bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

Even now, in an age not much given to mysticism, there are people who ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Not a few of them make the simple ‘unphilosophical’ assumption that there is something to be known here. (One might say that they are ‘cognitivists’ with regard to this sort of question.) And most of these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straightforwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit is good, has value, or is worth something. Finally, something even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.
Linear Syntax
Authors: Kathol Andreas
Published: November 2023

While much of contemporary syntax equates grammatical structure with hierarchical organization, i.e. tree structures, this book argues for a critical reassessment of that premise. It argues that a crucial part of the description of German clausal syntax should be based on linear, rather than hierarchical concepts. This is done here by adopting 'topological fields'-a concept from traditional descriptive theory. Such fields are defined as syntactic position classes, that is, clusterings of continuous syntactic material, and are defined orthogonally to constituency. This idea is implemented in an extension of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar that employs a separate level of flat linear organization called 'order domain'.
Topological Fields
Authors: Kathol Andreas
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides a concise introduction to the description of Ger man clausal syntax in terms of syntactic position classes, that is, the approach in terms of what has come to be known in the traditional literature as Stellungsfeld or topologisches Feld (‘topological field’). As indicated by the name, a topologically-oriented analysis concerns itself exclusively with the linear distributional properties of the elements occurring in German sentences. Typically no claims are made regarding constituent structure or any hierarchical organization which may underlie the observed pattern.
Left-Peripheral Structures
Authors: Kathol Andreas
Published: November 2023

It has long been one of the core tenets of transformational syntax that move-a is constrained in such a way that movement can only target positions that are consistent with the x-theoretic status of the moved element.

Thus, while an x° category can only move into another head position, for instance 1 ° or c °, maximal projections are required to move into positions that are compatible with this level of projection, e.g., substitution into [Spec,XP]. Movements in which a maximal category moves into an x0 position or which involve substitution of a head into a specifier position are illicit. This constraint is thought to hold regardless of the environment in which the movement takes place and does not distinguish between root and subordinate clauses. If we focus our attention on dislocations of the wh-movement type, i.e., those involved in relative clause and question formation in German, the constraint on movement targets entails that the same type of landing site is involved regardless of whether wh-fronting occurs in a root or embedded clause.
Reproductive Rights: Feminism or Patriarchy?
Authors: Brazier Margaret
Published: November 2023

The popular perception of the new reproductive technologies is of a medical marvel offering untold blessings to womanhood. Media cover age of each new development to assist the infertile to have children of their own invariably includes photographs of ecstatic mothers and bouncing infants. Assisted conception is vaunted as a vehicle for asserting women’s reproductive rights.
Reproductive Choice: A Muslim Perspective
Authors: Serour Gamal I
Published: November 2023

Reproductive health is defined as a condition in which the reproductive process is accomplished in a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Reproductive health is not merely the absence of disease or disorders of the reproductive process. This implies that people have the ability to reproduce, to regulate their fertility, and to practise and enjoy sexual relationships. It also implies that women can go safely through pregnancy and childbirth, that fertility regulation can be achieved with out health hazards, and that people are safe in having sex.
The Post-menopause: Playground for Reproductive Technology? Some Ethical Reflections
Authors: Wert Guido De
Published: November 2023

Until recently, most, if not all, clinics for in vitro fertilization used some sort of age limit with regard to their female patients. Women over 40 years of age were only seldom treated. This policy was accepted not because all gynaecologists agreed with Plato-who stated that women are allowed to produce children for society up until they are 40-but because of the poor success rate of IVF in older women. Every stage in the IVF process has been shown to be less effective when the source of the egg is an older woman.
Plato’s Reception of Parn1enides
Authors: Palmer John A
Published: November 2023

John Palmer presents a new and original account of Plato's uses and understanding of his most important Presocratic predecessor, Parmenides. Adopting an innovative approach to the appraisal of intellectual influence, Palmer first explores the Eleatic underpinnings of central elements in Plato's middle-period epistemology and metaphysics. He then shows how in the later dialogues Plato confronts various sophistic appropriations of Parmenides while simultaneously developing his own deepened understanding. Along the way Palmer gives fresh readings of Parmenides' poem in the light of the Platonic reception, and discusses Plato's view of Parmenides' relation to such key figures as Xenophanes, Zeno, and Gorgias. By tracing connections among the uses of Parmenides over the course of several dialogues, Palmer both demonstrates his fundamental importance to the development of Plato's thought and furthers understanding of central problems in Plato's own philosophy.
HIV Screening: Benefits and Harms for the Individual and the Community
Authors: Manuel Catherine
Published: November 2023

