bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
German Philosophy
Authors: Heinemann F. H.
Published: February 2009

Encounter is one of the magical keywords of our time which seems to open up new vistas. Rencontre, Encounter, Begegnung, the Festschrift dedicated to Professor F. J. J. Buytendijk (Spectrum, Utrecht) is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the meanings of the three terms are by no means identical. In encounter the negative sense “meet in a hostile manner”, prevails in Begegnung the affirmative sense, whereas rencontre is neutral and can be used in both senses. Secondly, whereas Festschriften tend to become a nuisance, occasionally arranged by the recipients ad majorem auctoris gloriam, this one is well-deserved and well-arranged. Buytendijk is a leading Dutch biologist, physiologist and psychologist of European stature with an excellent resistance record. Since the contributors were asked to refer to his paper, La phénoménologie de la rencontre (Eranos Jahrbuch, XIX, 1950), the most important papers are contributions to a psychology of rencontre. Thus the volume becomes representative of an important trend in European biology and psychology. The collaboration of biologists, psychologists and psychiatrists with philosophers is exemplary and fruitful. A non-behaviourist and non-materialist experimental psychology, a personalist counterpart to a behaviourist stimulus-response psychology, emerges in outlines. It has transcended the isolated individual and isolated impressions and ideas, and regards man as a being-within-the-world together with other persons. the influence of Husserl's phenomenology and of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit is outstanding. New categories are used, such as “authentic” and “inauthentic” rencontre, and new problems arise, e.g. the smiling of a child interpreted as a primitive mode of rencontre (M. Chastaing, K. Goldstein), and that of “Se fermer et s’ouvrir” (H. C. Rumke). It is quite impossible to discuss here single contributions. It must suffice to say that they confirm Buytendijk's central conception that somehow mind is already present within the organism, and that on the other hand, blind necessity penetrates human affairs.
The Philosophy Of J. F. Ferrier
Authors: Thomson Arthur
Published: February 2009

James Frederick Ferrier was born in Edinburgh on June 16th, 1808. He was educated privately and at the Royal High School, Edinburgh. After spending two sessions at Edinburgh University, he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1831. Returning to Edinburgh, he qualified as an advocate in 1832, but devoted himself to philosophical studies, largely as a result of his close friendship with Sir William Hamilton. In 1838-9, he published An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness in Blackwood's Magazine. This was followed by a number of interesting articles and reviews, chiefly on sense-perception. In 1844, Ferrier deputised for SirWilliam Hamilton in the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, and, in the following year, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy and Politica Economy in St Andrews. In 1854, he published The Institutes of Metaphysics. He died in 1864, leaving behind him a valuable course of Lectures on Greek Philosophy, which was published posthumously.
Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, And Machines
Authors: Gunderson Keith
Published: February 2009

IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility
of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.
The Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract
Authors: MacAdam J. I.
Published: February 2009

My Purpose is twofold: first, to interpret Rousseau's The Social Contract in terms of a serious interpretation of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality and second, to use as the principal interpretative concept for both, the concept of independence. One gets the impression in reading commentators that the Discourse on Inequality is not taken seriously in its own right but rather is treated as what it is, an essay which was suitable for submission as a prize essay, with the required clever rhetorical style, flashes of paradox and yet withal solemnly addressing itself to a virtually impossible question. However, if it is taken, in part, as Rousseau's social and psychological analysis of modern society, as an account of “men as they are” (The Social Contract, ed. Cranston, p.49), then it is not only worthy of serious study in itself, it also helps one to see that still puzzling book, The Social Contract, from a new perspective. Moreover, Rousseau's concept of independence is both interesting and helpful. What Rousseau means by “independence” may diner from what he means by “freedom”, but for most of this essay I shall draw from the latter a working definition of the former and thus shall mean by independence: (1) not being subject to or under the control of another person or persons, and (2) not being subject to or under the control of one's passions. The advantage of attending to the concept of independence is that it enables one to recognize that Rousseau is asserting three seemingly incompatible propositions: first, man is independent, second, no man is independent and in the given circumstances can be and, third, man must become dependent in order to become independent.
Necessarily Adequate Evidence About Other Minds
Authors: Greenwood T.
Published: February 2009

A well-known paradox of strict verificationism is this one. Suppose we distinguish between evidence-statements and statements for the truth or falsity of which evidence statements are support, and suppose we could not come to know the non-evidential statements except by knowing the truth of the evidential ones. We must say: what we know is after all some set of evidential statements, and what we mean when we assert the non-evidential statement is after all a set of evidential statements. But the point of calling a set of evidential statements evidential is simply to draw the distinction between evidence and what it is evidence for. What was the initial contrast therefore, and how did we come to think of it as a contrast? If what I mean by S is what would normally be considered evidence for the truth of S, then it cannot be evidence for the truth of S.
Could Machines Be Made to Think?
Authors: George F. H.
Published: February 2009

