bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empiricism in Ethics
Authors: Körner Stephan
Published: November 2010

The purpose of this essay is to exhibit certain crucial shortcomings of some representative empiricist and anti-empiricist ethical theories and to sketch an empiricist ethics which is not exposed to these objections and adequate to our cognitive and practical position in the world. The discussion falls into two parts. Part I, which is mainly critical, begins with a general distinction between empiricist and anti-empiricist ethical theories and surveys the assumptions which are permissible to the former in the sphere of factual beliefs, practical attitudes and logical inference (section 1). It then examines the central theses of three kinds of empiricist ethical theory, namely utilitarian, contractual and emotivist theories (section 2) and of three corresponding kinds of anti-empiricist theory which can be viewed as attempts at correcting the faults of their empiricist counterparts (section 3). Part II, which is mainly constructive, contains a sketch of a new empiricist ethics (section 4) and in its light a brief discussion of various types of moral system (section 5) of the limits of moral pluralism and the nature of moral argument (section 6).
Essay on Man
Authors: Bambrough Renford
Published: November 2010

I am grateful for the honour that is done to me by the invitation to give the first H. B. Acton Lecture. We are all grateful for an occasion to honour Professor Acton. It is disappointing, however understandable, and fitting to his modesty, that he has not felt able to be here to receive our gratitude.
Psycho-analysis, Human Nature and Human Conduct
Authors: Gregory Ian
Published: November 2010

There is, I gloomily suspect, little which is significantly new that remain to be said about psycho-analysis by philosophers. The almost profligate theorising that goes on within the psycho-analytic journals will, no doubt, continue unabated. It simply strikes me as unlikely that such theorising will generate further issues of the kind that excite the philosophical mind. Though in making such an observation, I recognise that I lay claim upon the future in a manner that many might believe to be unwise. The place of psycho-analysis upon the intellectual map, the implications that psycho-analytic theory and practice have for the various kinds of judgements that we make about human behaviour, have been exhaustively discussed in recent times. Rather more specifically, whether psycho-analysis should be accorded the dignity of being labelled a ‘science’, what the significance is of psycho-analysis for those complex problems bounded by the notions of Reason, Freedom, Motivation, have occasioned much fruitful philosophical debate. It is not any wish of mine to add to the literature on these problems in the forlorn hope that even slightly different answers might be forthcoming.
The Natural Supremacy of Conscience
Authors: Gosling Justin
Published: November 2010

I want to start this paper by drawing a distinction between two uses of the word ‘conscience’ in order to get clear just what it is I shall talk about. The distinction I want to make can perhaps best be brought out by reference to a type of situation which could equally well be described in one or other of two ways, each way illustrating one use of the word ‘conscience’. Suppose then that we have a man who has been brought up to think that it is a good thing to help the poor. This lesson he has been taught, at least in part, by being told stories about beggars asking for money. The good person gives money to the beggars and the wicked person callously refuses it. One year he decides to book himself a holiday in Spain. Before he goes, however, he has a conversation with a social scientist friend. This friend points out to him that the one thing he should not do when in Spain is give money to beggars. Beggary, he argues, is a social evil and one which will only be removed if people take a stand and refuse to go on giving money when asked. The appropriate action to take is to inform the beggar of the whereabouts of the local employment exchange, or take him along to an employer, or do one or other of various rather embarrassing things. If the worst comes to the worst, it is better simply to walk away than to give money. Our man goes to Spain convinced by this argument and realising the unsophisticated and over-simple nature of his earlier moral approach. Before long, a beggar comes up to him and asks for money. Let's suppose that he refuses to give it, because of his newly acquired conviction. Now it seems to me that when he returns he could describe this situation in one or other of two ways without there being any difference as regards the facts that he is asserting.
Nature, History and Morality
Authors: Letwin Shirley Robin
Published: November 2010

The question that I propose to consider is the ghost in modern philosophy. Its step has been heard more distinctly at some times than at others. But it has never rattled its chains so loudly as during the recent popularity of Existentialism. The question is: How is man related to the universe? All philosophers who pride themselves on being modern reject the ancient answer to the question. The most emancipated modern philosophers refuse to hear the question. Nevertheless some answer to this question is presupposed by all philosophy.
Attitudes to Nature
Authors: Passmore John
Published: November 2010

