bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Foundationalism And Coherentism In Ethics
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

After pointing out some obvious and well-canvassed faults in Cartesian foundationalism (already noticed in LM 3. 3), I shall go on to explain again where it goes wrong. My only reason for reviving these old arguments is that since then they have been forgotten. I shall then outline a procedure for moral reasoning which escapes these faults, on the lines already suggested in FR 6. 2 ff. and more fully worked out in M1’. This method has some claim to be called foundationalist in a different sense, which is perhaps in accordance with Kant’s aims. It can also claim to be in a sense coherentist. thus breaking down the supposed opposition between foundationalism and coherentism, about which much has been written. For sources, I can refer readers to Mark Timmons’s helpful paper (1987).After that, I shall introduce perhaps my only new point. This is that in the attempt to reconcile foundationalism and coherentism. the dispute between which has dogged epistemology, moral epistemology has a big advantage over most other kinds of epistemology.
Preferences Of Possible People
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

Hajdin sets out to show that my theory of moral reasoning can be so modified as to make irrelevant two kinds of preferences that have been an embarrassment to me, namely those that Dworkin (1977: 2.34) has called ‘external’ preferences. and those that I have called ‘now-for-then’ preferences. Another name for the first of these is ‘nonexperiential preferences’-that is, preferences for things other than experiences of the preferred. Another name for the second is ‘asynchronic preferences’-that is, preferences for what should happen at times other than the time when the preference is had. I shall for the most part use the second pair of expressions and their antonyms. The effect of the elimination of these two kinds of preferences from moral reasoning would be to make my own theory much more like the ‘happiness utilitarianism’ advocated by Brandt (1989).
Music and Humanism
Authors: Sharpe R A
Published: November 2023

Is music sad because it causes the listener to feel sad? Is it to be valued because of the pleasure it gives us? R. A. Sharpe argues that the views these questions enshrine underestimate the cognitive element in our response to music. Our beliefs about music and our knowledge of the culture in which it originated underlie the judgements we make. At their most general, these cognitive elements are ideological in nature and they play both a positive and a negative role in our response to music--they both help and hinder. Music has long been thought of as a language. This metaphor underpins the way we hear music and the way we think about it. We conceive of music both as expressive and as something to be understood. Almost certainly the roots of this conception lie in the fertilization of music by rhetoric during the Renaissance. Sharpe suggests that music may have entered a new period in which the language analogy and the humanist conception of music which it expresses are becoming less and less appropriate.
Language, Metaphor, Emotions, and Moods
Authors: Sharpe R A
Published: November 2023

Those attempts to account for the power and value of music which emphasize the causal connection between the music and its effect upon the hearer are open, then, to objections. None of these theories need exclude the role of ideas about musical form and structure, about fugue and sonata form, thematic development and harmonic and rhythmic structure, and all the paraphernalia of what Cook calls ‘musical culture’. But they underestimate it; it seems clear that a proper account of music’s significance for us requires a cognitive element.

This cognitive element is not merely the formal apparatus I have mentioned above. It also includes, as I shall show, the expressive function of music, the possibility of describing it as ‘sad’, ‘grave’, ‘ebullient’, ‘tragic’, and so on, for I shall argue that these aspects of the character of a piece of music also require a cognitive theory.
Humanism Founders?
Authors: Sharpe R A
Published: November 2023

In making a case for the in eliminability of expressive descriptions of music and for their connection with broader questions of sincerity, authenticity, and the ideology of the arts, I have made a case against treating music as a purely formal art. Music is, I believe, connected with the life humans live. The possibilities it has for expression make it possible for composers to write autobiographical music or music that expresses the conflicts of their times. Music is, to this extent, a humanist art. But what more can be said about this?

