bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Ackrill J L
Published: November 2023

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of 30 years or so. They are printed not in the chronological order of their composition but in the order suggested by their contents: papers on earlier dialogues of Plato come before those on later dialogues, while the Aristotle papers are ordered according to the traditional ordering of his works. Had the title not already been used (in a well-known and excellent set of essays in honour of Gregory Vlastos), I should have liked to entitle this volume ‘Exegesis and Argument’; nearly all the essays start from a particular text and attempt to analyse and criticize it with a view to clarifying some point or points of philosophical significance. In some of them I was lucky enough to hit on questions that provoked wide interest and generated discussion, discussion which included (of course) criticism of my treatment of them. But my purpose here is not to reopen those interesting controversies, but to say something about how the study of ancient philosophy has changed since the Fifties. This is not offered as a serious-or even a non-serious-contribution to scholarship or historiography, but as a highly personal and selective account that may (it was suggested to me) be of interest to some contemporary readers. I shall start in the Fifties, and then look back on some of the more striking changes since then.
Plato and the Copula: Sophist 251-259
Authors: Ackrill J L
Published: November 2023

My purpose is not to give a full interpretation of this difficult and important passage, but to discuss one particular problem, taking up some remarks made by F. M. Cornford and by Mr. R. Robinson in his paper on Plato’s Parmenides. First it may be useful to give a very brief and unargued outline of the passage. Plato seeks to prove that concepts2 are related in certain definite ways, that there is a (an interweaving of Forms) (251d-252e). Next (253) he assigns to philosophy the task of discovering what these relations are: the philosopher must try to get a clear view of the whole range of concepts and of how they are interconnected, whether in genus-species pyramids or in other ways. Plato now gives a sample of such philosophizing. Choosing some concepts highly relevant to problems already broached in the Sophist, he first (254-5) establishes that they are all different one from the other, and then (255e-258) elicits the relationships in which they stand to one another. The attempt to discover and state these relationships throws light on the puzzling notions Őv (being) and μ  Őv (not being), and enables Plato to set aside with contempt certain puzzles and paradoxes propounded by superficial thinkers (259).
In Defence of Platonic Division
Authors: Ackrill J L
Published: November 2023

Expositors of Plato have sometimes identified Plato’s later dialectic with diairesis, the method of division recommended and exemplified in well-known parts of the Phaedrus, Sophist, Politicus, and Philebus. In his Mind paper of 19391 and again in the chapter on dialectic in Plato’s Progress,2 Professor Ryle has made scathing remarks about this ‘method’, and has drawn a sharp contrast between it and genuine dialectic or philosophy: the construction of Linnaeus-type genus-species trees has nothing to do with the philosophical activity of hard reasoning which leads to truths about the powers and interrelations of topic-neutral concepts. While allowing that Plato may on occasion have attached some (improper) importance to division, Ryle holds that the philosopher who wrote the central part of the Sophist and the Parmenides could not (then, or seriously, or for long) have supposed division to be a significant part or instrument of philosophy. I think that Ryle has exaggerated the contrast between Platonic division and genuine dialectic or philosophy–both in Plato’s thought and in fact – and I want to mitigate the sharpness of his contrast by suggesting a more generous interpretation of division. I shall not attempt a close study of the relevant texts, but I shall try to say enough to show that it is bad history of ideas to write off Platonic division as a minor aberration, and that a less severe appraisal of it may discover in it material worthy of a philosopher’s consideration.
An Aristotelian Argument about Virtue
Authors: Ackrill J L
Published: November 2023

In Nicomachean Ethics III. 5 Aristotle argues that virtues and vices-good and bad states of character-are ‘in our power’ or ‘up to us’ ( eph hemin ) and ‘voluntary’ (hekousia). He needs to establish this thesis, a thesis which I shall label ‘T’, in order to justify the practice of praising people for their virtues and blaming them for their vices. He will at the same time be removing a dangerous objection that might be raised to the practice of praising and blaming people for actions they do voluntarily, the objection that if a man* cannot help the state of character which determines his choices and decisions, he can hardly be blamed for them or (consequently) for the actions he does voluntarily. In the last two main sections of the chapter Aristotle wrestles (without decisive success) against the contentions (i) that one cannot help being the sort of person one is, and (ii) that it is by nature that a man values what he values, and against the conclusion that our virtues and vices are therefore not in our power or voluntary. The main ideas he deploys against these contentions are (i) that one could have helped becoming the sort of person one is, and (ii) that whatever the importance of a man’s nature in setting his aims, it is he, after all, who carries them out. These sections of Nicomachean Ethics III. 5 have been much discussed, and rightly. Here however, I wish to examine more closely than is usually done the argument contained in the first few lines of the chapter (III. 5. 1- 3, 1113b3-14), a self-contained argument sharply distinct from the later ones and much more direct than they are.
Introduction: The Realistic Spirit in Bradley’s Philosophy
Authors: Stock Guy
Published: November 2023