From an ethical point of view HIV screening can be seen in terms of conflicting rights: society is entitled to protect itself from a serious danger, if need be by authoritarian measures; infected individuals are entitled to freedom, to ‘non-discrimination’, to the respect of their privacy, etc. Of course one may ponder on the validity and the possible limitations of these rights depending on the circumstances and the seriousness of the epidemic which concerns us. I will use in this chapter a more pragmatic approach, and will reflect on the benefits for the individual and for the community, on the real positive and negative effects of screening. Indeed, I see it as essential to adopt a perspective which reveals the true efficacy of such practices and to discuss the least ethically controversial methods.
Value-Pluralism
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

A view with some considerable influence in current moral and political philosophy holds that there is a plurality of values, all of them fundamental and authoritative and yet, in some genuinely disconcerting way, in coflict. I shall call it ‘value-pluralism’.

It is a philosophical thesis. It does more than record the fact that choice often involves conflicts, moral and other, and that choosing can be a difficult and sometimes even an appalling thing to do. That experience any serious ethics must acknowledge. It is basic, but it is not a surprise, philosophically or otherwise; whereas the claim of the value-pluralist is meant to be philosophically surprising and significant. Further, value-pluralism is to be distinguished from what Mill, Moore, and Rawls call ‘intuitionism’ in ethics: the view that there is no single moral principle to which all principles of conduct must conform, but a number of moral principles all equally fundamental.1 ‘Deontological pluralism’ would be a good term for this view; it is a philosophical thesis, and certainly not uncontroversial-but value-pluralism is meant to go beyond it.
The Defining Features of Mind-Body Dualism in the Writings of Plato
Authors: Robinson T M
Published: November 2023

The works of Plato are unique on a number of counts, not least that they contain the first fully articulated account of the relationship between soul (psyche) and body (soma) in Western literature. The picture that emerges is not without its complexities, not to say apparent self contradictions; so we might usefully begin our examination with a brief, scene-setting discussion of what we know of the two notions before Plato’s time.
Body and Soul in Saint Paul
Authors: Heckel Theo k.
Published: November 2023

It is often said that the physician cares for the body, the priest for the soul. But no more than the physician has soulless bodies to deal with, does the priest meet bodiless souls: believers have both body and soul. And yet it has often seemed, especially in Protestant theology, that the bodily side of belief could be ignored, leading many theologians to attempt to make Christianity a purely inward phenomenon: religion was concerned with the individual soul, and could justifiably leave social and political spheres aside. Right from the beginning of the Protestant movement, from Martin Luther himself, this unfortunate innerness seemed to be destined. Citing Saint Paul, the German reformer says, in his famous text ‘On the Freedom of the Christian’ (1520), that the freedom of the individual believer is neither outward nor bodily.1 Indeed, it is with the Apostle of the Gentiles that we come to the root of the question of what the body means for Christian existence.
Internalist Reasoning in Augustine for Mind-Body Dualism
Authors: Matthews Gareth
Published: November 2023

Aristotle records no argument from Thales for ‘the real distinction’ between soul and body, to put the point in a Cartesian way. The conclusion of the argument from Thales seems to be quite compatible with a soul’s being, rather than a substance in its own right, merely an attribute, or a power, of certain bodies—a power of magnets, for example.
Physique and Moral
Authors: Azouvi François
Published: November 2023

This is not, however, the meaning that N. Malebranche understands in his Meditations chretiennes et métaphysiques (1683), when he introduces the opposition physique and moral in the framework of a discussion on general laws and the particular acts of volition of the Creator. ‘You are much more admirable’, he says to God, ‘when you cover the earth with fruits and flowers by the general laws of Nature, than when by particular volitions you send fire from heaven to reduce to ashes sinners and their cities.’
Polysemy: A Problem of Definition
Authors: Goddard Cliff
Published: November 2023

The most basic premiss of the NSM approach is that semantic analysis must be conducted in natural language, rather than in terms of abstract technical formalisms, logical symbols, etc., because technical formalisms are not clear until and unless they are explained in ordinary language. As John Lyons (1977: 12) once remarked, ‘any formalism is parasitic upon the ordinary everyday use of language, in that it must be understood intuitively on the basis of ordinary language’. The NSM approach seeks to make a virtue of necessity, by basing its method of semantic representation as closely as possible on natural language. Natural language formulations also have the advantage of being more easily verified than abstract or technical formulations, since they make more direct predictions about usage (cf. Kempson 1977) and are directly accessible to the semantic intuitions of native speakers. The second basic premiss of the NSM approach is that the entire meaning of any semantically complex expression can be stated in terms of a reductive paraphrase, i.e. an equivalent expression composed exclusively of simpler meanings than the original.
Large Vocabulary Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: stevenson Mark , Wilks Yorick
Published: November 2023