The ambiguity of the word ‘nature’ is so remarkable that I need not remark upon it. Except perhaps to emphasise that this ambiguity — scarcely less apparent, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, in its Greek near-equivalent physis — is by no means a merely accidental product of etymological confusions or conflations: it faithfully reflects the hesitancies, the doubts and the uncertainties, with which men have confronted the world around them. For my special purposes, it is enough to say, I shall be using the word ‘nature’ in one of its narrower senses — so as to include only that which, setting aside the supernatural, is human neither in itself nor in its origins. This is the sense in which neither Sir Christopher Wren nor St Paul's Cathedral forms part of ‘nature’ and it may be hard to decide whether an oddly shaped flint or a landscape where the trees are evenly spaced is or is not ‘natural’. The question I am raising, then, is what our attitudes have been, and ought to be, to nature in this narrow sense of the word, in which it excludes both the human and the artificial. And more narrowly still, I shall be devoting most of my attention to our attitudes towards that part of nature which it lies within man's power to modify and, in particular, towards what Karl Barth calls ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’, a life we can by our actions destroy.
Descartes and the Notion of a Criterion of External Reality
Authors: Brodbeck May
Published: November 2010

Descartes's greatest glory was to be the first to articulate, and systematically to defend, the new scientific ideal of explanation in terms of lawfulness. For the realm of matter, lawful connections replaced anthropomorphic volitions as the model of rational explanation. (That he retained anthropomorphic volitional explanation for the realm of mind is understandable: you cannot expect a man to jump wholly out of his skin. It would prove easier, after Newton, to make the extension to mind.) Descartes's use of explanation in terms of lawfulness, inspired by Galileo's beginnings in this enterprise, was vindicated by Newton's subsequent achievement. Replacement of anthropomorphic agency, by causal mechanism, as the explanatory model, was undoubtedly the most profound of the many effects of the new science on our culture.
Spinoza and the Divine Attributes
Authors: Geach P. T.
Published: November 2010

On the very first page of Spinoza's Ethics we find the perplexing definition of ‘attribute’: ‘By an attribute I mean what the understanding perceives in regard to a substance as constituting its essence’. Each attribute of a substance by itself thus constitutes the essence of a substance; if there are many attributes of the same substance, it does not take all of them together to constitute its essence. Spinoza, as we all know, in fact held that there is only one substance, God, but there are infinitely many attributes, of which only two, Thought and Extension, are accessible to the human mind. Each attribute, we further learn, has to be conceived on its own account (I, prop. 10); being conceived on its own account is, however, a distinguishing mark of the one substance, so how is it that the many attributes, which Spinoza says are really distinct, are not so many distinct substances, so many gods?

That is the ontological side of the puzzle. Now for the logical or grammatical side — about which writers on Spinoza have, I think, said a great deal less, though it has been much discussed as regards less deviant theology than Spinoza's. Each attribute is clearly meant to be a concrete, active, individual entity; yet the attributes are designated by abstract nouns — ‘Thought’ and ‘Extension’. Now can we make sense of such a sentence as ‘God is Thought’ or ‘God is Extension’, as opposed to ‘God thinks’ or ‘God is extended’? What does it mean to predicate an abstract noun of a concrete individual? And if this ‘is’ here is not a bare copula of predication but an identity sign, then how can we avoid passing from ‘God is Thought’ and ‘God is Extension’ to ‘Thought is Extension’? Spinoza would deny the conclusion, and it is quite essential to his system to do so. For if Thought just is Extension, identically so, then any mode of the attribute Thought is a mode of the attribute Extension and vice versa. But for Spinoza, the last is diametrically opposite to the truth: no mode is a mode of more than one attribute, and indeed no causal relations link modes of different attributes — a causal linkage is always confined to one attribute.
Spinoza's Epistemological Views
Authors: MacIntosh J. J.
Published: November 2010

I propose, in this paper, to offer a simple, even perhaps a simplified, version of Spinoza's metaphysical views, and to show how these views sometimes affected his epistemological views.

When they did affect his epistemological views the effect was always a bad one, since Spinoza's metaphysical system is quite unworkable. It is helpful, and sometimes even inspiring, but it is wrong. In the end, with the epistemology as with the metaphysics, nothing of substance will be salvageable, but Spinoza's new and even radical perspective is worth observing for its own sake, and there are points of detail along the way, ranging from inspired falsehoods to cloudy truths, that still deserve the effort to untangle them.
Leibniz and the Ideas of Sensible Qualities
Authors: Ishiguro Hidé
Published: November 2010

In order to understand the thoughts of Leibniz it is important to stop putting Leibniz into the convenient pigeon-hole of rationalist, and stop thinking of him merely as the metaphysician and constructor of systems so vividly ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide. Most important of all, one should not attempt to see Leibniz's philosophy as a completely articulated and integrated whole or as built on three or five metaphysical and logical principles. It is better to remember that Leibniz was a very prolific writer, who was interested in the most varied aspects of philosophy, logic, mathematics, natural science, jurisprudence, history and philology: a man who was constantly trying to work out a large number of heterogeneous theories and thoughts. The collected editions of his writings make up more than twenty thick volumes, and these hardly exhaust his manuscripts. Yet this was a man who published only one book in his lifetime.
Berkeley on the Unity of the Self
Authors: Brown S. C.
Published: November 2010