Within the history of philosophy, Bradley’s philosophy has traditionally been classified as Hegelian and Idealist. This is not a very enlightening characterization. Neither of these terms is precise, and no doubt that is part of the reason why Bradley himself was reluctant to accept either description. R. G. Collingwood, in an unpublished essay on Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, written in 1933, sketched a rather different view, which enables the con temporary reader to locate Bradley’s thought more readily and to chart his philosophical motivation more accurately.
Did Russell s Criticisms of Bradley s Theory of Relations Miss their Mark?
Authors: Griffin Nicholas
Published: November 2023

In The Principles of Mathematics’ Russell considers two ways in which it might be supposed that relations could be eliminated in favour of intrinsic properties. The first, which he calls ‘the monadistic theory’, attempts to eliminate relations in favour of intrinsic properties of their terms taken individually.
Consciousness and Mind
Authors: Rosenthal David M
Published: November 2023

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal’s influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal’s higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought (HOT) that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal’s homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we’re conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications.
Content, Interpretation, and Consciousness
Authors: Rosenthal David M
Published: November 2023

We are all familiar with situations in which memory distorts some current experience. I may see a person I don’t know at all, but my memory of an old friend causes me to misperceive that person as my friend; the conscious experience that results is of seeing the friend. Perhaps, for example, my friend wears glasses and the person now before me doesn’t. Although I see a person without glasses, my memory of the friend intrudes and I seem, so far as consciousness is concerned, to see a person wearing glasses.
Metaphysics A 2: matter and change
Authors: Charles David
Published: November 2023

Its conclusion is that there are at least three shared principles which apply to sensible substances liable to change: two relevant contraries (enantia) and matter (ro69h32-4). This conclusion might seem unsurprising, and thoroughly in line with Aristotle’s doctrines elsewhere (in Physics I. 6-8, Metaphysics Z 7-9, etc.). However, the chapter and the conclusion are made both more interesting and more difficult by Aristotle’s attempt to show that these principles can apply to all sensible substances (including eternal, imperishable ones). While Aristotle mentions the latter category elsewhere in the Metaphysics (cf. H 1. ro42b5-6;0 8. ro5ob16 ff.), in A he needs to show how they can be understood within his favoured conceptual triad (matter: form: deprivation). For here he is concerned to provide principles which can account for the nature of sensible substances. His task is not merely to analyse changes involving such substances using these terms.
Metaphysics A 9: A Short-Lived Thought-Experiment?1
Authors: Brunschwig Jacques
Published: November 2023

A 9 is both quite famous and quite short. At first reading, it looks like a sort of appendix to A 7, separated from it by the excursus on astronomy in A 8. It is officially devoted to the discussion of ‘some difficulties’2 concerning ‘the questions about intellect’.3 However, because of the number of these difficulties, the structure of the chapter is often described as fairly disorderly.4 Indeed, many commentators think that Aristotle does not clearly distinguish the questions he raises, that he answers them in a way which does not indicate which question he is actually answering, and that he leaves some of them without any answer. This assessment is perhaps a little less fair than is often thought.
Metaphor in the Semantic Representation of Emotions
Authors: Apresjan J D , Apresjan V J
Published: November 2023

Until recently the inner world of human beings was the province of psychiatrists, philosophers, and poets, but was of little interest to linguists. The situation began to change with the rise of contemporary linguistic semantics in the 1960s, when the first attempts were made to describe the vocabulary of the emotions lexicographically (Wierzbicka 1969, 1972; Iordanskaja 1970, 1972). Since then there has been a steady growth in interest, both theoretical and lexicographical, in words denoting emotions, as shown by such works as Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Wierzbicka 1980, 1990b; J. Apresjan 1979; Uspensky 1979; Zalizniak 1983; Iordan-skaja 1984; Pajdzinska 1990a; Iordanskaja and Mel’cuk 1990; Wierzbicka 1991; J. Apresjan 1992b; V. Apresjan 1997a.1 Data which may be of interest to linguists, among others, can be found in a number of contemporary psychological, physiological, sociological, and other studies, for example Ekman 1984; Ortony et al. 1988; Kovecses 1990; Fries 1992; Oatley 1992. A survey of these studies is provided by V. Apresjan (1995a). It is to be hoped that the linguistic results of studies of the emotions may also be of value to researchers in other disciplines. Language contains the experience of millennia of psychological and cultural introspection, and its data are every bit as reliable as those provided by experimental research.Simplifying somewhat the real state of affairs, we may say that in linguistics two approaches to the description of emotions have developed.
Swahili For Starters
Authors: Maw Joan
Published: November 2023