The methodology and evaluation of word sense disambiguation (WSD) as a distinct task are somewhat different from those of others in NLP, and one can distinguish three aspects of this difference, all of which come down to evaluation problems, as does so much in NLP these days. First, researchers are divided over using a general method (one that attempts to apply WSD to all the content words of texts, the large vocabulary approach taken in this paper) versus one that is applied to only a small trial selection of words (e.g. Schutze 1992; Yarowsky 1995). The latter researchers have obtained very high levels of success: Yarowsky quotes 97 per cent correct disambiguation for the small vocabulary over which his system operates, results close to the figures for other ‘solved’ NLP modules, such as part of speech taggers. The issue is whether these small word sample methods and techniques will transfer to general WSD over a more complete vocabulary. Others, besides ourselves (e.g. Mahesh et al. 1997; Harley and Glennon 1997) have pursued the general option on the grounds that it is the real task and should be tackled directly, even with rather lower success rates. The division between the approaches probably comes down to no more than the availability of gold standard text in sufficient quantities, which is more costly to obtain for WSD than other tasks. In this paper we describe a method we have used for obtaining more test material by transforming one resource into another, an advance we believe is unique and helpful in this impasse.
Disambiguation and Connectionism
Authors: Schütze Hinrich
Published: November 2023

This chapter looks at word sense disambiguation from the perspective of the field of connectionism (Rumelhart et al. 1986; McClelland et al. 1986). We will bring two central concerns in connectionism to bear on designing a disambiguation algorithm: psychological plausibility and large-scale applicability. Several studies suggest that the concept of activation is crucial for explaining human word sense disambiguation (Kawamoto 1988; Tanenhaus et al. 1979; Swinney 1979). Activation is often modelled using vectors in a multi-dimensional real-valued vector space. We will propose that both senses and contexts of use of the ambiguous word be represented as directions in space, and that a context of use is assigned to the sense whose direction it coincides with. The important role of activation in explaing human word sense disambiguation motivates us to adopt such a vector space representation for contexts and senses. Another aspect of psychological plausibility considered important in connectionism is acquisition. In general, connectionist modelling tries to do without innate constraints or a large body of a priori knowledge unless there is good empirical evidence for hereditary or environmental structure that guides learning. The disambiguation algorithm proposed here acquires knowledge by grouping semantically similar contexts into context groups. The assessment of semantic similarity is one of the basic building blocks of human cognition. No psychologically implausible assumptions about strong innate or environmental structure are therefore necessary for our algorithm.
Morphological and Prosodic Alignment of Bulgarian Clitics
Authors: Legendre Géraldine
Published: November 2023

Bulgarian clausal clitics include not only familiar object pronouns, but also tense/aspect auxiliaries, modal particles, negative particles, as well as interrogative particles. They display well-known properties associated with clitic elements cross-linguistically. For example, they are typically stressless and they display positional restrictions. In simple sentences, most Bulgarian clitics cluster in second position.
Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’
Authors: May Simon
Published: November 2023

Simon May presents a fresh and wide-ranging critique of Nietzsche's famous attack on traditional morality, and of his controversial ethics of 'life-enhancement'. He reveals Nietzsche as both revolutionary and conservative-as one who repudiates traditional 'moral' conceptions of God, guilt, asceticism, pity, and truthfulness, and yet retains a demanding ethics of discipline, conscience, 'self-creation', generosity, and honesty. In particular, May shows how Nietzsche rejects truthfulness as an unconditional value and yet celebrates it as one of his own highest values, whose worth is determined by who is pursuing it, for what end, and when in their lives. May is strongly critical of various aspects of Nietzsche's thought-his self-defeating conception of justice, his assumption that 'life-enhancement' necessarily demands world-affirmation, his ambition to de-deify the world, and the impossible and undesirable autonomy of the Übermensch. But Nietzsche is shown to offer modernity key elements of a coherent ethic, and to provide moral philosophy with important tools for reassessing some of its most cherished values and concepts. May's book will be illuminating not just for scholars and students of Nietzsche, in philosophy, literature, and history of ideas, but for anyone interested in current debates about ethics and modernity.
Objective Prescriptions
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