If I describe an art as ‘humanist’, what might be implied is that an absorbed attention in it has moral consequences. It makes us, in some oblique way, better people. Our moral judgements are finer and more imaginative through engagement with fiction or drama or film. Perhaps a case can be made for saying that a fine engagement with the complexities of Henry James, George Eliot, or Proust makes us subtler moral agents—as opposed to simply self-conscious and self-absorbed—but it is hard to justify making such claims on behalf of music, opera apart.
Molyneux’s question and the idea of an external world
Authors: Eilan Naomi
Published: November 2023

The basic format of Molyneux’s question can be and has been extended to spatial properties other than shape, such as location, length and so forth; and to modalities other than vision and touch, such as hearing and proprioception, and to action. Very loosely, negative answers to the question are said to involve the idea that spatial perceptions are modality-specific; positive answers, the idea that they are a modal. Its enduring interest lies in the idea that the kind of issues it raises about the relations among the sensory modalities, whether they are a modal or modality-specific, have fundamental implications for the way we explain the nature of spatial representation in general.
How Not to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness
Authors: Block Ned
Published: November 2023

The concept of H2O and the concept of water are two concepts of the same thing, as are the concepts of temperature and mean molecular kinetic energy. But something like the converse case is also common. In the seventeenth century, there were two concepts whose referents did not coincide, both denoted by the ambiguous phrase now translated as ‘degree of heat’. When they measured “degree of heat” by whether various sources could melt paraffin, heat source A came out hotter than B. When they measured “degree of heat” by how much ice a heat source could melt in a given time, B was hotter than A (Wiser and Carey 1983). We now know that the latter method measured heat whereas the former measured temperature. Aristotle used a term we translate as ‘velocity’ sometimes to mean average velocity, sometimes to mean instantaneous velocity. Again, his failure to see the distinction led to trouble.
Life and Cognition
Authors: Boden Margaret
Published: November 2023

I must confess to feeling rather like the young man in the British film who, when warned by a suspicious policeman: “You want to watch it, sirr’, anxiously replied: “Yes, officer-but where is it?” Any discussion of life and cognition must recognize that there is little agreement on what these terms mean.
The Representation of Number in Natural Language Syntax and in the Language of Thought: A Case Study of the Evolution and Development of Representational Resources
Authors: Carey Susan
Published: November 2023

From an evolutionary perspective, it would be extremely surprising to find a nonhuman animal lacking in computational specializations. Simply take a mental walk through your average zoo or natural history museum, and consider bats and dolphins who use biosonar to auditorily see the world, honey bees that can detect polarized light, snakes that can see into the infrared, songbirds that can simultaneously tap into two independent sound production sources for singing their glorious courtship melodies, fish that can detect electric pulses, and both vertebrates and invertebrates that can generate their own light sources as advertisements for mating or defensive ploys against predators. These are indeed marvelous specializations and they illustrate the power of natural selection to fine tune an organism’s neural machinery for computational tasks that allow it to solve species-typical ecological problems, or capitalize on species-typical ecological opportunities (Darwin 1859, 1871; Dawkins 1986).
Hobbes on Justice
Authors: Raphael D D
Published: November 2023

Hobbes has a distinctive view of justice. His most explicit statement ofit comes at the beginning of chapter 15 of Leviathan, where justice is identified with the third law of nature,’ Thal men performe their Covenants made’. In making the identification Hobbes does not immediately speak of definition: he says, in the English version, that ‘the Fountain and Originall’ of justice consists in this third law of nature, while the Latin version abbreviates ‘Fountain and Orig:inall’ to ‘natura’. A couple of sentences later, however, it is plain that for Hobbes these terms arc tantamount to, or include, the notion of definition; he says that ‘the definition of INJUSTICE, is no other than the not Performance of Covenant. And whatsoever is not Unjust, is Just’.
Another Plea for Modesty
Authors: Mcdowell John
Published: November 2023

Modest, in relation to meaning, is the denial that we can ‘hope to give an account of the concepts expressible by the primitive vocabulary’ of a language.1
The Realism of Memory
Authors: Campbell John
Published: November 2023