New in paperback and in an updated edition, Swahili for Starters: A Practical Introductory Course teaches Swahili in its social and cultural context, by modern and entertaining methods. An ideal beginners’ text, it introduces the language in a natural manner, starting from real-life situations in dialogue form, many of them revealing attitudes and ideas which may surprise and intrigue the learner. Grammar and vocabulary are introuduced gradually, with the most useful items first. Games and puzzles and other activities are used to give practice in the language and guidance in punctuation.
Filling and Licensing Multiple Specifiers
Authors: Doron Edit , Heycock Caroline
Published: November 2023

The uniqueness and obligatoriness of the clausal subject (Spec-TP) that charcharacterizes languages such as English does not hold across all languages. It has recently been argued (Ura 1994, 1996; Chomsky 1995) that specifiers may be generated recursively. Together with the assumption that in certain languages nominative case may be licensed on more than one element, this provides the necessary positions for ‘multiple-subject’ constructions (MSCs, henceforth) as they exist in languages such as Japanese and, we will argue, also the Semitic they exist in languages such as Japanese and, we will argue, also the Semitic languages of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic.
The Role of the Specifier and Finiteness in Early Grammar
Authors: Hoekstra Teun , Hyams Nina , Becker Misha
Published: November 2023

Root infinitives of the sort in (1) are a common feature of many child languages. In the languages which display this phenomenon, the non-finite forms appear to be in free variation with finite forms of the verb. The apparent optionality of root infinitives led Wexler (1994) to propose that children pass through an optional infinitive stage.
The Origins of Complex Language
Authors: Carstairs-McCarthy Andrew
Published: November 2023

This book proposes a new theory of the origins of human language ability and presents an original account of the early evolution of language. It explains why humans are the only language-using animals, challenges the assumption that language is a consequence of intelligence, and offers a new perspective on human uniqueness. The author draws on evidence from archaeology, linguistics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Making no assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge he first provides an introductory but critical survey of all sources of evidence for language evolution. He then considers what language itself reveals about its own and human origins and evolution. He shows that certain central aspects of language do not, unexpectedly, reflect what they are used for, are maladapted for their function. He considers why this should be, and argues that these odd aspects of language reveal important clues about its evolutionary origin. The Origins of Complex Language fulfils the promise of its title. In doing so it turns upside down conventional theories about the relation between cognition and expression, truth and reference, and the co-evolution of mind and body. Original in conception, brilliantly executed, stylishly written, this book will attract a wide range of readers interested in the evolution and origins of language.
Introduction
Authors: Carstairs-McCarthy Andrew
Published: November 2023

It is not hard to imagine the world before human language existed. All we need to do is visualize the world as it is, but with human beings and all their works expunged. For the sake of verisimilitude, we may include in the picture a selection of animals that became extinct only after humans had arrived, such as mammoths, sabre-tooths, and dodos. We may also tentatively include some of our hominid ancestors themselves, walking upright but still ape-like and still, ex hypothesi, languageless: that is, vocalizing in roughly the way that chimpanzees or gibbons do, perhaps, but not producing utterances composed of words. It is also not hard to leap forward mentally two million years or so from then and visualize a world soon after the appearance of people speaking an unequivocally modern sort of language. The people we conjure up will probably be cave-dwelling hunters and gatherers, but also sophisticated creative artists of the kind who produced the famous cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere in southern France more than 25,000 years ago.
Aquinas on Being
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

Anthony Kenny offers a critical examination of a central metaphysical doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval philosophers. Aquinas's account of being is famous and influential: but Kenny argues that it in fact suffers from systematic confusion. Because of the centrality of the doctrine, this has implications for other parts of Aquinas's philosophical system: in particular, Kenny shows that the idea that God is pure being is a hindrance, not a help, to Aquinas's natural theology. Kenny's clear and incisive study, drawing on the scholastic as well as the analytic tradition, dispels the confusion and offers philosophers and theologians a guide through the labyrinth of Aquinas's ontology.
Introduction
Authors: Lewis Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