R. M. Hare has brought together in this volume the best of his uncollected essays in moral philosophy, several of them previously unpublished or revised for this collection. They span the whole range of his ethical interests, from the most abstract to the most down-to-earth. The reader will find here the bases of his ethical theory in Kantian prescriptivism, utilitarianism, and the logic of imperatives, and will see that theory applied to issues of bioethics, medical ethics, business ethics, loyalty and obedience, and racism. The essays display the author's characteristic clarity and vigour; some of them are polemical, targeting particular opponents and rival theories. The volume provides a compelling demonstration of Hare's commitment to bringing together the theoretical and the practical in ethics.
Introduction
Authors: Nettle Daniel
Published: November 2023

Humankind today speaks about 6,500 different, mutually unintelligible languages. These languages belong to at least 250 identifiable large families, though there are various proposals to group these into still larger units. Within these families, there are languages that use a dozen contrastive sounds, and languages that use 100. There are languages that place the subject of the sentence before the verb and languages that put the verb first. There are a few that place the object before either. Some languages mark the relationships between the constituents of the sentence, or between the sentence and the world, by extensive inflection, whilst others use almost none, and rely on independent particles and the order of words.
Structural Diversity
Authors: Nettle Daniel
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we turn to the third and final type of diversity in the linguistic pool that was identified in Chapter. This is structural diversity. Just as phylogenetic diversity is not necessarily correlated with language diversity, so structural diversity is not necessarily correlated with diversity of the other two types. Lineages oflanguages that are unrelated can be identical on basic structural parameters, either because of areal convergence, or because of independent evolution to some favoured state. On the other hand, many structural states can exist within what is identifiably a single lineage of languages, since not all parameters are phlyogenetically conservative.
Epilogue
Authors: Nettle Daniel
Published: November 2023

We have now reached the end of our enquiry into linguistic diversity. The mechanisms that produce it were considered, and three different levels of diversity were identified (Section 1.3). Each of these levels was then examined in turn.
The Truth in Particularism
Authors: Raz Joseph
Published: November 2023

When reflecting on the way we come to do what we do, or to refrain from what we refrain from doing, it is natural to be torn between a particularist and a generalist tendency. We tend towards a generalist view when we feel that at least sometimes we are guided by general precepts and are inclined to believe that it is always possible to be so guided. ‘I must do this’ —I may say-’My son is relying on me.’ Or, ‘I cannot do this. It would be cheating.’ I am, and am conscious of being, guided in my decision by general precepts: ‘One should not cheat: ‘One should not let one’s children down: These principles may be too simple.
4
Authors: Jackson Frank , Pettit Philip , Smith Michael
Published: November 2023

Information couched in descriptive terms plays a major role in determining our moral judgements. Perhaps we learn that an action involves breaking a promise and respond by forming the view that it is wrong. Later we learn that it was necessary to break the promise in order to save a life, and retract our earlier judgement and decide that the action was right. Later still we learn that, although a life was saved, many more were lost as result of the promise-breaking and we return to our original judgement. Here we have a simple example of the role of descriptive information in leading us to a moral judgement, and of how our judgement may change as more descriptive information comes to hand.
Introduction: Frames of reference
Authors: Brewer Bill , Pears Julian
Published: November 2023

Suppose that my glasses are now on my nose, just as they were an hour ago, but an hour ago I was in a different room in the house. How should we answer the question whether my glasses are in the same place that they were an hour ago? Given that my glasses are still on my nose, we might say that they are still in the same place. But given that I was in a different room in the house an hour ago, we might equally say that my glasses are not still in the same place. In relation to my nose, my glasses are still in the same place; but in relation to the house they are not. To evaluate whether or not my glasses are in the same place, we need to know how places are being individuated here. When places are individuated by their spatial relations to certain objects, a crucial part of what we need to know is what those objects are. As the term ‘frame of reference’ is commonly used, these objects would be said to provide the frame of reference. In the above example, either (parts of) my nose or (pars.-s of) the house are to provide the frame of reference.
Reflections on the Neurobiology of Emotion and Feeling
Authors: Damasio Antonio R
Published: November 2023

By the end of the nineteenth century Charles D3;rwin had made incisive observations on the expression of emotions in animals and humans and placed emotion in the perspective of biological evolution; William James had produced a scientific description of the phenomenon of emotion, thus opening the way to its experimental study; and Sigmund Freud was writing about the means by which emotion might play a role in psychopathology. Somebody freshly arrived on earth in 1994 and interested in the topic of emotion would have good cause to wonder why such groundbreaking devel opments did not lead to an assault on the neurobiology of emotion. What could possibly have gone wrong in the intervening century? The simplest answer to this question is that emotion has received benign neglect from neuroscience and been passed over in favor of the study of attention, perception, memory, and language. The not-so-simple answer would invoke the following reasons. First, in spite of the auspicious begin nings provided by Darwin, James, and Freud, there was a manifest difficulty in defining the phenomenon of emotion. What was the nature and substance of emotion? What was its scope? What were its component manifestations? William James made a brave attempt as one can see in the following passage: “If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our con sciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff out of which the emotion can be con stituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains” (James 1950).
What Thought Requires
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: November 2023