That the legacy of Berkeley's philosophy has been a largely sceptical one is perhaps rather surprising. For he himself took it as one of his objectives to undermine scepticism. He roundly denied that there were ‘any principles more opposite to Scepticism than those we have laid down’ (PHK, 40). Yet Hume was to write of Berkeley that ‘most of the writings of that very ingenious author form the best lessons of scepticism, Bayle not excepted’. And it has become something of a commonplace to say that Berkeley's philosophy is sceptical in direction, if not in intention. He is represented as a half-hearted sceptic, applying radical empiricist principles in his treatment of matter but baulking at their implications when he came to consider spirits. Hume is credited with being the more thoroughgoing of the two. Berkeley had denied the substantiality of extended things. Hume felt obliged, by parity of reasoning, to deny the substantiality of the self. On his account of the mind there is ‘properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different’ (THN, 1 iv 6). It is commonly supposed that Berkeley, in maintaining the quite contrary view that we know ourselves to be simple, undivided beings (PHK, 27), showed a lack of rigour or consistency.
Kant's Explanation of the Necessity of Geometrical Truths
Authors: Watling John
Published: November 2010

Kant was an idealist. His idealism was in some ways, it is true, less extreme than that of Berkeley. He distinguished his own by calling it ‘transcendental’. It is less extreme than Berkeley's in two ways. First, Kant does not assert that everything which exists is essentially mental, as Berkeley does. Second, those things which he does hold to be essentially mental, he holds to be so in a weaker fashion. Nevertheless he was an idealist; he held that neither intuition nor thought could concern any object that was not essentially related to our minds. Since intuition and thought together provide knowledge, and since we can have no knowledge except through them, it follows that every object of which we have knowledge is essentially within our minds. Moreover, there is at least one respect in which his idealism is more extreme than that of Berkeley. He held that the objects of intuition were essentially within our minds, whereas Berkeley held only that they were essentially within some mind.
Hegel: Force and Understanding
Authors: Murray David
Published: November 2010

‘Force and Understanding’ is the title, or part of the title, of the third section of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, his ‘phenomenology of spirit’. That was his first book; it was published in 1807 as Volume One of his System of Science. A second volume, he announced, would contain ‘the system of Logic as speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of philosophy, the sciences of Nature and Spirit’. But no such volume appeared: although in 1812 his Science of Logic was published as ‘the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system’, Hegel added to the 1831 edition a note explaining that since then he had brought out his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ‘in place of the projected second part’.
Hegel's Concept of Freedom
Authors: Parkinson G. H. R.
Published: November 2010

The concept of freedom is one which Hegel thought of very great importance; indeed, he believed that it is the central concept in human history. ‘Mind is free’, he wrote, ‘and to actualise this, its essence – to achieve this excellence – is the endeavour of the worldmind in world-history’ (VG, p. 73). Those who already have an interest in Hegel will doubtless be interested in his views on a topic which he thought so important; on the other hand, the many philosophers who are either indifferent to or hostile to Hegel may point out that it does not follow that, because the subject of freedom interested Hegel, his views about this subject are of general interest. It will be the aim of this paper to show that they are of general interest; in the meantime, it may be recalled that Isaiah Berlin has argued (Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford, 1969, p. 144) that Hegel's concept of freedom is one of a type, called by him the concept of positive freedom, which is ‘at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist, authoritarian and totalitarian creeds of our day’. It will surely be worth while to see to what extent this is true of Hegel, and to what extent Hegel's views about freedom are true.
Was Bentham a Utilitarian?
Authors: Lyons David
Published: November 2010

The principle of utility is Bentham's basic test for morals and legislation. But there is room for doubting what that principle is supposed to say. I shall argue that one important element of modern utilitarian doctrines Cannot be found in Bentham's.

Some aspects of his views will not be questioned here. He holds, for example, that acts should be appraised by their consequences alone. The effects that count are ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’, that is, the effects upon human happiness, interest or welfare.
T. H. Green and the Ethics of Self-Realisation
Authors: Kemp J.
Published: November 2010

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Victorian age in England was philosophically barren; but it would not be a great exaggeration. By this somewhat uncomplimentary opening, I do not mean to imply that Victorian England contained no competent philosophers at all. Indeed, if one considers thinkers of the second and lower ranks only, their literary productivity was probably greater than those of any previous period in English, or even British, history, even if in sheer numbers they can hardly compete with the prolific hordes of our own century. It is at the very highest level of philosophical greatness and originality that one finds the Victorian age wanting. The great period of British philosophy, which runs roughly from the 1630s to the 1770s, contains at least three thinkers who cannot be matched in the succeeding 140 years, Hobbes, Locke and Hume.
Design and analysis of a totally decoupled 3-DOF spherical parallel manipulator
Authors: Zhang Dan , Zhang Fan
Published: November 2010