Memory seems to be a way of spanning temporal perspectives: a description of the world formulated at one time is used when describing it at another. So, for example, if I am asked to recall the events of the evening of 17 March 1990, I summon up the description I formulated then, and, with appropriate changes in tense, use it to say how things were then. This procedure assumes that there is a single temporal reality onto which all one’s various temporal perspectives face, so that the judgements I make at one time can be the basis of knowledge at a later time. This characteristic of memory brings our ordinary reliance on it into conflict with any view which opposes realism about the past. My aim in this chapter is to explain more fully the conflict between memory and antirealism; to show that a kind of realism is engraved in our memories. I shall begin with some remarks on the rationale for anti-realism about the past, and then go on to discuss the conflict with our ordinary reliance on memory.
Analysis of the Dialectical Structure of Slippery Slope Arguments
Authors: Walton Douglas
Published: November 2023

In the current literature two points of view on the slippery slope argument have dominated most studies of it. One is to see it as an informal fallacy. The general presumption in this approach is that the slippery slope argument is either inherently fallacious, or at least is such a suspicious argument that one should normally denounce it on sight as a fallacy. This presumption, although it is understandable, has led the textbook treatments to neglect serious research into the underlying structure of the slippery slope as a serious or important type of argumentation. For the real reason this argument is so convincing when used as a sophistical tactic is that, when used properly, it is a reasonable and highly persuasive argument.
Metaphysics and Mental Causation
Authors: Baker Lynne Rudder
Published: November 2023

Does what we think ever affect what we do? The answer to this question may seem obvious: of course, having the thoughts that we have leads us to do what we do. But philosophers have recently cast doubt on the relevance of what we think to what we do. Mental causation—the causation of what we do by what we think—be comes a problem against a particular metaphysical background. My aim is twofold: first, to root out the metaphysical assumptions that generate the problem of mental causation and to show that they preclude its solution; second, to dissolve the problem of mental causation by motivating rejection of one of the metaphysical assumptions that give rise to it.
The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation
Authors: Kim Jaegwon
Published: November 2023

Mind-Body dualism in the classic Cartesian style envisages two non-overlapping domains of particulars (‘substances’) that are, by and large, equal in ontological standing. Mental items are thought to share a certain defining property (‘thinking’ or ‘consciousness’, according to Descartes) that excludes the defining property shared by the items on the physical side (‘extension’, according to Descartes). And associated with each domain is a distinct family of properties, mental properties for one and physical properties for the other, in terms of which the particulars within that domain can be exhaustively characterized. We are thus presented with a bifurcated picture of reality: the world consists of two metaphysically independent spheres existing side by side.
Preliminaries
Authors: Brickhouse Thomas C , Smith Nicholas D
Published: November 2023

Given the history of its attribution to Plato, and the evidence provided by stylometric analyses, there is virtually universal agreement among scholars that Plato did indeed write the Apology that has come down to us under his name. The actual date of the Apology’s composition, however, is a matter of controversy. Neither stylometric analysis nor any of the other techniques used for establishing the chronological order of the dialogues can do more than place the Apology within the group of early dialogues.
Socrates’ DEfense, Part I (17al-24b2)
Authors: Brickhouse Thomas C , Smith Nicholas D
Published: November 2023

There was little that was ordinary about the trial of Socrates. One of its most extraordinary aspects was the way in which Socrates behaved in the courtroom: whereas other litigants might employ highly emotional stratagems to win a favorable verdict, all the ancient accounts show Socrates proudly disdaining any posture of supplication or fearful humility that might have helped to earn him the jurors’ mercy. In this respect, Plato’s Apology is no exception. But as we have said, commentators have typically inferred from Socrates’ refusal to ap peal to the jurors’ emotions that he betrayed insolence towards the jurors and was indifferent to the legal outcome of the case.
Socrates’ Defense, Part III (30cl-35d8)
Authors: Brickhouse Thomas C , Smith Nicholas D
Published: November 2023