This question as to whether machines can, or could, be made to think, has become familiar in recent years since the renewed outburst of interest that has taken place in the development of Cybernetics. The notion of servo–mechanisms and the like has a history in remote antiquity but the form of its fundamental question has recently taken on a new and especially acute significance.
Philosophy and Poetry
Authors: Britton Karl
Published: February 2009

Professor Brett has some direct acquaintance with a Joint Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy: and it is therefore on the basis of his own experience (as well as Coleridge's) that he warns us that poetry and philosophy are “difficult pursuits for any man to combine” (p. 79). This book has an introductory chapter and a short epilogue which deal in a philosophical way with meaning in poetry and in imaginative literature generally and with the nature of critical interpretation.In the four middle chapters the author gives his account of four well-known and much discussed poems: Lycidas, the Essay on Man, the Ancient Mariner and the Four Quartets. One could imagine these chapters presented independently as interpretations and discussions of the literary and historical background of the poems: but they certainly illustrate Mr. Brett's theory of meaning in poetry and this provides a certain unity. Parts of Chapter I were first published by the author in Philosophy (July 1952). What is new is the particular application of the theory to didactic and discursive poetry. To this is now added a discussion of rival theories of interpretation: first, the view expressed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy” (Sewanee Review, 1946 and 1949); and, second, the views expressed by Miss Kathleen Raine in her essay on Blake (British Book News, Supplement, 1951).
The Social Structure of Experience
Authors: Hartshorne Charles
Published: February 2009

In many contemporary philosophical writings, what is most surprising to me is not the things asserted, nor those denied, but those not even mentioned (or barely mentioned as of no importance). Several of these slighted topics are summed up in the title of this essay. At the age of twenty, when I was not reading any technical philosophers, nor any author (unless a poet or two) who held an essentially social view of experience, I attempted to persuade myself of the adequacy of a non-social view, expressed partly in a self-interest theory of motivation, and partly in an idea of perception as experience of things not themselves constituted by any sort of experiences. So far from succeeding in this attempt, I began to find reasons for regarding both motivation and perception as manifestations of a single principle, that of the overlapping or inter-individual unity of minds, not simply of human minds, but of mind on various levels of, nature, including inorganic nature. This overlapping I thought I found in experience itself, and not merely through speculation or postulation. Subsequent reading in philosophy has not shown me a basic error in Hhis early philosophizing, but only a vagueness and blurring of dis; Jinctions which, when taken into account, strengthen rather than weaken the case.
Impartiality and Consistency
Authors: Monro D. H.
Published: February 2009

It is quite commonly held nowadays that universalizability is a purely formal feature of moral terms, or perhaps of moral rules.To say that something is good, it is asserted, implies (in some sense of “implies”) that anything else with the same (relevant) characteristics is also good; to say that Jones ought to do X is to commit oneself to saying that, in the same circumstances, Smith ought to do X. In pointing this out, it is suggested, one is not oneself taking up a moral position, or laying down a particular moral rule, but simply making it clear what a moral utterance is. The principle ofuniversalizability is thus a principle of meta-ethics, not of morality itself. That moral judgments are universalizable, Hare tells us, is an analytic statement: “analytic by virtue of the meaning of the word moral”.
Moral Talking and Moral Living
Authors: Harrison Jonathan
Published: February 2009

People unacquainted with moral philosophy suppose that its business is to tell us the difference between right and wrong. Many moral philosophers, unfortunately, seem to agree with them, to the extent, at any rate, of taking it for granted that there is some one divison of actions into two classes, which division is of some especial or even unique significance. Actions, they have supposed, are either right or wrong. If they are right, then they must and ought to be done, and to do them is our duty. If they are wrong, then they must not and ought not to be done, and it is our duty not to do them. If we do what is right, and do this because it is right, and not just because it suits us, then we have performed a morally good action, and we deserve praise or commendation. If we have done something which is wrong, then we have performed a morally bad action, and deserveblame, and possibly punishment. Finally, a man manifests his moral goodness by performing, from a sense of duty, those actions which belong to the first class, and omitting those which belong to the second class; since there are no other ways in which actions may be classified morally, he has ample oppo tunity for exercising his talents, and the morally good man, or the conscientious man, or the dutiful man, becomes the archetype of what a man ought to be.
Meanings and Criteria in Ethics
Authors: Gewirth Alan
Published: February 2009