The true fly is dipterous, but it has halteres which have evolved from posterior wings. It had been thought that the astonishing rapidity with which a fly maneuvers must be due to a direct neural connection between the eyes and the wings, but recent experiments at Berkeley suggest something more sophis ticated (Chan, Prete, and Dickinson 1998). It was known before that the halteres, which beat antiphase to the wings, act as gyroscopes which stabilize flight on all three axes by feeding information directly to the wing muscles. Remove a fly’s halteres and it crashes. What is new is that apparently the visual system is directly connected to the halteres, which then control the wing muscles. This fancy setup distinguishes between the aerodynamic forces and the Coriolis forces acting on the wings, permitting the fly to evade the flyswatter with marvelous ease.
Mental Causation
Authors: Heil John , Mele Alfred
Published: November 2023

Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behaviour have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has its advocates, most theorists have sought a middle way that accommodates both the common-sense view of mind and the metaphysical conviction about the physical world. This volume presents a collection of new, specially written essays by a diverse group of philosophers, each of whom is widely known for defending a particular conception of minds and their place in nature. Contributors: Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson, Fred Dretske, Ted Honderich, Jennifer Hornsby, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ruth Garrett Millikan, H. W. Noonan, Philip Pettit, Ernest Sosa, and Robert Van Gulick.
Thinking Causes
Authors: Davidson Donald
Published: November 2023

In 1970 I proposed a theory about the relation between the mental and the physical that I called Anomalous Monism (AM). AM holds that mental entities (particular time- and space-bound objects and events) are physical entities, but that mental concepts are not reducible by definition or natural law to physical concepts. The position is, in a general way, familiar: it endorses ontological reduction, but eschews conceptual reduction. What was new was the argument, which purported to derive AM from three premisses, namely, (1) that mental events are causally related to physical events, (2) that singular causal relations are backed by strict laws, and (3) that there are no strict psycho-physical laws. The first premiss seemed to me obvious, the second true though contested (I did not present arguments for it), and the third true and worth arguing for. Many readers have found my arguments against the existence of strict psycho-physical laws obscure; others have decided the three premisses are mutually inconsistent. But the complaints have most often been summed up by saying that AM makes the mental causally inert. The criticisms are connected: if AM makes the mental causally inert, then AM apparently implies the falsity of the first premiss and hence the inconsistency of the three premisses. The third premiss seems to many critics the relevant offender, so they urge that it should be dropped.
Davidson’s Thinking Causes
Authors: Sosa Ernest
Published: November 2023

Against anomalous monism (AM) I have drawn an analogy between the relevance of mental properties to the causal efficacy that AM grants to mental events and the relevance of loudness to the causal efficacy of a loud shot. Neither the mentality of mental events nor the loudness of the loud shot is causally relevant to the respective relevant effects. The point seems clear in the case of the shot: A gun goes off, a shot is fired, and it kills someone. The loud noise is the shot. Thus, if the victim is killed by the shot, it’s the loud noise that kills the victim Yes, in a certain sense the victim is killed by the loud noise; not by the loud noise as a loud noise, however, but only by the loud noise as a shot, or the like [The] loudness of the shot has no causal relevance to the death of the victim; had the gun been equipped with a silencer, the shot would have killed the victim just the same.
Explanation in Biopsychology
Authors: Millikan Ruth Garrett
Published: November 2023

I Would like to explore implications for the science of psychology of the thesis that the categories of intentional psychology are function categories in the biologist’s sense of ‘function’, taking this to be a sense in which function is determined by evolutionary history rather than by current dispositions. I would like to explore, first, the general shape of the discipline that is psychology under this interpretation. What is its subject-matter? What kinds of explanations does it seek for what kinds of phenomena? Second, I would like to bring these reflections to bear on the classic question concerning in what way, if any, giving an individual’s reasons for action tells of the causes of that action. I will not attempt to defend the thesis that the categories of intentional psychology are biological function categories, nor the thesis that biological function categories are carved out by reference to evolutionary history, but some clarifications of these theses, will of course, be in order.
Who’s in Charge Here? And Who’s Doing All the Work?
Authors: Gulick Robert Van
Published: November 2023