In this paper, we propose a unique, decoupled 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) parallel wrist. The condition required for synthesizing a fully isotropic parallel mechanism is obtained on the basis of the physical meaning of the row vector in the Jacobian matrix. Specifically, an over-constrained spherical 3-DOF parallel mechanism is presented and the modified structure, which avoids the redundant constraints, is also introduced. The proposed manipulator is capable of decoupled rotational motions around the x, y, and z axes and contains an output angle that is equal to the input angle. As this device is analyzed with the Jacobian matrix, the mechanism is free of singularity within its workspace and maintains homogenous stiffness over the entire workspace.
Interdisciplinary research as a strategy for environmental science and management in Brazilian Amazonia: potential and limitations
Authors: FEARNSIDE PHILIP M.
Published: November 2010

Interdisciplinary research has wide applicability to the environment and its management, and few areas can rival Brazilian Amazonia in terms of interdisciplinary challenges. Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology currently makes interdisciplinary research an explicit priority, and to this end directs financing to large networks of researchers working in different institutions and fields. An impressive number of programmes support and carry out interdisciplinary research in the region, with varying success. Shifts in funding priorities are needed to maximize further advances.
Perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis: improved compliance and impact on infection rates
Authors: PROSPERO E. , BARBADORO P. , MARIGLIANO A. , MARTINI E. , D'ERRICO M. M.
Published: November 2010

The aims of this study were to determine adherence to the perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis (PAP) protocol used at a large Italian teaching hospital during a 6-year period, to assess the variables associated with inappropriate administration, and to measure the impact on surgical site infection (SSI) rates. There were 28 621 patients surveyed of which 74·6% received PAP. An improvement in adherence to the PAP protocol was registered for 58·8% of patients. Significant risk factors were an American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score ⩾2 [odds ratios (OR) from 1·28 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1·19–1·37) to 1·87 (95% CI 1·43–2·44)], prolonged duration of surgery (OR 1·68, 95% CI 1·56–1·82) and urgent surgery (OR 2·16, 95% CI 1·96–2·37). During the study period, a significant reduction in SSIs rates was detected. We concluded that the global reduction of inadequate PAP administration signifies the efficacy of a multidisciplinary quality improvement initiative on antimicrobial utilization, and this is supported by the observed reduction of the SSI rate.
Contrast processing by ON and OFF bipolar cells
Authors: BURKHARDT DWIGHT A.
Published: November 2010

Much of what is currently known about the visual response of retinal bipolar cells is based on studies of rod-dominant responses to flashes in the dark in the isolated retina. This minireview summarizes quantitative findings on contrast processing in the intact light-adapted retina based on intracellular recording from more than 400 cone-driven bipolar cells in the tiger salamander: 1) In the main, the contrast responses of ON and OFF cells are surprisingly similar, suggesting a need to refine the view that ON and OFF cells provide the selective substrates for processing of positive and negative contrasts, respectively. 2) Overall, the response is quite nonlinear, showing very high gain for small contrasts, some 10–15 times greater than that of cones, but then quickly approaches saturation for higher contrasts. 3) Under optimal conditions of light adaptation, both classes of bipolar cells show evidence for efficient coding with respect to the contrasts in natural images. 4) There is a marked diversity within both the ON and OFF bipolar cell populations and an absence of discrete subtypes. The dynamic ranges bracket the range of contrasts in nature. 5) For both ON and OFF cells, the receptive field organization shows a striking symmetry between center and surround for responses of the same polarity and thus opposite contrast polarities. 6) The latency difference between ON and OFF cells is about 30 ms, which seems qualitatively consistent with a delay due to the G-protein cascade in ON bipolar cells. 7) In sum, we report quantitative evidence for at least 11 transformations in signal processing that occur between the voltage response of cones and the voltage response of bipolar cells.
Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed
Authors: Burnyeat M. F.
Published: November 2010

It is a standing temptation for philosophers to find anticipations of their own views in the great thinkers of the past, but few have been so bold in the search for precursors, and so utterly mistaken, as Berkeley when he claimed Plato and Aristotle as allies to his immaterialist idealism. InSiris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, which Berkeley published in his old age in 1744, he reviews the leading philosophies of antiquity and finds them on the whole a good deal more sympathetic to his own ideas than the ‘modern atheism’, as he calls it, of Hobbes and Spinoza (§354) or the objectionable principles of ‘the mechanic and geometrical philosophers’ such as Newton (§§250, 271). But his strongest and, I think, his most interesting claim is that neither Plato nor Aristotle admitted ‘an absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things’ (§311).
Fichte and German Idealism
Authors: Gardiner Patrick
Published: November 2010