This book has two purposes. The first is to acquaint the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic, but never dull story of the Turkish language reform. The second is to provide students of Turkish at every level with some useful and stimulating reading matter. With both purposes in mind, no word, phrase, or sentence of Turkish has been left untranslated, apart from names of books and articles, as it is assumed that the reader who wishes to chase up bibliographical references will understand the meaning of the titles. The second purpose accounts for the references to the author’s Turkish Grammar and for the abundance of footnotes and digressions.
Ottoman Turkish
Authors: Lewis Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

By the beginning of the eleventh century, most of the ancestors of the present Turks of Turkey had become Muslim. It is evident that their introduction to Islam was due to peoples of Iranian speech, because the basic religious terms in Turkish come not from Arabic but from Persian or other Iranian languages: namaz prayer’, orug ‘fasting’, peygamber ‘prophet’ The apparent exceptions, the Arabic hac or ziyaret for ‘pilgrimage’, are no exception, because those are the words used in Persian too. Once settled within the civilization of Islam, the Turks took into their language as much of the Persian and Arabic vocabularies as they needed, and more. As the perception that they were Turks was supplanted by an awareness that they were members of the Ummet-i Muhammed, the Community of Believers, so the tide of Arabic and Persian flowed. It was not just a matter of borrowing foreign words for foreign concepts.
Technical Terms
Authors: Lewis Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The Language Society did not forget that Ataturk had wanted the work on technical terms to continue. In 1948 it began publishing glossaries for subjects as varied as statistics and cycling, metallurgy and volleyball; they are listed in Brend- emoen (1990: 490-2).
Sources of London English
Authors: Wright Laura
Published: November 2023

The macaronic (mixed-language) business texts of London for the period 1275 to 1500 present a rich source of evidence for the medieval dialect of London English. Hitherto they have been ignored because of mistaken ideas about their value: they have been viewed as bastardized forms produced by ill-educated scribes. We cannot dismiss macaronic documents as debased or degenerate without investigation, nor should we underestimate the evidence they present for the development of the English language. The contemporary importance of these documents is attested by their sheer number - it is easier today to find macaronic business documents from the late medieval period in record offices than it is to find monolingual texts. The book focuses on terminology surrounding the River Thames to present a study of the medieval dialect of London. The vocabulary survey lists many words which had previously been lost to us, and the illustrative extracts from the texts present a fascinating picture of life in medieval times on the River Thames. The author's analysis covers the orthography, phonology, and morphology of the dialect as revealed in these texts.
The Instability of Negative Liberalism
Authors: Spector Horacio
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapter I tried to delineate a convincing version of negative liberalism. At each step in the construction of this version I attempted to choose the best of the theoretical alternatives lying open to the negative liberal. In this task I was guided by the wish to show negative liberalism as a theory worth criticizing. It would serve no purpose to criticize negative liberalism by pointing out such problems as a determined champion of this theory might overcome with a modicum of philosophical skill. My endeavours produced a theory advancing as a basic ideal the maximization of negative freedom, conceived as the maximization of options made up of possible actions-token, whether or not the object of actual desires or preferences, not obstructed by the active intervention of other persons (deliberate, negligent, or accidental). This theory defends the primacy of the negative conception of freedom over the positive one. Positive freedom may reasonably be seen as consisting in the availability of alternative courses of action, where several courses of action are available for an agent if he can really follow one or other of them. If an agent is unable to perform an action that action does not count for the purpose of determining his positive freedom, irrespective of whether the cause of this inability is the intervention of other persons or another type of event.
The Nicomachean Conception Of Happiness
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE] we meet the following line of argument. The subject-matter of ethics is the good for man, the end of action for the sake of which all else is desired. Most people would agree that this supreme good is happiness, however much they may disagree about what precisely happiness consists in. Aristotle goes on to expand the general view that the supreme good is happiness by outlining the three traditional lives-the life of philosophy, that of virtue, and that of pleasure. He begins his own account by saying that the good we are looking for must be perfect1 by comparison with other ends-that is, it must be something sought always for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else; and it must be self-sufficient-that is, it must be something which taken on its own makes life worthwhile and lacking in nothing.
Being, Identity, and Truth
Authors: Williams C J F
Published: November 2023

Philosophers have met with many problems in discussing the interconnected concepts being, identity, and truth, and have advanced many theories to deal with them. Professor Williams argues that most of these problems and theories result from an inadequate appreciation of the ways in which the words `be', `same', and `true' work. By means of linguistic analysis he shows that being and truth are not properties, and identity is not a relation. He is thus able to demystify a number of metaphysical issues concerning the meaning of the word `I', the relation between the mental and the physical, objects of thought, times and places, and the nature of reality. Williams presents his views clearly, with a minimum of technicality, and with rich and apt examples, so that they will be accessible to readers not versed in symbolic logic.
Pains and Brains
Authors: Williams C J F
Published: November 2023