There is nothing exceptional about such explanations and the everyday situations they describe. In each case a common-sense or folk psychological explanation of someone’s behaviour is offered that explains why someone acted as he or she did by appeal to one or more of the person’s mental states and their mental properties. Tom put the canteen to his lips because of his belief and because his belief had the propositional content that it did-that there still was water in the canteen. Greta picked the tomatoes that she did because of the visual experiences they had produced in her and because those visual experiences had the qualitative property of being phenomenally red–a property none of Henrik’s visual experiences has. Little Sonja rejected the fluffy rabbit because of her desire and because that desire had a particular toy as its intentional object—her own brown teddy bear.
Plato The Sceptic
Authors: Annas Julia
Published: November 2023

From about 273 BC, when Arcesilaus of Pitane took over its headship, until it petered out in the first century BC, Plato’s school, the Academy, practised and taught a form of scepticism. This is surprising; even more so is the fact that the Academy regarded sceptical philosophizing as philosophizing in the spirit of Plato, doing what Plato did. Modern scholars tend to regard this as so surprising as to be an aberration, but it was not so regarded in antiquity. Middle Platonists like Plutarch respected and defended the sceptical New Academy. The Neoplatonist commentators, though they disagreed with the thesis that Plato was a sceptic, thought ofit as a familiar thesis requiring refutation. Even a hostile figure like Numenius, who regards the New Academy as a ghastly mistake, pays it the compliment of extensive attention.
Plato’s Arguments And The Dialogue Form
Authors: Frede Michael
Published: November 2023

Plato’s dialogues are works of art. They are pieces of powerful dramatic fiction which by their art manage to give us a strong sense of what it would be like to listen to a dialectical debate or even to participate in it; they perhaps give us a stronger sense of what is involved in such a debate than we could have acquired by actually attending an ordinary dialectical discussion. For they represent paradigmatic debates between model characters in characteristic settings in a most vivid and realistic way. To this end they display an impressive mastery of a wide array of literary techniques. The dialogues put themselves into the literary tradition, by their constant allusions to earlier literature, by their constant reworking of motifs and themes of traditional literature from Homer and Hesiod down to the tragedies. Even a dialogue dealing with such abstract and prosaic material as is handled in the Sophist is eminently literary in this way.
A Maieutic View Of Five Late Dialogues
Authors: Sayre Kenneth
Published: November 2023

There are five dialogues of Plato’s late period, each consisting of a conversation with a master philosopher, in which the conversation is organized by methodological principles explicitly proposed by the philosopher himself. In the case of the Theaetetus, the method was stated by Socrates in earlier dialogues, notably the Phaedo and book 6 of the Republic. In each of the remaining four, however, the method is expounded and applied within the same onversation-by the Stranger from Elea in the Sophist and the Statesman, by Parmenides himself in his namesake dialogue, and by a renovated Socrates in the late Philebus. I shall refer to these five as the methodological dialogues. Although details vary from context to context, the method described and its manner of application remain more or less the same throughout these five dialogues.
Musical Works in the Worlds of Performers and Listeners
Authors: Martin Robert L
Published: November 2023

Familiar problems arise when we ask what sort of an object a musical work is (for example, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C, Op. 59 No. 3).1 The work itself is not any particular score of it (the autograph score, or the plates of the first edition, or any other score or set of parts), or the type of which any actual scores are tokens; this is clear because a person can be familiar with the work without being familiar with the score. The work itself is not any performance or set of performances; this is clear because there can be works that are never performed; it is possible for a person to admire the work without admiring any particular performance or set of performances of it. A musical work is none of the relevant physical objects or acoustical events.
Introduction
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

Papua New Guinea is, like many Third World nations, engaged in a struggle to ‘develop’. This struggle for development is intimately bound up with the history of Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin which is the product of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Pacific. This language has since come to serve as the most important lingua franca, spoken by more than a million people in a highly multilingual society. This book deals with some of the changes that are taking place in Tok Pisin as it becomes the native language of the younger generation of rural and urban speakers. These linguistic processes, which are by no means complete, have to be understood in the sociohistorical context of colonial expansion and strategies for socio-economic development in the post-colonial era.
Lexical Expansion, Borrowing, and Change
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 2 I noted Miihlhausler’s claim that the lexicon of Tok Pisin was still impoverished up to the time of World War I. He suggests that it had a vocabulary of around 750-1,000 words, while others like Clark (1987) and Crowley (1990) believe that Melanesian Pidgin had already expanded to 1,000 words in the 1880s. While I will have little to say about earlier stages of the language in this chapter, it will be clear that there is a great deal of variability in both size and source of items in the lexicon of present-day Tok Pisin. Both size and composition vary according to sociolect (sec Romaine 1985 for discussion of similar variation in the history of English). The fact that urban and rural varieties of Tok Pisin have different sources for lexicalization has created a major dialect boundary in the modern period of the language’s development. This gap has arisen as part of the process of lexical expansion which involves the creation or borrowing of new linguistic resources to fulfil the new functions to which the language is put.
Syntactic Change
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I will discuss three of the major syntactic structures of Tok Pisin: the use of bai to mark futurity (8.1), predicate marking (8.2), and strategies of relative clause formation (8.3). With regard to bai and predicate marking a case has been made for ongoing grammaticalization of new syntactic categories (sec Sankoff and Laberge 1980 and Sankoff 1980e, respectively). In the case of the predicate marker, however, a process of degrammaticalization seems to be operating now to dismantle an earlier system that was in the process of becoming more generalized. Similarly, my discussion of relative clause formation strategies documents a case of syntactic expansion, whereby new complex sentence types are introduced.
Unity in the Parmenides: The Unity of the Parmenides
Authors: Mccabe Mary Margaret
Published: November 2023