Fichte's reputation at the present time is in some respects a curious one. On the one hand, he is by common consent acknowledged to have exercised a dominant influence upon the development of German thought during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Thus from a specifically philosophical point of view he is regarded as an innovator who (for good or ill) played a decisive role in transforming Kant's transcendental idealism into the absolute idealism of his immediate successors, while at a more general level he is customarily seen as having put into currency certain persuasive conceptions which contributed—less directly but no less surely—to the emergence and spread of romanticism in some of its varied and ramifying forms. On the other hand, however, it is noticeable that detailed consideration of his work has not figured prominently in the recent revival of concern with post-Kantian thought as a whole which has been manifested by philosophers of the English-speaking world. Although his name is frequently mentioned in that connection, one suspects that his books may not be so often read. In part this may be due to his particular mode of expounding his views, which at times attains a level of opacity that can make even Hegel's obscurest passages seem comparatively tractable. It is also true that Fichte's principal theoretical works—if not his semipopular writings—are largely devoid of the allusions to scientific, historical, psychological or cultural matters with which his German contemporaries were prone to illustrate their philosophical doctrines and enliven their more abstract discussions: there is a daunting aridity about much of what he wrote which can raise nagging doubts in the modern reader's mind about the actual issues that are in question. Yet the fact remains that by the close of the eighteenth century his ideas had already made a profound impact, capturing the imagination of a host of German thinkers and intellectuals. The problem therefore arises as to what preoccupations, current at the time, they owed their indubitable appeal and to what puzzles they were welcomed as proffering a solution. If these can be identified, it may become at least partially intelligible that Fichte should have been widely regarded as having provided a framework within which certain hitherto intractable difficulties could be satisfactorily reformulated and resolved. Let me accordingly begin by saying something about them.
Schopenhauer on Action and the Will
Authors: Hamlyn D. W.
Published: November 2010

There are certain metaphysical theories which present a view of the world and of the position of human-beings within it which have seemed attractive or at least impressive to many irrespective of the arguments that are marshalled in their favour. That is certainly true of Schopenhauer. His identification of the inner nature of reality with the will, and the conclusions which he drew from this as regards the nature of human-beings and their place in the world, have seemed striking and perhaps even illuminating to many thinkers, not all of whom have been philosophers in the most obvious sense and not all of whom have had much concern for the underlying argument that led Schopenhauer to his conclusions. It is in this way too, perhaps, that certain of Schopenhauer's ideas have become well known—his emphasis on the will to live, his pessimism and his views on suicide, and his thoughts about human nature and about sex that have been seen as something of an anticipation of Freud. In recent times attention has also been directed to his influence on Wittgenstein. In all these respects, however, it is Schopenhauer's ideas that have been influential, rather than the argument that underlies them. Indeed it is sometimes said that Schopenhauer was not a very systematic thinker at all. If that seems true it is so in the sense that Kant too has seemed to some unsystematic in the details of his argument. That does not mean that the main structure of the argument is not clear. So it is with Schopenhauer.
Bradley and Internal Relations
Authors: Manser A. R.
Published: November 2010

Bradley is often described as an Anglo-Hegelian, and hence it is assumed that his doctrines derive from Hegel. It is true that his first two works ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’ and Ethical Studies are heavily influenced by Hegel. The Principles of Logic is much less so: it certainly contains a number of both laudatory and critical references to Hegel, but the whole design of the book is completely unrelated to his treatment of logic. Appearance and Reality seems to me not to be Hegelian at all. The interesting logical discussions occur in the Principles, and it is here that we can find points of comparison between Bradley and Frege and Russell. This is in part because all three were agreed that it was impossible to account for logic by reference to psychology. Bradley's doctrine of internal relations first emerges in this context, though it is given a more metaphysical interpretation in the subsequent Appearance and Reality. However, most who have talked of internal relations have taken their view from the latter work, and have found the doctrine either confused or silly. This quotation from Appearance and Reality seems to bring out all that is objectionable in the view:

And if you could have a perfect relational knowledge of the world, you could go on from the nature of red-hairedness to these other characters which qualify it, and you could from the nature of red-hairedness reconstruct all the red-haired men. In such perfect knowledge you could start internally from any one character in the Universe, and you could from that pass to the rest…For example, a red-haired man who knew himself utterly would and must, starting from within, go on to know everyone else who had red hair, and he would not know himself until he knew them. But, as things are, he does not know how or why he himself has red hair, nor how and why a different man is also the same in that point, and therefore, because he does not know the ground, the how and why, of his relation to other men, it remains for him relatively external, contingent, and fortuitous. But there is really no mere externality except in his ignorance (AR, 520–521).
Transcendental Arguments and Idealism
Authors: Harrison Ross
Published: November 2010