What is the relation between events which occur in the brain and can be described in neurophysiological terms and conscious experiences? How is the pain I feel in my right elbow related to electrical activity that is no doubt going on in certain regions of my cerebral cortex? Brain scientists are confident that some sort of correlation can be found, if not now, at least in the not too distant future, between the physically or chemically describable phenomena of the brain and the subjectively describable phenomena of consciousness. But what sort of relation or correlation are we looking for? One answer to this question which has been popular amongst philosophers in the last twenty or thirty years is that the relation in question is that of identity.
Embryo Experimentation Public Policy in a Pluralist Society
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

8.1 What is the proper relation between the moral principles that should govern public policy, including legislation, and moral principles which may be held—often passionately—by individuals, including individual legislators? The adherents of such ‘personal’ principles often object that proposed laws would allow people, or even compel them, to transgress the principles. Obvious examples are homosexuality and abortion law reform. People who think homosexuality an abominable sin object to the repeal of laws that make it a crime; and those who think that abortion is as wrong as murder of grown people object that a law permitting abortion in certain cases might make it permissible for other people to—as they would say—murder unborn children, or even, if they are nurses and want to keep their jobs, compel them to do so themselves.
The Lexical Phonology of Slovak
Authors: Rubach Jerzy
Published: November 2023

This book has both a descriptive and a theoretical purpose. It is the first full phonological description of Slovak, a language spoken by some four-and-a-half million people in Central and Eastern Europe; and it is a study of the theories of lexical, auto segmental, and prosodic phonology, with a particular emphasis on syllable structure. In a synthesis of these two aims, the author demonstrates how the theories can be integrated in a description of a single language. Particular importance is attached to the problem of phonological representations which, it is shown, must be three-dimensional. Both the independence and the interaction of the melodic, skeletal, and syllabic tiers are investigated in detail. The theoretical linguist will find here a detailed and comprehensive description of the language, deepened by an extensive debate on current phonological theory. For the Slavicize - of whatever theoretical persuasion - the book offers a discussion of the most recent theoretical developments in phonology, couched in the framework of a familiar type of linguistic material.
Norms and Reforms: Fixing the Form of the Language
Authors: Sauer Wolfgang Werner , Glück Helmut
Published: November 2023

Orthography is boring. It is a subject for elderly folk who love order, vote Conservative, and always keep their dog on a lead. Spelling is a burden for most schoolchildren, students, teachers, secretaries, and office workers. In more and more professions (in anglophone as in German-speaking countries) you have to master orthographic rules and conventions without gaining recognition for it: it is simply something which is taken for granted. If you are not sufficiently competent, you are considered uneducated and unsuited for promotion. At the same time, mastering the art of spelling is a particularly thankless task, as you can only be said to have achieved it if you are able to write a text without the reader finding anything remarkable about it.
After the Wall: Social Change and Linguistic Variation in Berlin
Authors: Schönfeld Helmut , Schlobinski Peter
Published: November 2023

Many of the features of sociolinguistic variation discussed in this chapter apply more or less generally in the eastern and western parts of Germany. However, we have chosen to focus on Berlin, as it was for so long the symbol of division (a kind of microcosm of the political situation in post-war Germany) and after the fall of the Wall it was where contact was most immediately (and painfully) re-established, so that both contrasts and emerging changes are most clearly to be seen here. This divided speech community is now reunified: what does this mean for language development in the new capital city and for the people who for over a generation lived in two adjacent but increasingly distinct communicative worlds? The vernacular spoken in Berlin is certainly the most thoroughly investigated urban vernacular in Germany and reflects like no other the variety of different developments in East and West.
Language and Television
Authors: Holly Werner
Published: November 2023

The connection between language and television is at least a twofold one. We may ask: (1) how does language appear in television? Or the other way round: (2) what is the impact of television on language? For both questions it is first crucial to consider the institutional structure of German broadcasting, which has been called a ‘dual system’ of public and private organization (Section 2 below).
How to Decide Moral Questions Rationally
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