In Recent years noncognitivist ethical theories have been supported by an argument which has come to be widely accepted among moral philosophers.1 According to this argument, an ethical term like ‘good’ has both a commending function and a describing function, but between these functions there is the important difference that the commending function alone is invariant while the describing function varies greatly. For many and different things may be called good—hammers, sunsets, paintings, missionaries, cannibals—but despite these differences in the descriptive criteria for applying the word to objects, ‘good’ retains a common meaning in all these uses, for in each case the word is being used to commend. The conclusion drawn, then, is that because of its being the sole invariant or common feature of every use of ‘good’, the commendatory function rather than the varying descriptive function must be the primary meaning of ‘good’. I shall refer to this as the commendatory invariance argument
‘“Ought” Implies “CAN”’
Authors: Henderson G. P.
Published: February 2009

The dictum ‘“ought” implies “can”’ has a status in moral philosophy in some respects like that of ‘a good player needs good co-ordination’ in talk about ball-games. Clearly, you say something important but not conclusive about proficiency in playing a ball-game when you say that it requires good co-ordination: similarly, you say something important but not conclusive about obligation when you say that it implies a certain possibility or power or ability. Each dictum is a reminder: the one about such courses of physical instruction, the other about such exhortations to duty, as are worth persevering with. It would be hopeless to keep on teaching a boy the moves and tricks of rugby football if he could never co-ordinate well enough to get his eye in, so to speak. Correspondingly, it would be meaningless to recommend that someone ought to do something the specification of which involved a contradiction, and pointless to suggest that he ought to do something which, for quite general reasons, was not, and was certain to remain not, within his power. So each dictum expresses a bluff, no-nonsense wisdom which we should count on before involving ourselves in certain more detailed commitments. But probably this is as far as the comparison between the two sayings can well be taken.
Restricted Moralities
Authors: Brunton J. A.
Published: February 2009

It will, I suppose, be readily agreed that questions concerning the scope of moral principles are of vital importance for the moral philosopher. If we are to accept a view, such as Professor Hare's, that there are formal criteria for any morality if it is to count as a morality, then it is necessary to know what is left outside the fence. Are Egoism and Caste Morality to count as moralities, restricted to the interests of one and of a limited group of persons respectively; or is there a logical absurdity in calling them moralities at all?

Hare's thesis of ‘prescriptive universalisability’, as definitive of the formal structure of any moral system, rules out such restricted ‘moralities’. Using ‘ought’ as a key-concept in moral discourse, Hare suggests that the word has two basic functions:

(i) to prescribe: meaning to commend courses of action sincerely to oneself and others.

(ii) to prescribe consistently, or universalisably; that is, in the same way, on relevantly similar occasions, to anyone, including oneself, unless valid reasons for discrimination of persons can be offered.
On Talking about the Arts
Authors: Reid Louis Arnaud
Published: February 2009

I want to concentrate on two kinds of talking about the arts. One concerns those aspects of the language of philosophical aesthetics in which generalisations about ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ are made. The other concerns the language of the critic in so far as it can be stated as having a very particular aim: ‘the stimulation’ (in, say, a reader) ‘of interest and the heightening of insight and the education of his ability to make his own appreciative judgments from direct experience’.
Rationality and Understanding
Authors: Reddiford Gordon
Published: February 2009

I wish to discuss some of the problems that arise when we attempt to understand beliefs and actions that are alien to the thingswebelieve and do. This will involve my saying something about the concepts of rationality and understanding so as to provide grounds for a claim I wish to make that we can understand beliefs, or doctrines, and actions that would not count as rational by our standards. I shall further examine a problem, in education, not all of whose perplexities have been resolved by empirical research in conceptual development: the problem of how children with only a limited familiarity with the conceptual frameworks of their own culture can come to understand conceptual frameworks and ways of acting radically at variance with their own. British children, from the ages of eight or nine onwards, hear stories of the lives of the Aboriginals and the Eskimoes, and learn about the Romans, the Vikings and Elizabethan England, the beliefs and prophecies of the Old Testament, moral stories of the classical world and even the characteristics within their own societies of such institutions as monasteries. Not only have they to meet the problems of the historian and the anthropologist of understanding ways of life strange and distant, but they encounter them without the conceptual familiarity with the beliefs and actions of their own society possessed by the former. Lacking settled criteria of intelligibility for understanding their own society, they are asked to develop the criteria of intelligibility necessary to making some sort of sense of societies very different from their own: a situation probably not paralleled in any other aspect of their education.
A Kind of Necessary Truth
Authors: Brown Norman J.
Published: February 2009