‘Metaphysics’, said Bradley, ‘is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ This idea that reasoning is both instinctive and feeble is reminiscent of Hume; except that reasons in Hume tend to serve as the solvent rather than the support of instinctive beliefs. Instinct leads us to play backgammon with other individuals whom we assume inhabit a world which exists independently of our own perception and which will continue to exist tomorrow in a similar fashion to today. However, when instinct leads us also to reason about these beliefs they are all subject to sceptical attack. Their defence provides a challenge, a challenge which in thumbnail histories of the subject is met by Kant. He does this by use of a powerful new form of argument which he calls transcendental argument and which, in my opinion, provides not only reasons but also good reasons for the defence of some of our most central instinctive beliefs. The strategy involved in this kind of argument is to reflect on the necessary preconditions for comprehensible experience. In this way, some beliefs which are subject to sceptical attack, such as that there is a causal order between objects which exist independently of our experience of them, can be found to be the essential preconditions for having comprehensible experience at all. The reason for accepting them is, therefore, that they are the necessary preconditions of having any beliefs at all; and this provides a good, rather than a bad, reason for accepting these particular instinctive beliefs.
Wittgenstein and Idealism
Authors: Malcolm Norman
Published: November 2010

Recently some philosophers have proposed that the later philosophy of Wittgenstein tends towards idealism, or even solipsism. The solipsism is said to be of a peculiar kind. It is characterized as a ‘collective’ or ‘aggregative’ solipsism. The solipsism or idealism is also said to be ‘transcendental’. In the first part of this paper I will be examining a recent essay by Professor Bernard Williams, in which he presents what he takes to be the grounds for such an interpretation of Wittgenstein. After that I will try to offer convincing evidence that no tendency towards any form of idealism is to be found in Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
Emotions Across Cultures: Objectivity and Cultural Divergence
Authors: Heelas Paul
Published: November 2010

One of the themes of this lecture series has to do with the bearing of radical cultural divergencies on the issue of whether or not there is an invariant human nature. Put starkly, the options are between: first, man as a socio-cultural product, which entails that human nature must vary significantly across divergent cultures; second, man as a biological product, which entails (racist theories aside) that human nature is universal and invariant, impervious to cultural influence; and third, man as a mixture or synthesis of these two options.
Understanding Art and Understanding Persons
Authors: Berenson Frances
Published: November 2010

I have been asked to contribute a paper to the present series of lectures on culture, specifically on whether it is possible to understand the art of other cultures. What I find intriguing is why this question arises; why is such understanding seen as a problem needing discussion?

These are significant questions. How they are answered will be important for any possibility of cross-cultural aesthetic judgments and aesthetic experience. In order to deal with them it is necessary to see how they got purchase, what background they emerged from.
The Devil's Disguises: Philosophy of Religion, ‘Objectivity’ and ‘Cultural Divergence’
Authors: Phillips D. Z.
Published: November 2010

In approaching the topic, ‘Objectivity and Cultural Divergence’, there is little doubt that certain styles of philosophizing will conceive of the task confronting them as that of devising or at least calling attention to standards of rationality by which distinctions between objectivity and divergence are to be drawn. This mode of philosophizing is marked by the confidence it has in its own methods. It seldom occurs to it to question its own operations; to ask whether the heterogeneity of our culture does not itself create difficulties for the practice of philosophy. It is to such questionings as these, however, that I want to direct attention in this lecture.
The Sociobiological View of Man
Authors: Trigg Roger
Published: November 2010

What is the relation of the biological to the social sciences? Fierce battles are being currently fought over this question and much hangs on the answer. If society (or culture) is taken as an irreducible category which can only be understood in its own terms, the social sciences can feel safe from the sinister designs of other disciplines. Yet it is a commonplace that cultures vary, and we humans are prone to look at the differences rather than the similarities between them. The result can be a thoroughgoing relativism. If culture cannot be understood by means of any non-cultural categories, cultural differences themselves can be accepted as the ultimate truth about man. When everything is cultural, even the notion of a non-cultural category can seem to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms. The categories with which we think are the product of our culture, or so we are told. Instead of our being able to understand culture in terms of anything beyond itself, our understanding appears totally moulded by the society to which we belong. Any theory can thus be seen as merely the expression of the beliefs of a particular society.
Biological Ideas and Their Cultural Uses
Authors: Benton Ted
Published: November 2010