The Parmenides is a dialogue about what there is. It asks two different kinds of question about what there is. Firstly, how do we count what there is—how many things are there? Secondly, how is what there is arranged, so that it is susceptible to reason—how are we to explain what there is? The relation between what there is and reason, therefore, is expected to be well formed, structured, and thus unified; indeed, a large part of the work is an intricate discussion of just what unity is. Yet the Parmenides is all too often treated as ill formed and fragmented. It seems, in the first place, to be not one but two dialogues: the first, a vigorous attack on the theory of Forms which is at least comprehensible, even if its exact philosophical purpose is difficult to discern; the second, a thoroughly peculiar discussion of ‘the one’, better left either to Neoplatonists or to enthusiastic analytic philosophers. In practice, even if not on principle, scholars deal with one or other of these ‘dialogues’; and the overall purpose of the Parmenides-if indeed there is one--is lost to view.
Afterword: Dialectic and the Dialogue Form in Late Plato
Authors: Gill Christopher
Published: November 2023

In this concluding chapter, I offer an independent account of the use of dialectic and the dialogue form in late Plato, though one that is couched in general terms. I also respond to certain issues raised in earlier chapters, as well as commenting on the project of this volume as a whole, considered in relation to some previous work on Plato’s use of dialogue form.
Introduction
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

Louisiana brings to mind pictures of a unique place-bayous, or marshy and usually sluggish tributaries to a river or lake, associated with images of a slower, more relaxed lifestyle. This part of North America also demonstrates passion in lagniappe, Mardi Gras, spicy Creole cuisine, jazz, and New Orleans with its long and unique history. All these impressions evoke memories of a good time, epitomized by Laissez les bans temps rouler!

As a stronghold of French language in North America, Louisiana has maintained a distinct French colonial heritage. A closer examination of its history further shows significant Spanish and African influences. Place names such as Lac des allemands or Bayou des allemands remind one even of German settlers, who accompanied the first French colonizers to the Mississippi delta area in the early eighteenth century. Yet conspicuously absent from Louisiana’s history, as presented conventionally, has been her Native American population. The Guide to the History of Louisiana (Cummins and Jeansonne 1982) covers various periods and specific communities such as African Americans, urban New Orleans, and women, without including any systematic discussion of American Indians. In this regard, the Guide’s editors have not been unusual, for historians of the South have regularly overlooked Native Americans in the area. A common but unsupported justification for this neglect draws on arguments as to the historical insignificance of native peoples. based on the erroneous supposition that they either have perished (such as the frequently cited Natchez) or else have been removed to “the Indian Territory’’ in the Plains (like the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma). Other scholars (e.g. Perdue 1988) have interpreted Native Americans of the South primarily in terms of its racist plantation history, and apparently do not recognize indigenous traditions still alive today.
Phonology
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

This inventory of Mobilian Jargon consonants may be summarized in (1) (with the swung dash standing for “variable with” and the parentheses around a sound or the swung dash indicating limited occurrence of that particular sound or variation). With r as an infrequent exception, this inventory of consonants confirms du Ru’s observation of a missing voiced alveolar stop and r-like sound (see quotation from du Ru above).
Lexicon
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

The recorded vocabulary of Mobilian Jargon consists of some 1,250 entries. More than 500 words make up modern recordings from recent speakers of the pidgin, while about 750 entries are reconstitutions of historical attestations, based on phonetic triangulation (see Sect. 3.3). The size of the attested lexicon discourages its inclusion here, and warrants a separate study, including a Mobilian Jargon-English section (with early attestations and comparative evidence in source languages) and an English-Mobilian Jargon index (see Drechsel, 1996). The lexicon has still exhibited several traits of a general nature that bear on the pidgin’s grammar, use, and history and that deserve closer attention here.
Semantics and Beyond
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