In what sense can we not help thinking that every event has a cause? One answer is, that this begs the question: we can think of events as uncaused. Well, we can think of events in isolation from causes, and we can formulate the proposition that some events have no cause, or that no event needs a cause. But the first of these does not constitute thinking of an event as not caused, but thinking of an event not-as-caused (or, not thinking of the event as caused); while the implications of the second, forming anti-causal propositions, are obscure. I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some events are uncaused’; the question is, whether it makes sense to affirm it. Now I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some triangles are quadrilateral’, and we must not say that this does not make sense; for I know the criteria for being a triangle, and I know the criteria for being quadrilateral; and the proposition simply asserts that there are some figures which satisfy both sets of criteria. That this is logically impossible is true, but it is not unintelligible. It does not, however, make sense to affirm a logical impossibility, simply because I cannot meaningfully affirm what I do not understand and believe to be possible (though of course I can meaningfully affirm what I believe to be false), and if I understand what it means to be both triangular and quadrilateral, I cannot also believe it to be possible, since to understand what it means for a plane figure to have three sides is to understand that this excludes its having any other number of sides, e.g. four. But ‘some events are not caused’ is not logically incoherent in this way, or not apparently so; for in thinking of an event (as opposed to thinking of an effect) I am by definition thinking of a happening (whether caused or not) in isolation from any cause; I am thinking of it not as caused. Thus ‘some events are uncaused’ is not incoherent ex vi terminorum.
A. N. Whitehead On Good and Evil
Authors: Harrison R. K.
Published: February 2009

The many comments on good and evil found in the writings of A. N. Whitehead are exhibited in his mind against the two categories of positive and negative value. His concern in value-considerations is with the “trinity” of truth, beauty and goodness on the one hand, and with falsehood, ugliness and evil on the other. For him, “value” is a word employed for “the intrinsic reality of an event” and very frequently in his treatment of the value-theme he uses the term “importance” as having equivalence to “value.”
Mr Strawson on Individuals
Authors: Williams B. A. O.
Published: February 2009

Mr P. F. Strawson's book Individuals is subtitled An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. ‘Descriptive metaphysics’, he writes (p. 9), ‘is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world’, whereas ‘revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’; it is distinguished from logical or conceptual analysis in scope and generality, rather than in fundamental intention. The book is divided into two parts; in Strawson's words (pp. 11–12), ‘the first part aims at establishing the central position which material bodies and persons occupy among particulars in general. … In the second part of the book the aim is to establish and explain the connexion between the idea of a particular in general and that of an object of reference or logical subject.’
Individuals
Authors: Leclerc Ivor
Published: February 2009

The problem of ‘individuals’ is an age-old philosophical concern, but from time to time in the history of thought it is a problem which becomes acute. In our day the far-reaching advances in science—in physics and chemistry, in biology and bio-chemistry, in neurology and psychology—have made the philosophical attention to the problem of ‘individuals’ a matter of urgency. Yet, with some notableexceptions, philosophers have so far been displaying singularly little interest in the problem.
Politics and Power
Authors: Partridge P. H.
Published: February 2009

In recent years, political scientists have talked a great deal about the proper definition of their subject, and of how the ‘field’ of the political scientist is best distinguished from that of other social scientists. One proposal that is frequently made is that political science might quite properly be defined as the study of power, its forms, its sources, its distribution, its modes of exercise, its effects. The general justification for this proposal is, of course, that political activity itself appears to be connected very intimately with power: it is often said that political activity is a struggle for power; that constitutions and other political institutions are methods of defining and regularising the distribution and the exercise of power, and so on. Since there seems to be some sense in which one can say that, within the wider area of social life, the political field is that which has some special connection with power, it may seem plausible then to suggest that the study of politics focusses upon the study of power.
Causes
Authors: Grene Marjorie
Published: February 2009

In an essay on ‘The Notion of Cause’ reprinted in Mysticism and Logic (and which constituted the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in the year 1912) Russell argued ‘that the word ‘cause” is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable’.1 His argument here to the effect that ‘cause’ is not a central concept in science, as philosophers have thought it, is reminiscent of Norman Campbell's statement in Physics: The Elements (1920) and in What is Science? (1921).
The Jensen Uproar
Authors: Flew Antony
Published: February 2009

In the winter of 1969 the Harvard Educational Review published a long article by Professor Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley. In this article Jensen reviewed the psychological evidence bearing upon the question ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ The original publication occasioned an enormous coast to coast brouhaha of protest and denunciation; including tyre-slashing, slogan-painting, telephoned abuse and threats, and strident demands to ‘Fire’ or even to ‘Kill Jensen’. The author has now republished this offending article, along with several shorter contributions in the same area, under the title Genetics and Education. He has also supplied, in addition to a full collection of References for the papers included, a Bibliography of the controversy, two Indices, and a 67 page Preface.
Method and Insight
Authors: Hepburn R. W.
Published: February 2009