The topic of my talk is a very ancient one indeed. It bears upon the place of humankind in nature, and upon the place of nature in ourselves. I shall, however, be discussing this range of questions in terms which have not always been available to the philosophers of the past when they have asked them. When we ask these questions today we do so with hindsight of some two centuries of endeavour in the ‘human sciences’, and some one and a half centuries of attempts to situate the human species within a theory of biological evolution. And these ways of thinking about ourselves and our relation to nature have not been confined to professional intellectuals, nor have they been without practical consequences. Social movements and political organizations have fought for and sometimes achieved the power to give practical shape to their theoretical visions. On the one hand, are diverse projects aimed at changing society through a planned modification of the social environment of the individual. On the other hand, are equally diverse projects for pulling society back into conformity with the requirements of race and heredity. At first sight, the two types of project appear to be, and often are, deeply opposed, both intellectually and politically.
Moral Objectivity
Authors: Lear Jonathan
Published: November 2010

Morality exercises a deep and questionable influence on the way we live our lives. The influence is deep both because moral injunctions are embedded in our psyches long before we can reflect on their status and because even after we become reflective agents, the question of how we should live our lives among others is intimately bound up with the more general question of how we should live our lives: our stance toward morality and our conception of our lives as having significance are of a piece. The influence is questionable because morality pretends to a level of objectivity that it may not possess. Moral injunctions are meant to be binding on us in some way that is independent of the desires or preferences we may happen to have. When one asserts that a certain action is morally worthy or shameful one is,prime facie, doing more than merely expressing approval or disapproval or trying to get others to act as instruments of one's own will. If moral assertions were shown, at bottom, to be merely such exhortations, then they would be shown to wear a disguise. Morality would be revealed as pretending to an objectivity it does not have, and such a revelation could not but have a profound impact on our lives. It is doubtful that such a revelation could be kept locked up inside our studies.
Morality, Survival and Nuclear War
Authors: Zaw Susan Khin
Published: November 2010

This paper proceeds from a sense of dissatisfaction with much of current moral argument about defence policy, in particular the role of nuclear weapons. Discussions of the moral issues tend to divide into two distinct kinds of writing: on the one hand, impassioned calls to action based on and allied with equally impassioned moral exhortations; and on the other hand, usually in academic contexts, meticulous analyses and comparisons of aspects of nuclear policy with paradigm cases of acknowledged moral categories or requirements, with the object of showing by analogy with these that the particular aspect of policy under discussion is or is not morally wrong. My unease is caused by the fact that, while it is difficult not to respond to the impassioned style of argument, as one recognizes in it a practical and moral urgency which our situation seems to demand, nevertheless it plainly appeals only to those already convinced of its conclusions. The unconverted tend to regard it with suspicion or disdain, for in contrast to the analytical style, which manifestly seeks to compel the intellect, the impassioned style seems to make its effect by stirring the emotions as much as if not instead of by compelling the intellect. On the other hand the analytical style can seem curiously irrelevant, even trivial, in relation to the issue. For instance, it has been argued that since: nuclear war is a moral disaster; deterrence is threatening or intending to wage nuclear war; it is wrong to threaten or intend to do something wrong; therefore: deterrence is wrong, and should be abandoned. It is hard to believe that defenders of deterrence as the cornerstone of defence policy are going to be persuaded by such an argument to abandon their advocation of it, if only because the argument totally ignores the object of deterrence.
The Scope of Reason: An Epistle to the Persians
Authors: Bambrough Renford
Published: November 2010

‘Does the planetary impact of Western thought allow for a real dialogue among civilizations?’ This arresting question was set to the lecturers at the first international symposium of the Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations, which took place in Tehran in October 1977. Plans were made for a second symposium to be held in January 1979 under the title ‘The Limits of Knowledge According to Different World-views’. The Director's letter of invitation amplified the theme in a series of questions:

For instance, is the agnosticism which has now extended to a world-wide level the consequence of the destruction of objective reason, namely the universal logos, as conceived earlier in the great metaphysical doctrines of the East and the West? Is there any organic link among these: the creation of modern political myths, the individual's fragmentation and the reduction of thought to its mere instrumentality? Is knowledge limited solely to our calculating reason or can it lead to spheres raising us above the limits determined by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason?
The Scientific and the Ethical
Authors: Williams Bernard
Published: November 2010

Discussions of objectivity often start from considerations about disagreement. We might ask why this should be so. It makes it seem as though disagreement were surprising, but there is no reason why that should be so (the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition found conflict at least as obvious a feature of the world as concord). The interest in disagreement comes about, rather, because neither agreement nor disagreement is universal. It is not that disagreement needs explanation and agreement does not, but that in different contexts disagreement requires different sorts of explanation, and so does agreement.
A Sociological Theory of Objectivity
Authors: Bloor David
Published: November 2010

I want to propose to you a theory about the nature of objectivity—a theory which will tell us something about its causes, its intrinsic character, and its sources of variation. The theory in question is very simple. Indeed, it is so simple that I fear you will reject it out of hand. Here is the theory: it is thatobjectivity is social. What I mean by saying that objectivity is social is that theimpersonalandstablecharacter that attaches to some of our beliefs, and the sense of reality that attaches to their reference, derives from these beliefs beingsocial institutions.
Tractatus Sociologico-Philosophicus
Authors: Gellner Ernest
Published: November 2010

Men make themselves radically different pictures of reality.