Thus far, Socrates has constructed his defense by means of two sorts of arguments. By responding directly to his ‘first’ accusers and then to his actual prosecutors, he seeks primarily to show that he is not guilty of any of the various forms of wrongdoing specified in their accusations. And by claiming, after the completion of his ‘interrogation’ of Meletus, that his philosophical activities have been undertaken as a service ordained by the god, Socrates attempts to show that the very activities which have for so long been the object of popular suspicion and hostility have actually provided an invaluable benefit to the city of Athens. Both kinds of arguments, those concerning his innocence of the accusations against him and those concerning the good his mission bestows on Athens, show how complete would be the injustice he would suffer by the court’s condemnation.
Occasionalism and the mind-body problem
Authors: nadler Steven
Published: November 2023

One of the more popular myths in the traditional account of the development of metaphysics in the seventeenth century regards the genesis and historico¬ philosophical significance of the doctrine of occasionalism, or the theory that God alone is a true causal agent, in whose operations qua causa are included all the phenomena of nature. According to the story usually told, some early modern thinkers, committed to Descartes’s philosophy, and to mind-body dualism in particular, were unable to explain how two substances so radically different in essence could interact. Since unextended thought and matter as pure extension have absolutely nothing in common (either essentially or in regard to the kinds of properties of which each is capable), and thus no means by which they might be able to ‘‘engage” one another, it becomes inexplicable, and even inconceivable, how a body can be the cause of mental events (thoughts, sensations) and how a mind can cause motions in the body with which it is united. When confronted with such a problem, the story runs, Cartesians asserted that no such interaction really takes place and retreated to a deus ex machina. What appears to be true causal interaction is really God’s constant activity in producing thoughts on the occasion of certain bodily motions (especially in the brain) and motions in the body on the occasion of certain volitions in the mind, all in accordance with general laws established beforehand. On this reading, occasionalism is first and foremost an ad hoc response to the mind-body problem as it is faced by Cartesian dualism.
Pierre bayle, libertine?
Authors: wootton David
Published: November 2023

Since Man after his Fall was unable to obey the exact dictates of Reason, there was nothing more necessary than to introduce Love into the World; for it cannot be conceived how Mankind could have subsisted without it. The Passions, with respect to the natural benefits of Society, are the same thing as Repentance in celestial concerns, a Plank after Shipwreck; and since Reason was to become so feeble, we could not have had recourse to a better shift than that of the Passions, of which Love is without dispute the principal one, and in some manner the Soul of the World. (‘Eve’ [F])1 Pierre Bayle was born in 1647, the son of a Huguenot minister in the south of France. At the age of twenty-one he converted briefly to Catholicism; when he reconverted to Protestantism, he was obliged to flee the country to escape the legal penalties faced by relapsed heretics, and went to complete his education in Geneva.2 He worked first as a tutor in Switzerland and in France, under an assumed identity, and then as a professor in the Protestant college in Sedan. When that was closed in 1681 by the government, he moved to Rotterdam, where he taught and, for a time, edited a journal, Nouvelles de la republique des lettres. In 1693 he was dismissed from his teaching position: he had increasingly come into conflict with Pierre Jurieu, a prominent Huguenot theologian and a former protector.
‘Music Has No Meaning to Speak of’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

‘The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, ... may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony.’ So James Gibbons Huneker remarked in 1898—to which Robert Schumann, had he still been alive, might have responded: ‘I am more interested in judging whether the symphony is beautiful than in determining whether it has an extra-musical programme.’2 Schumann believed that the musical (audible) content of a symphony is the primary determinant of its meaning. He may even have believed that it is its sole determinant and that music has no extra-musical meaning to speak of at all. ‘The best way to talk about music’, he once wrote, ‘is to be quiet about it.’3 But if silence has satisfied those, like Schumann, of ‘purist’ tendencies, it has worried others who suspect that there is more to music than meets the ear—especially those who have held, as Huneker did, that a symphony can sometimes be blasphemous.
Indian Philosophy: Between Tradition and Modernity
Authors: Mohanty Jitendra Nath
Published: November 2023

Anyone who asks ‘What is Indian philosophy? What is “Indian” about it?’ has already situated himself outside the tradition that we call Indian. None of the philosophers who shaped that tradition, and with whose writings we are acquainted, ever asked such a question. They lived and thought within that tradition which today, by the very questions we are asking, we are categorizing. Through this act of categorization, a rupture occurred. Or, rather, it is only such a rupture that could make such categorization possible.
Grammatical Data in the Lexicon
Authors: Hajičová Eva
Published: November 2023