IF we look back over the development of moral (and also of legal) philosophy over the past fifty years or so, we can see it as the unfolding of the consequences of a fundamental mistake. Almost the first thing that happened to me when I started doing moral philosophy was that I saw that it was a mistake. I have been trying ever since to make people see that it is a mistake. But I have not been very successful. Let me now try to explain again what the mistake is. It is the mistake of thinking that the only possible exercise of reason is in determining facts or discovering truths. That there can be practical as well as theoretical reason was a cardinal thesis of Kant; and Aristotle, with his concept of phronesis, or practical as opposed to theoretical wisdom, showed that he thought the same. But now nearly everybody, whether or not he calls himself a rationalist, seems to agree in thinking that if one wishes to be a rationalist (if, that is to say, one wishes to find a place for rationality in moral thinking), one has to be a descriptivist ( that is to say, one has to believe that there are moral facts to be discovered). This almost universal mistake has had the most harmful consequences in recent moral philosophy, which it is my purpose in this paper to explore.
Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

MORAL philosophy is now in a phase which must seem curious to anybody who has observed its course since, say, the 1940s. During all that time moral philosophers of the analytic tradition have devoted most of their work to fundamental questions about the analysis or the meaning of the moral words and the types of reasoning that are valid on moral questions. It may be that some of them were attracted by the intrinsic theoretical interest of this branch of philosophical logic; and indeed it is interesting. But it may surely be said that the greater part, like myself, studied these questions with an ulterior motive: they saw this study as the philosopher’s main contribution to the solution of practical moral problems such as trouble most of us. For if we do not understand the very terms in which the problems are posed, how shall we ever get to the root of them? I, at least, gave evidence of this motive in my writings and am publishing many papers on practical questions. But, now that philosophers in greater numbers have woken up to the need for such a contribution, and whole new journals are devoted to the practical applications of philosophy, what do we find the philosophers doing? In the main they proceed as if nothing had been learnt in the course of all that analytical enquiry-as if we had become no clearer now than in, say, 1936, or even 1903, how good moral arguments are to be distinguished from bad.
Change and Selves
Authors: Pivčević Edo
Published: November 2023

It is a trite fact that changes do occur, yet is it logically contradictory to deny that they do? If Zeno and McTaggart were right, then there is no logical contradiction in such a denial, although this is incompatible with the way in which we normally think of the world. Supporters of the `block view' of the universe believe that there is a sense in which all events may be said to be contemporaneous, like episodes in a book, so that there is no `objective' past or future. The aim of this book is not to demolish belief in the existence of objective change, but to elucidate the conditions under which it makes sense to suppose that changes occur. The book pays particular attention to the existence of selves as one such condition, and concludes that the naturalistic account of change is defective and leaves the sceptic victorious.
Changes and Selves
Authors: Pivčević Edo
Published: November 2023

If all change, including existential change, is to be explained in terms of development, then, as we have just seen, there is no ready alternative to interpreting development as a comprehensive cosmic process, and yet this immediately gives rise to paradoxes about time and destroys the very basis of the intelligibility of change. We thus seem to have reached an impasse. The philosophical evolutionary model was intended not only to help to sweep clean any remaining difficulties that lingered on in the ruins of the mechanistic account of change but in particular to provide a more secure footing for a teleological approach by equipping it with a refurbished concept of a not yet-realized target state within the context of an objective, forward-moving time. As it turned out, the project misfired, and as a result the perplexity about the whole issue increased rather than diminished.
Aristotle’s Potential Infinites
Authors: Charlton William
Published: November 2023

‘It is not true’, says Descartes, ‘that the infinite is understood through denial of boundary or limitation, since on the contrary all limitation contains a denial of the infinite’. As a claim about the finite and the infinite this is notoriously dubious; but something of the sort can, I think, be maintained about finitism: we understand a thinker’s finitism by seeing what kind of infinity he rejects and how. Aristotle rejects at least four kinds of infinite. In the first place he holds that there cannot be an infinitely large body or quantity of material. His argument for this conclusion (which occupies Phys: III. 5 and Cael I. 5-7) depends mainly on physical considerations about motion and force. He also has metaphysical objections to infinitudes of parts in undivided wholes, infinitudes of points and infinite numbers of actual things generally; but in connection with each of these classes of entity he allows the possibility of what commentators call a ‘potential infinite’. Many philosophers profess to find the notion of a potential infinite obscure or question its utility.2 Although Aristotle’s exposition is indeed marred by obscurity, indecision, and even error I shall argue that the concept is fundamentally sound and does apply to parts, points, and actual things. First, however, I shall say something about his views on the impossibility of an infinitely large quantity of material, since these affect his development of his more metaphysical contentions.
Can God Be Free?
Authors: Rowe William L
Published: November 2023

