets what he refers to as the ‘Quest for Being’, which only further contributes to the objectionable character of the essay.
Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour
Authors: McGinn Marie
Published: January 2009

The task of giving some sort of interpretation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour is an extraordinarily difficult one. The book is exceptionally fragmentary. Many of the remarks seem to raise questions that are then left completely unanswered, or to invite us to imagine various circumstances that are then left without any further comment. Although nearly all the remarks are related in one way or another to the problem of colour, the range of topics that Wittgenstein touches on is extremely wide, and covers areas that are not normally mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of colour. For example, apart from the familiar ‘Why can't there be a transparent white?’ and ‘Why can't there be a reddish-green?’, he asks ‘Can a transparent piece of glass have the same colour as an opaque piece of paper?’, ‘Is white always the lightest colour?’, ‘Do I see blond hair in the black and white photograph of a blond youth?’, ‘Does it make sense to point to a colour in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and ask for the walls of my room to be painted the same colour?’, ‘Do the colour-blind have the same concept of colour-blindness as the normally sighted?’, ‘Can normal vision be described?’, and so on.
Rationality as an Absolute Concept
Authors: Sorensen Roy A.
Published: January 2009

My thesis is that ‘rational’ is an absolute concept like ‘flat’ and ‘clean’. Absolute concepts are best defined as absences. In the case of flatness, the absence of bumps, curves, and irregularities. In the case of cleanliness, the absence of dirt. Rationality, then, is the absence of irrationalities such as bias, circularity, dogmatism, and inconsistency.
Wittgenstein's Elephant and Closet Tortoise
Authors: Grant Brian
Published: January 2009

Locke reports, in his discussion of substance and with some amusement, on the Indian philosopher who, when asked what the earth rests on, postulated an elephant and then, when asked in turn about the elephant, decided to go with a tortoise. Locke's amusement, of course, is justified. But it is also tempered if not downright equivocal. For he sees that at some point a very special elephant or—if we stick to the Indian's story—a very special tortoise will have to be invoked. Locke's own tortoise, or elephant, substratum or substance, has some very peculiar properties or, alternatively, an equally alarming lack of them—so much so that, as he is painfully aware, it might well seem totally implausible. Enough of Locke though. Wittgenstein's problem, unlike Locke's, lies in epistemology. His elephant consists of an indefinitely large and varied set of bench-marks or paradigms—Moore's examples, in fact, along with some additions—that function as an epistemological ‘foundation’, ‘river bed’, ‘bedrock’, ‘rock bottom’, a ‘substratum’, no less. Where is the tortoise? Wittgenstein's answer to this is that there is no tortoise, none at all. A non-existent tortoise, however, is as unacceptable here as a regular common-or-garden one. Even the Indian realized that an elephant is no good without a tortoise.
Cambridge Philosophers I: F. P. Ramsey
Authors: Mellor D. H.
Published: January 2009

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was born in February 1903, and he died in January 1930—just before his 27th birthday. In his short life he produced an extraordinary amount of profound and original work in economics, mathematics and logic as well as in philosophy: work which in all these fields is still, over sixty years on, extremely influential.
Minimal Consequentialism
Authors: Caws Peter
Published: January 2009

In this paper I propose to set out, and argue for, a theory of what makes acts morally permissible. The claims about morality that I shall be advancing will be minimalist. By this I mean that the scope of the theory will be restricted to as small a class of acts or courses of action as possible, and its bearing on the members of that class to as narrow a range of characteristics as possible. My starting point is that, as Dostoevsky put it, 'everything is permitted'– unless there prove to be good reasons why it cannot be.
Wild Justice
Authors: Wallace Gerry
Published: January 2009

Shylock's famous speech is music to the ears of modern liberals: Hath not a Jew eyes, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heated by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you pick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?
Responsibility and Necessity
Authors: Cockburn David
Published: January 2009

It is widely assumed that there is some form of logical tension between the idea that everything that happens happens of necessity and the idea that people are sometimes responsible for what they do. If there is such a tension it ought to be possible to characterize the notions of necessity and responsibility in a way such that the incompatibility is transparent.
How I Almost Solved the Problem of Induction
Authors: Watkins John
Published: January 2009

At the seventh international congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, held at Salzburg in 1983, I was talking with John Searle when I glanced at my watch and exclaimed, I must run. I'm due to solve the problem of induction at 2.15. ‘Yes,’ he replied, I must go too; I'm due to solve the mind-body problem. I don't know how seriously he meant his remark, but I did actually believe that I had cracked this old problem in the Epilogue of my Science and Scepticism,1 the manuscript of which was then with the publisher. In that book I drew a sharp distinction between the problem which faces a theoretical scientist trying to select, out of several competing theories, the one that best fulfils the aim of science, and the pragmatic problem which faces an applied scientist or practical decision-maker trying to select, out of several competing hypotheses, the one that offers the best guidance. I had what I still regard as a viable solution to the theoreticians problem. It aid that theoreticians should prefer that theory, if there is one, that is the best corroborated; for on a certain non-trivial but uncontroversial assumption about what kinds of test have been made, the best corroborated theory will best satisfy what I claimed to be the optimum aim for science: it will be deeper and wider than its rivals and, moreover, possibly true, given all the reported outcomes of tests in its field. For present purposes we can forget the explications I offered for ‘deeper’ and ‘wider’. As to ‘possibly true’: this reflects the abandonment of hopes (still nursed as recently as 1918 by Moritz Schlick, for example) that science can arrive at theories that are certainly true, or at least have a high probability of being true, or at the very least have had their probability raised by the experimental evidence.
Reason, Passion, and Action: the Third Condition of the Voluntary
Authors: Chappell T. D. J.
Published: January 2009

1. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office, but to serve and obey them.’ (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (THN) 2.3.3) Unfortunately, Hume uses ‘reason’ to mean ‘discovery of truth or falsehood‘ (THN 3.1.1) as well as discovery of logical relations. So suppose we avoid, as Hume I think does not, prejudging the question of how many ingredients are requisite for action, by separating these two claims out:

A. Reason (= logical powers) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

B. Reason (= belief(s)) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.