The objective of this chapter is to substantiate the view that for an adequate linguistic description (from which applications such as natural language understanding, machine translation, etc. can draw their data) the lexical entry should contain:
Is the Doctrine of the Atonement a Mistake?
Authors: Hick John
Published: November 2023

One can wish to honour a thinker because one agrees with his work or because one disagrees with it but nevertheless sees it as important and therefore as needing to be discussed. My own motivation in contributing to the present volume in honour of Richard Swinburne is the latter. He is a major figure in the philosophy of religion today, exercising his powerfully logical mind with immense energy, and is now producing in a series of volumes what will amount to a new summa of Christian dogma. My own view is that this new summa, produced at the end of the twentieth century, is a vast anachronism, representing the thought-forms out of which Christianity is developing rather than the kind of new thinking that is needed as we approach the twenty-first century. But Swinburne’s growing summa is nevertheless a very considerable intellectual achievement, and those who see this as misapplied should present reasons for so thinking. The present chapter attempts to do this on one particular topic.
Grammar on Aristotle‘s Terms
Authors: Barnes Jonathan
Published: November 2023

According to Frege, ‘the fundamental logical relation is that of an object falling under a concept’.The fundamental relation finds its canonical expression in singular sentences of the form ‘F (a)’. Such sentences consist of two parts: there is a designating expression, which Frege calls an Eigenname;and there is a descriptive expression, which Frege calls a Begriffswort. Grammatically speaking, the simplest sentences of this sort contain two words and show the structure ‘E + B’. More generally, and a little more rigorously: in Fregean grammar, (1F) primary sentences have two significant parts; (2F) these two parts belong to different and mutually exclusive grammatical categories: no Eigenname may hold the place of a Begriffswort and no Begriffswort may hold the place of an Eigenname; and (3F) in virtue of their heterogeneity, the two elements in a primary sentence bind together into a syntactic unity the Eigenname ‘completes’ or ‘saturates’ the Begriffswort, which is itself essentially incomplete or unsaturated.
Epilogismos: an Appraisal
Authors: Schofield Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Readers of Epicurus and other Epicurean authors frequently meet the expressions epilogizesthai, epilogismos, etc. Sometimes at least these words seem to have something like the status of technical terms. It is plausible to construe the decision to use them, rather than other expressions for thinking and its species, as designed to indicate something distinctive in Epicurean epistemology or in the Epicurean conception of what is and is not proper philosophical method. No Epicurean definition of epilogismos etc. is preserved. This is hardly surprising, in view of their general theory of language and well-known aversion to definition (see LS 19, esp. F-H1). Examination of Greek and specifically Epicurean usage is therefore the only way in which we can achieve an understanding of the terms as they occur in the texts which interest us. But despite various attempts by recent scholarship to do just this, notably in valuable studies by Arrighetti and Sedley which survey all the Epicurean evidence, the literature contains no wholly compelling story on the subject. Arrighetti illuminates very well the variety of uses to which the epilog-vocabulary is put, but his idea that epilogismos of the goal of living is a sort of comprehensive appreciation of the main truths of Epicurean ethics has not found much favour.
Descartes’s Compatibilism
Authors: Chappell Vere
Published: November 2023

Compatibilism is the doctrine that determinism is logically consistent with libertarianism. Determinism is the doctrine that every being and event is brought about by causes other than itself. Libertarianism is the doctrine that some human actions are free. Was Descartes a compatibilist? There is no doubt that he was a libertarian: his works are full of professions of freedom, human as well as divine. And, though he held that God has no cause other than himself, Descartes thought that everything apart from God is externally caused: he was a determinist with respect to the created universe. So it appears, assuming him consistent with himself, that Descartes must have been a compatibilist. And, indeed, there are passages in his writings in which he appears explicitly to affirm that he is. Since both Descartes’s libertarianism and his determinism are complex doctrines, however, his view of the relation between them is complex as well.
Necessity
Authors: Hughes Christopher
Published: November 2023

Modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity) goes back at least as far as Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, and flourished in the high Middle Ages. After the demise of scholasticism the subject received comparatively little attention, especially from empiricist philosophers. But the first half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in modal logic, arising at least in part from interest in the nature of implication.
Identity, Worlds, and Times
Authors: Hughes Christopher
Published: November 2023

At ‘Naming and Necessity’, 266, Kripke notes that some philosophers have found the notion of identity across worlds problematic, on the grounds that we cannot legitimately make judgements of identity across worlds unless we have a criterion for trans-world identity. If, for example, we judge that someone in an alternative world is the same person as Nixon, then, they have thought, we need a criterion saying, in non-trivial terms, under what conditions a person Pin a world His the same person as a person P’ in a (different) world H’ (in other words, a criterion that provides us with non-trivial necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of person Pin world H with person P’ in world H’). But-these philosophers have maintained-it is very difficult to provide a criterion of identity across worlds for persons, or material objects, or the like.
Classifications of Psychological Concepts
Authors: Schulte Joachim
Published: November 2023

In his manuscript book 134, a volume which appears particularly discontinuous, Wittgenstein notes down the following comment: ‘The genealogical tree of psychological phenomena: It is not exactness which I am striving for, but a perspicuous way of looking at things [Übersichtlichkeit].’ But the way of dealing with his subject-matter does not become more perspicuous after this remark. The number of daily entries decreases; after a short time only sporadic remarks are to be found, and these are often unconnected with the philosophy of psychology.
Supervenience, Composition, and Physicalism
Authors: Charles David
Published: November 2023

Physical reality is fundamental and all genuine mental states and properties are grounded in physical states and properties. The mental is dependent on the physical, but the physical is not dependent on the mental. In this way, the physical determines the mental. These ideas are a commonplace in a central contemporary tradition in the philosophy of mind. They express (at least part of) the ‘physicalist’ preference for the physical as (in some sense) more basic than the mental. For physicalists, the major difficulty has been to make this set of ideas precise without undermining their initial plausibility. In the recent past, philosophers beginning from this starting-point have been led to propose accounts of mental phenomena which have proved difficult to defend in detail. One such account is the type identity thesis of the mental and the physical; another is analytical functionalism.
Reductionism and First-Person Thinking
Authors: Cassam Quassim
Published: November 2023

According to Derek Parfit, the existence of a person just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of an interrelated series of mental and physical events. Parfit calls his view ‘reductionism’, but there is more to this view than is suggested by the initial formulation. What distinguishes ‘reductionism’ from other non-Cartesian conceptions of the self is its commitment to the idea that the life of a subject can be described in an impersonal way. As Parfit puts it, ‘We could describe what, at different times, was thought and felt and observed and done, and how these various events were interrelated. Persons would be mentioned here only in the descriptions of the contents of many thoughts, desires, memories and so on. Persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of any of these thoughts.’ In other words, what is possible is a description which abstracts from the ownership of mental states or events by a subject.
Living among Mysteries
Authors: Clark Stephen R L
Published: November 2023

Allegorizing identification of Hermes and the Divine logos, which achieved its fullest expression in the Hermetic Corpus, is a reminder that God’s messages, characteristically, are obscure. Hermes is the angel of travellers by night or twilight. At such a time ‘everything teases the traveller, puts on a familiar face and the next moment is utterly strange, suddenly terrifies with awful gestures and immediately resumes a familiar and harmless posture’ (Otto 1954: 119). We cannot always trust our own perceptions, even if they are cleared of desire and preconception. So far from creating our own worlds, we are constantly reminded that even our fantasies are not wholly ours to command. Hermes, the god of charm and trickery, is also an angel of death, leading us into the Unseen, Hades, and stealing from us all our little certainties and our more grandiose hopes. Teilhard, meditating on the human future during the First World War, fantasized of the Great Monad, humankind united in what he later called the noosphere, rising from the earth to the skies. In that fantasy the face of the moon served him as a memento mori: ‘what awaits you, you and your works,’ he imagines it to say, ‘is the frozen immobility of my rigid shell’ ( 15 January 1918: Lubac 1967: 50).
The Vacuum on Null Planes
Authors: Fleming Gordon N
Published: November 2023