Fr. Bernard Lonergan's writings have not so far received much discussion in British philosophical journals, although they contain one of the most fully-developed contemporary presentations of Catholic Christianity and have a substantial and distinctive philosophical content. They have not lacked theological commentators, both in print and in conferencediscussions. The present article has three aims: to draw attention to Lonergan's work and its philosophical relevance; to notice the publication of his latest book, Method in Theology, and to venture some critical comments on certain arguments about the intelligibility of being, being and the good, and God, in his book Insight (published first in 1957). These arguments are central to Lonergan's account of theism, a theism which, in its orthodox Roman Catholic form, is presupposed by Method in Theology. The books are organically interrelated. One admirer of Lonergan described the newer book (before its appearance) as ‘the book [Lonergan] originally set out to write’.
Time and Time Again
Authors: Wilkerson T. E.
Published: February 2009

‘… and he arranged it all. It's done me the world of good, I can tell you. And that's why I said that yesterday was both yesterday and two years ago.’

‘Well, it still sounds nonsense to me. I told you H. G. Wells would do you no good.’
On Unconscious Intentions
Authors: Gustafson Donald
Published: February 2009

Professor Hamlyn (in ‘Unconscious Intentions’, Philosophy, 1971) defen the idea of unconscious intentions independently of its place in Freudian theory. If successful, his argument would show that arguments such as Frederick Siegler's (in ‘Unconscious Intentions’, Inquiry, 1967), would not succeed in demonstrating the incoherence of the Freudian notion(s) of unconscious intention. Further, if Hamlyn is successful, he provides conceptual grounds from ordinary, non-psychoanalytic cases from which the Freudian notion of unconscious intention could be reconstructed.
Recent Trends in Ethical Thought
Authors: Metz Rudolf
Published: February 2009

In my book, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, in connection with Cook Wilson and his Oxford followers I briefly mentioned a new line of ethical research that has made its mark within the last decade. Its representatives are differently labelled, as “Oxford Moralists,” “Intuitionists,” “Neo-Intuitionists,” “Objectivists,” and with other names as well. But I could not give more than a few very insufficient hints about the new school: a fuller treatment would have exceeded the compass of my book, and, further, at the time the book was written, things were not settled enough to be made the subject of a historical review. Even now the time has hardly come for a final appreciation. Nevertheless, the discussion is so far advanced that it may be worth while to take stock of it in order to exhibit not only the new tendency itself, but also the various cross-currents which have been called forth by its appearance. Such an attempt is greatly furthered by the fact that some preliminary work has already been done in this direction by writers who have taken part in the discussion.
Towards a Theory of Properties: Work in Progress on the Problem of Universals
Authors: Armstrong D. M.
Published: February 2009

Many philosophers have declared that everything which exists is a particular. There is a weak interpretation of this doctrine which I believe to be a true proposition, and a strong one which I believe to be false.
Desert, Equality and Injustice
Authors: Holborow Les
Published: February 2009

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972) is an extremely long and elaborate work. But despite the length and the elaboration there is at the heart of the work a crucial set of unargued assumptions which need to be challenged. When this is done we are in a position to provide additional support for the critical conclusions of several other commentators who concentrate on other features of Rawls's system.
Meaning-as-Use and Meaning-as-Correspondence
Authors: Butchvarov Panayot
Published: February 2009

The purpose of this article is to examine two major arguments in favour of the philosophical thesis that the meaning of an expression is its use, and not its referent or what it corresponds to. A second philosophical thesis which is closely related to the first is that the study of the ordinary, “actual” uses of certain expressions is not of purely linguistic interest but in fact is a way, probably the only proper way, of solving the problems of traditional philosophy; in the sequel to the present article, we shall examine one major argument in favour of this second thesis. Both theses occupy a place of central importance in the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as “the philosophy of ordinary language”. Together they seem to constitute the basis of the most characteristic claim of this movement: that traditional philosophic discourse is logically improper and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with “the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language” by describing “the actual use of language”. Both theses are necessary for the justifi cation of this more general claim.
Popper's Improbability Criterion for the Choice of Scientific Hypotheses
Authors: Harsanyi John C.
Published: February 2009