In the three major religions of the West, God is understood to be a being whose goodness, knowledge, and power is such that it is impossible for any being, including God himself, to have a greater degree of goodness, knowledge, and power. This book focuses on God's freedom and praiseworthiness in relation to his perfect goodness. Given his necessary perfections, if there is a best world for God to create he would have no choice other than to create it. For, as Leibniz tells us, 'to do less good than one could is to be lacking in wisdom or in goodness.' But if God could not do otherwise than create the best world, he created the world of necessity, not freely. And, if that is so, it may be argued that we have no reason to be thankful to God for creating us, since, as parts of the best possible world, God was simply unable to do anything other than create us - he created us of necessity, not freely. Moreover, we are confronted with the difficulty of having to believe that this world, with its Holocaust, and innumerable other evils, is the best that an infinitely powerful, infinitely good being could do in creating a world. Neither of these conclusions, taken by itself, seems at all plausible. Yet each conclusion appears to follow from the conception of God now dominant in the great religions of the West. William Rowe presents a detailed study of this important problem, both historically in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, Thomas Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards, as well as in the contemporary philosophical literature devoted to the issue. Rowe argues that this problem is more serious than is commonly thought and may require some significant revision in contemporary thinking about the nature of God.
Introduction
Authors: Rowe William L
Published: November 2023

When religion was in its infancy, it was natural for human beings to envisage the gods as both different from us, and somewhat like us— having greater longevity, as well as greater power, residing in the heavens rather than on earth, but still somewhat limited in power and knowledge, jealous of other gods, and sometimes at war with one another. But as the great religions slowly developed, there emerged the idea of a single god, a being of great wisdom, power, and goodness. In the West, this majestic idea of God was developed and refined over the centuries by influential theologians such as Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure, Avicenna, Anselm, Maimonides, and Aquinas. It is now the dominant conception of God in the three great religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is no longer thought of as just a great being, or even the greatest being among all beings that have ever existed or ever will exist. God is thought of as the greatest possible being, the being than which none greater exists or can even be conceived to exist. Quite naturally, then, God is taken to be a being whose goodness, knowledge, and power is such that it is inconceivable and logically impossible for any being, including God himself, to have a greater degree of goodness, knowledge, and power. Moreover, as part of his essential greatness, God is thought to be a necessarily existing being, a being who exists and logically could not fail to exist.
Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism
Authors: Marshall John
Published: November 2023

When the Calvinist John Edwards accused Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity of being “all over Socinianized” in 1695} he began a long tradition.1 Within a decade, the charge that Locke’s works at least favoured Socinianism had a wide currency. Edwards himself repeated the charge in his Soci’nianism unmask’d (1696) and 17ie Socinian creed (1697). In 1697 the grand jury of Middlesex condemned The reasonableness of ChristianitY, among other works, for denying the Trinity and giving rise to Socinianism and Arianism. The new century began with the non-juror John Milner surveying Locke’s works and concluding, with Edwards, that Locke was broadly Socinian. In a series of works in the 1 690s, Bishop Edward Stillingfleet suggested that Locke’s epistemology indirectly favoured Unitarianism focusing not upon the Reasonableness, but upon An essy concerning human understanding.
Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800
Authors: Hastrup Kirsten
Published: November 2023

The Icelandic Free State which flourished from 930 to the middle of the thirteenth century gave rise to a sophisticated political system and had a rich literary culture. However, by 1400 the structure of this society had begun to crumble. The following period, from 1400 to 1800, has been largely overlooked by scholars. In this book Kirsten Hastrup offers an analysis of Icelandic society during a period of remarkable social disintegration and technological decline. She approaches the subject from a variety of angles, juxtaposing the economic, social, and political orders with concepts of humanity, fate, and nature, and providing the reader with a comprehensive picture of Icelandic society in the period. Her analysis shows how the dissolution of the ancient order must be attributed to internal factors of culture and mentality, as well as to the external ones of natural catastrophe and commercial exploitation. She ends the book with a valuable discussion of the nature of causation in history.
From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu
Authors: Morphy Howard
Published: November 2023

In this essay I shall consider aspects of the aesthetics of Yolngu art. I am concerned primarily with a category of painting produced by men, but I place my analysis in the broader framework of the aesthetics of Yohigu ritual.1 The Yolngu are an Australian Aboriginal people, renowned in the anthropological literature as the Murngin, who live in north-east Arnhem Land, a coastal area of northern Australia.
Marquesan Societies
Authors: Thomas Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Marquesan society has long captured the interest of European observers, in part because of unfamiliar institutions such as polyandry. However, due to complex and destructive historical changes and the very scattered nature of early source-materials, the distinctive Marquesan developments of Polynesian society have been obscure and at odds with anthropologists’ and historians’ overall understanding of Pacific societies. Nicholas Thomas’s book, based on a critical study of the fullest possible range of sources, is the first to provide a clear account of early Marquesan social relations and culture, and as such will become a key source for Pacific scholars. However, Dr Thomas’s discussion is not restricted to ethnohistoric documentation. His analysis of dynamic and highly fluid society and its encounters with early European visitors and traders encompasses wider debates about the nature of gender relations in Polynesian societies, small-scale hierarchical structures, cultural transformation, and longer-term change. In linking specific features of early Marquesan society, its contact with foreigners, and the longer-term transformations of eastern Polynesian societies, Dr Thomas offers Pacific studies a distinctive new perspective.
Binary Operations and Groups
Authors: Hage Per , Harary Frank
Published: November 2023