The crucial word in this assertion is ‘radically’. Its full force is not often appreciated. But ‘picture’ also requires some elucidation. The term suggests, like the word ‘vision’, something relatively static. A ‘vision of reality’, a style of thought, a culture, is in fact an ongoing process, and one which contains internal options, alternatives, disagreements. There is no language in which one cannot both affirm and deny. Even, or perhaps especially, a culture which maintains that the big issues have been finally settled within it, can yet conceive of the alternatives which are being denied and eliminated. It must give some reasons, however dogmatic, for selecting that which it does select and for excluding that which it excludes, and thus in a way it concedes that things could be otherwise.
Death and Fulfilment, or Would the Real Mr. Dostoyevsky Stand Up?
Authors: Sutherland Stewart
Published: November 2010

Philosophers have devoted much attention to a series of issues grouped under the heading ‘the problem of personal identity’. In most of these discussions the focus has been the question of identity over time and the issues confronted have been basically logical or metaphysical. Students enrolled in philosophy classes dealing with such topics often express a sense of disappointment or frustration, for, of course, they belong to a culture in which the jargon of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ identity belongs to a rather different intellectual context heavy with the overtones of existentialism or with the suggestion of psychoanalysis. Anglo-Saxon philosophers have tended to bypass these ways of construing questions of personal identity; sometimes for good reason, sometimes not.
The End of the Road: The Death of Individualism
Authors: Kegley Jacquelyn
Published: November 2010

Though John Barth won the National Book Award for his novel, Giles Goat Boy, his second novel, The End of the Road, proves a more interesting case study for our purposes, namely, to explore the relationship between philosophy and literature. This is so for at least three reasons. First, by the author's own admission, the novel is intended as a refutation of ethical subjectivism, particularly as expoused by Jean Paul Sartre. Secondly, in the novel, Barth, like Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, places reason and imagination in contention, suggesting that either faculty in isolation is inadequate in dealing with human experience. Both Barth and Woolf are reflecting and probably criticizing the assumption of a number of contemporary writers and critics, namely, that rational discourse is inadequate to the task of ordering the chaotic, fragmentary world and giving meaning to life and only the poet (novelist) employing his imagination can do this.
Devant la Loi
Authors: Derrida Jacques
Published: November 2010

…: ainsi faict la science (et nostre droict mesme a, diet-on, des fictions légitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la vérité de sa justice);(…) (Montaigne, Essais II, f. XII).

Un titre résonne parfois comme la citation d'un autre titre. Mais dès lors qu'il nommerait autre chose, il ne citerait plus simplement, il détournerait l'autre titre à la faveur d'un homonyme. Tout cela n'irait jamais sans quelque préjudice ou usurpation.
Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy
Authors: Engel Pascal
Published: November 2010

People outside France have always wondered why analytical philosophy has had so little influence in this country, while it has gained currency in many other European countries, such as Germany and Italy, not to speak of Northern Europe, where the analytical tradition is strongly established. This can be explained only by a particular conjunction of historical, cultural, sociological and maybe economical factors, which it would be too long to detail here. If there are natural characters of nations, there is no reason to believe that there are no philosophical characters of nations. As Hume said, the characters of nations can have physical as well as moral causes. As for the physical causes, everybody in Britain knows how insular the Continent can be. So if there is such a thing as French analytical philosophy, nobody will be surprised to learn that it is very insular. Before presenting some of the work done by French philosophers related to the analytical tradition, let me try to give what I take to be some of the moral causes of their insularity.
Motifs Towards a Poetics
Authors: Deguy Michel
Published: November 2010

Contemporary poetry—true to the changes brought about by the poetics of modernity at the turn of the century—far from glorifying the ‘lyrical illusion’ and from favouring ‘romantic’ identifications with heroes standing ‘alone against all’, that madness of a subject believing himself to be the only exception to the law, had in fact to tone down its song, had to pull down its hopes, had to interiorize its failures in order to turn them into paradoxes … What failures? The failures of the poets who thought they were failing. Contemporary poetry has therefore to meditate the different figures of paradoxical failure (the failure that is in no way a simple failure); namely, to distinguish the failures of Baudelaire from that of Rimbaud, from that of Mallarmé …