While a grammar and lexicon can account for much of meaning in Mobilian Jargon, there are two aspects that do not neatly fit the descriptiveanalytical frame used thus far and that merit closer attention as part of the pidgin’s wider linguistic structure — semantic domains and discourse. However disparate at first sight, these linguistic features are part of semantics, and — more than any other — reflect Mobilian Jargon’s uses by illustrating how it meshed with the sociocultural context. The topics of semantic domains and discourse, together with the subsequent chapter on linguistic variation, build a convenient bridge to an examination of the pidgin’s extralinguistic aspects.
Morphological Change
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

It is claimed that the term morphology was coined by Goethe for the study of living forms. Its use in linguistics for the form of words dates from the middle of the nineteenth century. Inflectional morphology is usually distinguished from derintional (word-formation).
Revelation and Biblical Exegesis: Augustine, Aquinas, and Swinburne
Authors: Stump Eleonore
Published: November 2023

Christianity, like the other major monotheisms, is committed to the claim that God has revealed himself to human beings and that his revelation is written down in a text. This claim gives rise to a host of questions. We might, for instance, wonder about the means by which this revelation is supposed to have been made. Does Christianity intend us to think that God himself talked, face to face, with individual human beings at some period in history? Or is Christianity committed rather to some weaker claim about the way in which human doctrines and narratives have been given divine significance? We might also wonder about the means by which the divine revelation is set down in writing. According to Beryl Smalley, some early Montanists supposed that God dictated every syllable of Scripture. Contemporary Biblical scholars, on the other hand, assume that the biblical texts were formed in human, culturebound ways. We might also want to examine particular parts of the biblical texts which seem to pose problems for the claim that the text is revealed, because they seem to conflict with something we believe to be true on other grounds-something drawn from science, for example-or because they offend our moral sensibilities or because they seem to conflict with other passages in the texts. These and other questions like them are interesting and worth pursuing, but in this chapter I want to look at a different kind of question raised by the Christian claim about revelation. However much they may differ otherwise, virtually all Christians have supposed that although God’s revelation was made at particular points
Aristotle‘s Rationalism
Authors: Frede Michael
Published: November 2023

As is well known, Aristotle not only claims that all of our knowledge has its origins in perception (cf. e.g. APo. I. 18), he also in his own practice attaches great importance to the detailed observation of the relevant facts in a given domain. In particular his biological writings give evidence of this, sometimes in an impressive way. Given his theory and given his practice, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Aristotle sometimes is called a ‘empiricist’.It is equally well known, though, that Aristotle also claims that all knowledge, properly speaking, is either knowledge of principles which govern a certain domain, or knowledge by deduction of what follows from these principles. It is not immediately obvious how these two claims go together. One might think that it was Aristotle‘s view that, though all derivable truths were known, strictly speaking, only by deduction from the principles, the principles of a science themselves owe their epistemic status as known truths to the fact that they can be justified by some kind of inference from what we observe. And if this were the case, one would, indeed, have no difficulty in calling Aristotle an ‘empiricist’.
Scepticism, Old and New
Authors: Annas Julia
Published: November 2023

There are many important differences between ancient and modern scepticism, and one of the most illuminating, for both sides, is the differing ways in which Ancients and moderns conceive of scepticism about values (moral values in particular). For beliefs about values have a crucial connection with action. It is true that beliefs which are not about values also have implications for action, but beliefs about values provide a special motivation to act. As Sextus Empiricus puts it, ‘All people pursue intensely what is believed by them to be good and avoid what is supposed bad.’Beliefs that things, people, and actions are good or bad provide reasons for me to act, and reasons to care (to be intense) about the actions of myself and others. If these beliefs are undermined by sceptical argument, what results for the sceptic‘s motivation to act? It is an important question in ethics, what happens when scepticism under mines what we take to be reasonable beliefs about value and commitments to action on the basis of them.
Rationality
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

I want to tell the story of the crisis produced in philosophy by a single claim about rationality: Aristotle‘s claim that animals lack it. And since belief (doxa) implies rationality, he denied them belief as well. But how, then, do animals cope with the world? To explain this, Aristotle had to expand the content of sense perception, which in Theaetetus 185-7 Plato had contracted to the mere registering of whiteness, sweetness, and other sensible qualities. And he had to reclaim appearance (phantasia) as a perceptual faculty, where Plato had classified appearance and illusion as kinds of belief (doxa).