In developing Mauss’s (1935) ideas concerning the cultural symbolism of bodily techniques, Mary Douglas proposes that notions about the body reflect social morphology:

The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other (Douglas 1973: 93).
Low Castes in Lalitpur
Authors: Gellner David N
Published: November 2023

Although there is an enormous amount of anthropological work on caste in South Asia, relatively little has focused primarily on the lowest groups in the hierarchy. There are practical reasons for this, which are poignantly and eloquently described in Michael Moffatt’s An Untouchable Community in South India (1979). He tried to live with his subjects as an anthropologist is supposed to do, but the total lack of privacy and the extremely deprived living conditions almost led him to abandon the project altogether. He was only able to gather substantial data on social organization when, after leaving his original field site, he moved to another area of Tamil Nadu and started to visit an Untouchable settlement in short daily bursts in the company of a field assistant.
Occidentalism as a Cottage Industry: Representing the Autochthonous ’Other’ 1n British and Irish Rural Studies
Authors: Nadel-Klein Jane
Published: November 2023

A cartoon appeared a couple of years ago in my local newspaper, purporting to explain ethnic violence in Eastern Europe. In it, a Western-suited man (Gorbachev) stands helplessly by as men in loose peasant blouses and cummerbunds (the ’Zugs’) massacre each other in the street. ’Why do we kill each other?’ reads the legend below, ’Because it’s our nature!’ In this cartoon, bloodshed is explained in terms of instinct, or ’nature’, and the violent men are obviously denizens of a Europe that does not fit into the cartoonist’s conception of Western civilization. They are peas ants, rural folk who have not grasped modernity’s message of reason.
Conclusion: The Extended mind
Authors: Gell Alfred
Published: November 2023

The discussion of Marquesan graphic/plastic stylistics, just concluded, has been founded on the notion of a ‘corpus’ of artworks as a kind of spatiotemporally dispersed ‘population’. Marquesan art, considered as a whole, can be conceptualized, macroscopically, as a ‘distributed object’ in time and space. Like the 216 separate items in a 24-place luxury set of china tea and dinnerware, all .Marquesan artworks belong to a kind of ‘set’, though, of course, a more loosely integrated set than the sets of china which are presented to young couples as wedding presents by rich relatives. A china dinner-set is bound together, as a distributed object (an object having many spatially separated parts with different micro-histories) by prior design, that is, by the intentional actions of the design and manufacturing staff of Spode, or Wedgwood, or who ever.
Ministerial Accountability: What and Where are the Parameters?
Authors: Oliver Dawn
Published: November 2023

Geoffrey Marshall’s Constitutional Conventions: The Rules and Forms o f Political Accountability is the only serious legal book that I have read that has made me laugh out loud. His comment about ‘parameters’ must be a classic. Marshall states that ‘The Crossman manuscript had been submitted for security clearance to the Cabinet Secretary who had set out for Crossman’s guidance a number of restrictive rules or “parameters” (a term new to constitutional theory).’
The Decline of an Ideal: The Conservatives and Immigration, 1958–1960
Authors: Hansen Randall
Published: November 2023

Shortly after replacing Anthony Eden as Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan sent a note to Rab Butler stating, ‘I have no doubt you will be reporting to the Cabinet … about the situation in London and elsewhere in what are called the “race riots”… [W]e agreed not long ago to look again at the immigration question in a few months’ time. Perhaps we should look at it now.’ The migration issue was examined after the riots, and it continued to be until the introduction of restrictive legislation in 1962. This chapter focuses on two eventful years–1958 to 1960–during which a divisive argument within Whitehall and the Cabinet was carried in favour of control. The two years are of considerable scholarly interest, as they produced a rich abundance of documents on Commonwealth immigration. They demonstrate that a lengthy argument was waged between the Colonial Office and the Ministry of Labour over the legitimacy and necessity of migration controls. The right of free entry had its defenders in the British bureaucracy, and the argument in favour of control was won against their objections.