The publication in English of Karl R. Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, Hutchinson, 1959) twenty-five years after the appearance of the German original, is an important event. At the time when many philosophers questioned the cognitive value of scientific hypotheses (and even of the most down-to-earth empirical generalizations), Popper has shown how to reconcile the free use of bold explanatory hypotheses with an insistence on empirical testing. Many of Popper's views have now been accepted even by most of his earlier opponents, which is no small tribute to a philosopher who had challenged an important current of opinion. But, though the basic aspects of Popper's theory have attracted considerable attention in recent years, some of his finer points have received insufficient discussion. It is hoped that the publication of this important book in English translation will now help to remedy this situation.
Austin's ‘Sense and Sensibilia’
Authors: Lazerowitz Morris
Published: February 2009

This book was reconstructed by G. J. Warnock from notes Professor J. L. Austin prepared for a course of lectures he first gave in Oxford in Trinity Term, 1947, under the title ‘Problems of Philosophy’. The title was changed to ‘Sense and Sensibilia’ the following year. Mr Warnock deserves to be commended for a piece of work which must have been as difficult as its result is excellent. It is a considerable feat of sympathetic identification to have achieved the kind of continuity and order of thought as well as the stylistic continuity found in the book from the sketchy lecture notes a practised lecturer like Austin would need. Mr Warnock assures the reader in his Foreword that ‘…in all points of substance (and in many points of phraseology) his argument was the argument which this book contains’, and there can be no doubt whatever that Austin's thoughts have been recorded meticulously and with admirable clarity.
Comenius (Komensky) on Lexical Symbolism in an Artificial Language
Authors: Miskovska V. T
Published: February 2009

Although philosophising about given languages had been going on ever since the time of Plato's Kratylos, the idea of an artificial philosophical language or system of signs began to take shape in the seventeenth century. Both Descartes and Mersenne explored the ground for the foundations of a system of expressions which could meet all the requirements of logical thought; but the merit of presenting the first elaborate plans goes to the British authors George Dalgarno and John Wilkins.1 Leibniz followed soon after with his characteristica universalis.
Plato and Natural Science
Authors: Field G. C.
Published: February 2009

The object of this paper is, as the title implies, to investigate the relation of Plato’s thought to natural science. More especially, it is intended to examine the widely held view that Plato’s influence, owing to the character of his beliefs, was necessarily and positively unfavourable to the development of natural science, as we know it at the present day.
Plato's Theory of Forms and Modern Physics
Authors: Joad C. E. M.
Published: February 2009

The stream of books and papers devoted to the bearing of modern physics upon philosophical problems is apparently endless. Nevertheless, I am, I think, safe in asserting that the relations between physics and philosophy are still far from satisfactory. If, then, I venture to add one more paper to the stream, it is not because I believe that I am in a position to succeed where so many have failed, but because I have a suggestion to offer which, while it has not hitherto to my knowledge been made, would, if it could be accepted, throw some light upon one aspect of the vexed question of the status of the physical world.
Spinoza's Doctrine of Privation
Authors: Demos Raphael
Published: February 2009

According to Spinoza, the categories of good and bad—in fact, all categories of value—are relative. The only valid category is that of substance; value as distinct from reality has no genuine meaning. Spinoza’s attack on valuation is based on two sets of arguments, one rationalistic and scientific, the other religious and theological. We will consider each in turn.
Some Arguments for a Liberal Society
Authors: McCloskey H. J.
Published: February 2009

In this Paper I am concerned to argue that the traditionally and contemporarily important arguments for a liberal society do provide a justification for what may fairly be called a liberal society. However, many liberals may wish to deny that the society which these arguments are seen to justify when their various limitations and qualifications are noted, can properly be called liberal, for it is less committed to non-interference with liberty than is the liberal society which those who advance these arguments believe to be justified by them.
Sensations, Experiences and Brain Processes
Authors: Heil John
Published: February 2009

In his defence of the identity theory, Professor Smart has attempted to show that reports of mental states (for example, sensation reports) are strictly topic-neutral. If this were the case then it would follow that there is nothing logically wrong with the claim that the mind is the brain (and nothing more) or that mental states are really nothing but brain states. Some phillosophers have argued that a fundamental objection to any form of materialism is that the latter makes an obvious logical blunder in identifying the mental with the physical. This is the view that dualism is enshrined in our language. If this is true then of course statements such as ‘the mind is actually nothing but the brain’ and ‘mental states are really nothing but physical processes’ would be quite unacceptable on strictly logical grounds. Smart's claim that talk about mental states is topic-neutral, however, appears to exempt materialism from such objections. The question is, does it? That is to say, are sensation reports and the like topic-neutral in the required sense? Are they analogous in principle to statements of the form ‘someone is in the room’? Smart's point is that expressions such as ‘someone phoned: it was the doctor’ are logically similar to those of the form ‘I am having a red after-image: it is a brain process.’ ‘Someone’ is not logically equivalent to ‘the doctor’ (and it even sounds strange to say ‘someone is the doctor’), but it may, of course, be true that the doctor is the someone who phoned. Does this analogy hold and is it correct to say that sensation reports and mentalistic expressions in general are topic-neutral, that they refer only to experienced ‘somethings’? Smart's claim runs as follows:

When a person says, ‘I see a yellowish-orange after-image’, he is saying something like this: ‘There is something going on which is like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, that is, when I really see an orange’. (And there is no reason why a person should not say the same thing when he is having a veridical sense-datum, so long as we construe the ‘like’ in the last sentence in such a sense that something can be like itself.) Notice that the italicised words, namely ‘there is something going on which is like what is going on when’, are all quasi logical or topic neutral words. This explains why the ancient Greek peasant's reports about his sensations can be neutral between dualistic metaphysics and my materialistic metaphysics. It explains how sensations can be brain processes and yet how a man who reports them need know nothing about brain processes. For he reports them only very abstractly as ‘something going on which is like what is going on when…’ Similarly, a person may say ‘someone is in the room’, thus reporting truly that the doctor is in the room, even though he has never heard of doctors.
A Materialist Fallacy of Mind
Authors: Pucetti Roland
Published: February 2009

… once it be granted that the concept of a mental state is the concept of a state of the person apt for the production of certain sorts of behaviour, the identification of these states with physico-chemical states of the brain is, in the present state of knowledge, nearly as good a bet as the identification of the gene with the DNA molecule.
The Philosopher's Attack on Morality
Authors: Frankena William K.
Published: February 2009

Morality has been getting a great deal of looking at in recent years by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, social scientists, journalists, and novelists, as well as by people, especially students, women, and young people, on the street. Much of this investigation has been aimed at redesigning morality or developing a ‘new morality’, and some of it at doing away with morality entirely and replacing it with something else, with the something elses ranging all the way from love, through religion, sincerity, authenticity, and doing one's own thing, to selfishness. New-moralism and amoralism seem to be widespread, the first often being seen as an antidote to the second. At any rate, many are convinced that morality, at least modern morality, Christian or non-Christian, has been based on a mistake, or on a number of mistakes, though there are different views about what these are. Among others, moral philosophers have also been looking at morality, especially in the form of an inquiry into its definition, meaning, or nature, and into its logic, categories, and justification, but usually with some aloofness from the fray, thinking of themselves rather as elucidating morality than as revising or replacing it, leaving the driving to others, or taking for granted that morality is essentially sound as it stands, though sometimes defending it or at least studying the logic of the question ‘Why should I be moral?’
Do Theodicists Mean What They Say?
Authors: Dore Clement
Published: February 2009

Many theodicists have maintained that God is justified in permitting suffering on the ground that His doing so is a necessary condition of the realization of certain intrinsically valuable ends which the suffering serves and whose value outweighs the suffering which occasions them. Examples of ends which are frequently cited in this connection are freely chosen actions in accordance with stringent obligations to be charitable and steadfast. To say that the value of these ends outweighs the suffering which gives rise to them is to say that the existence both of these ends and of suffering is better than the non-existence of both. (Of course, the best thing of all on the view of the theodicists under discussion would be for these ends to exist and for the suffering not to exist, but they point out that it is logically impossible for there to be desirable responses to suffering in the absence of suffering.)
Kant's Treatment of Animals
Authors: Broadie Alexander , Pybus Elizabeth M.
Published: February 2009

Some of the greatest writers on moral philosophy have claimed that their theories about morality do not run counter to the moral views of ordinary men, but on the contrary are an elucidation of such views, or provide them with a sound philosophical underpinning. Aristotle, for example, made it quite clear that he could not take seriously a moral view that was at odds with the heritage of moral wisdom deeply imbedded in his society. His doctrine of the mean was based on a philosophical consideration of such wisdom. And Immanuel Kant thought that his moral philosophy articulated the moral views of ordinary men.
Aristotle's Four Becauses
Authors: Hocutt Max
Published: February 2009

What has traditionally been labelled ‘Aristotle's theory of causes’ would be more intelligible if construed as ‘Aristotle's theory of explanations’, where the term ‘explanation’ has substantially the sense of Hempel and Oppenheim, who construe explanations as deductions. For Aristotle, specifying ‘causes’ is constructing demonstrations.
The Nature of Things
Authors: Ayers M. R.
Published: February 2009

Anthony Quinton's The Nature of Things covers competently a good deal of philosophical ground in hopeful pursuit of a coherent ontology de-scribable as ‘a version of materialism’. He seems to discern two major difficulties for the enterprise: first, that of giving an acceptable account of ontology, and, secondly, that of reconciling his naturalism with his empiricist principles. ‘Naturalism’ is the view that man and his doings constitute a part of nature on the same ontological level as other natural things, and materialism is a naturalist philosophy. Of the second difficulty Quinton writes:

…a naturalistic view of the world has had to find its chief philosophical expression through doctrines of a sceptical and subjectivist kind, such as Hume's, which have a tendency to undermine the naturalistic presumptions which inspired them. In this book I have tried to equip materialism with solid philosophical credentials.
Existentialism
Authors: Copleston F. C.
Published: February 2009

To treat existentialism as a philosophy is no more possible than to treat idealism as a philosophy. The reason is obvious. Jean-Paul Sartre is an existentialist and Gabriel Marcel is also an existentialist; but the philosophy of Sartre is not the same as the philosophy of Marcel. One can no more speak of the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel and Berdyaev, as though they maintained the same system, than one could speak of the philosophy of Plato, Berkeley and Hegel, as though one philosophy was common to the three thinkers. Of course, if one took idealism in the sense in which the Marxist uses the term, as meaning the doctrine that mind is prior to matter, i.e. as opposed to materialism (with the suggestion that realism and materialism are equivalent), one would have a definite theme to consider; but one would be forced to recognize as idealists thinkers who would never call themselves by that name and who would not be generally recognized as such. Similarly, if one said that existentialism is the doctrine that man is free and that what he makes of himself depends on himself, on his free choices, one would doubtless have mentioned a doctrine which is common to the existentialists and which they insist upon; but one would at the same time be forced to include in the ranks of the existentialists philosophers whose inclusion would be manifestly absurd.
Theism
Authors: Inge W. R.
Published: February 2009

Theism is a modern word, meaning belief in God. But there is no unanimity about the attributes of God. The Greek theos meant a superhuman and in particular an immortal Being. For the Platonists he was a “Soul,” and there may be more than one soul. The Christian Fathers—Augustine as well as the Greeks, could say without reproach that God became man in order that man might become divine. The Logos in the Fourth Gospel is God, but not the Godhead. “My Father is greater than I.”
Linguistic Philosophy and Perception
Authors: MacDonald Margaret
Published: February 2009

Philosophical theories of perception are generally admitted to be responses to certain problems or puzzles allied to the ancient dichotomy between Appearance and Reality. For they have been mainly provoked by the incompatibility of the common–sense assumption that an external, physical world exists and is revealed to the senses with the well–known facts of perceptual variation and error. If only what is real were perceived just as if only what is right were done it is possible that many of those questions would never have been asked which lead to moral philosophy and a metaphysics of the external world. But sense perceptions of the same object vary so that it appears to have contradictory qualities and are sometimes completely deceptive. Nor do illusory differ internally from veridical perceptions. Moreover, perceptual variation and error can be unmasked only by such procedures as looking more carefully, listening harder, trying to touch, asking others, in short by more sense experience. So the senses are, as it were, both accused and judge in these disputes and why should a venal judge be trusted more than the criminal he tries? Such “correction” of one experience by another of the same kind seems no more reliable than the original “error.” Philosophers have found all this very puzzling.
The Relation Between Mind and Body as a Problem for the Philosopher
Authors: Ewing A. C.
Published: February 2009

This article must open with a Warning. In face of the positive information which the sciences supply, the philosophical contribution to this problem will seem disappointingly negative, or at least mine will do so. For I shall insist, and I think we can only rightly insist, that the philosopher is not yet in a position to produce a satisfactory positive theory of the relation between mind and body. And I shall annoy many of you further by insisting that the old-fashioned “dualism” has not really been disproved. However, even if you do not agree with me, it is at any rate a good general piece of advice that, when we are confronted with a philosophical view which has maintained its ground for a very long time but seems to ourselves or to our generation very unreasonable, we should look specially carefully to find the positive grounds which have made so apparently unplausible a doctrine seem true to so many competent thinkers.
Linguistic Analysis and Moral Statements
Authors: Rickman H. P.
Published: February 2009

A tendency towards diffuse and piecemeal linguistic analysis threatens to overwhelm Anglo-Saxon philosophy to-day. Stringent linguistic analysis can indeed be valuable, but much that has been written recently, for instance, in Mind, the stronghold of linguistic analysis, shows no trace of clearly grasped method and well understood aims. The result is meandering discursiveness, the collection of trivial anecdotes and the random mixing of linguistic, psychological and sociological reflections leading to no clear conclusions.
The Philosophy of Resemblances
Authors: Emmet E. R.
Published: February 2009

This paper is a discussion and a criticism of the account of the Philosophy of Resemblances which appears in the first chapter of Professor H. H. Price's Thinking and Experience.