In 1949 Dirac published a comparison of three distinct approaches that one could take to describing the initial conditions and dynamical evolution of Lorentz covariant quantum theory (Dirac 1949, 1950). One motivation for presenting the comparison was Dirac’s recognition that, in the two approaches that were not used at the time, the description of dynamical evolution had simpler properties, in some respects, than those in the conventional approach. The conventional approach was called by Dirac the Instant Form of quantum dynamics, and the two alternatives were called the Front Form and the Point Form.
Theory of Vacuum
Authors: Finkelstein David
Published: November 2023

Today the vacuum is recognized as a rich physical medium, subject to phase transitions, its symmetry broken by non-vanishing vacuum values for several important fields akin to the permanent magnetization of a ferromagnet, and supporting the emission, propagation, and absorption of particles. A general theory of the vacuum is thus a theory of everything, a universal theory. It would be appropriate to call the vacuum ‘ether’ once again, as long as we remember its local Lorentz invariance. The most workable theories of the vacuum today are quantum field theories. In these the vacuum serves as the law of nature, as reviewed below. The structure of the vacuum is the central problem of physics today; the fusion of the theories of gravity and the quantum is a subproblem. Here I develop a quantum–space–time description of the vacuum. Einstein considered such a programme in the 1930s:
Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive Liberalism’?
Authors: Pogge Thomas W
Published: November 2023

Beginning in 1985,John Rawls has repeatedly emphasized that modern, pluralistic societies should be structured in accordance with a political conception of justice. In doing so, he has insisted that his own liberalism should be understood as political, in contrast to the comprehensive liberalisms of Kant and Mill. While this refinement in Rawls’s position has been discussed by many, his characterization of Kant’s liberalism as comprehensive has not been critically explored in the literature. My interest in beginning such an exploration here is entirely focused on Kant. My guiding thought is that we can gain a better understanding of Kant’s RL by confronting it with the distinction Rawls developed two centuries later.
Self-Legislation and Duties to Oneself
Authors: Reath Andrews
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I focus on some of Kant’s ‘foundational’ remarks about duties to oneself and on some of the problems that they raise. I mean what the syntax of this sentence implies in that the problems that interest me lie more in what Kant says to clarify the basis of duties to oneself than in the idea of such duties themselves. I will not be questioning the general coherence of duties to oneself Instead I will be concerned for the most part with what such duties, as well as what Kant says about them, tell us about his general understanding of certain features of duty and obligation.
Why Not Compatibilism?
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, Stevenson, and a host of others have done what can be done, or ought ever to have been needed, to remove the confusions that can make determinism seem to oppose freedom. (Donald Davidson, ‘Freedom to Act’) No serious believer in the claims that (1) libertarian free will exists, or (2) whether it exists or not it is crucially important, can doubt that there are important compatibilist senses of free will. So much is disputed in the free will problem that we need to begin by clarifying this point.
Why Not Libertarian Free Will?
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

I describe that sort of thing as ‘depending on us’ of which the opposite too is both possible and depends on us; ... For those choices which have nature or training and habit as their causes are said to depend on us in the sense that they come about through us, but those which come about without a cause and in accordance with not-being, these in this way preserve what is said to depend on us in the strict sense. (Alexander of Aphrodisias, in R. W. Sharples, ‘Responsibility, Chance and Not Being’) In the previous chapter, we saw why compatibilism is both ethically and personally insufficient. This makes the promise of libertarian free will significant. Unfortunately, this hope must be dashed, for the required sort of libertarian free will is impossible. Now, the related questions that make up the free will problem are so complex, and so much work has been done on them, that any discussion that begins ‘at the beginning’ or that attempts to take up all free will-related matters will not get far.
The Fundamental Dualism
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 2, we saw that the Core Conception is the basis for our thinking about the free will problem, so that the question of control is of central ethical importance. Chapter 3 explained why any compatibilist notion of control falls far short of fulfilling the requirements of the Core Conception. But Chapter 4 showed that a libertarian notion of control is not available to us. This pushed us towards hard determinism, but then in Chapter 5 we saw why a simplistic hard determinism is also inadequate, and we must go back and recover the partial but true insights of compatibilism. Hence, we are inextricably drawn towards a Fundamental Dualism, incorporating both compatibilism and hard determinism, as a theoretical framework for making sense of moral and personal life in a world without libertarian free will. Since most people are intuitively inclined one way or the other on the Compatibility Question, we need to try out various approaches in showing that we indeed have an inescapable dualism, and to apply these approaches in different contexts.
Positive Importance of Illusion
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

At various stages of previous discussion, lacunas have been revealed which ‘demand’ something like illusion. Perhaps the idea that illusion may need to play a central role in our self-understanding and social order in the free will context is by now expected. In this, the central chapter of the book, we set out to chart the illusionistic situation. We shall see how illusion is useful because of the absence of libertarian free will and because of the contrariety of the partial insights of compatibilism and hard ““““’““’ we shall see that illusion is present, and why it would not be a good thing if it were dissipated. We are fortunate in being imbued with illusion because, I claim, we cannot function well with a complete realization of the truth on the free will issue. Both the nature of this truth and pragmatic considerations following from human weaknesses will be seen to contribute to this conclusion. Illusion helps maintain, and in part even creates, crucial aspects of our moral and personal reality.
Explorations in the Land of Illusion
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

If my view about the role of illusion in our lives is tenable, much more needs to be said. I will attempt here a number of further explorations, trying to make sense of where we stand. This should help integrate some previous themes, further our understanding, and pose new questions, some of which will be taken up later.
Some Further Benefits
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

The picture of the human condition we have ended up with might be plausible, but it is also distressful. When I go on to speak of ‘opportunities’ created it is thus important to realize that little consolation is offered—the opportunities, if at all fortuitous, are of limited significance relative to the moral and personal weight of the conclusions themselves. Nevertheless, difficult conditions sometimes produce interesting rewards and in this context we should cherish anything helpful that we can get.
Some Additional Problems
Authors: Smilansky Saul
Published: November 2023

The difficulties with my position, such as those related to dishonesty or to the political dangers of acknowledging ‘necessary illusions’, are both real and important. They need to be better understood, and certain fears can perhaps be diffused, but there is no simple trick which can make these grave difficulties go away. Hence, the importance attached to them in evaluating the plausibility of the position presented in this book primarily depends on the strength of the case that I have made so far.
The Evolution ofDo-Support in English Imperatives
Authors: Han Chung-Hye
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents an analysis of the syntactic evolution of English imperatives from Late Middle English to the Early Modern period, specifically of the increasing frequency of do-support in negative imperatives. I show that the development ofdo-forms in negative imperatives cannot be explained with a clause structure that has only one INFL projection and one NegP, as assumed in Roberts (1985) and Kroch (1989b). I therefore propose a more articulated clause structure, which I argue is already necessary to explain the syntax of Middle English infinitivals. In particular, I argue that the syntax of negative infinitivals in Middle English can be accounted for if we posit two possible syntactic positions for negation and an intermediate functional projection, which I assume to be an Aspect Phrase (AspP), between the two negation projections.
Emotions in the Music
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

There has been a growing consensus among philosophers of music that, contrary to the skeptical claims of Hanslick, it makes perfect sense to describe music in expressive terms, and that, again contrary to Hanslick’s skeptical claims, there is more or less general agreement, among qualified listeners, as to what the music is expressive of, in any given instance, if, that is, it is expressive of anything (which need not necessarily be the case). More specifically, there has been a growing consensus that music can be, and often is, expressive of the garden-variety emotions, such as sorrow, joy, fear, hope, and a few other basic emotions like these.
Enhanced Formalism
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

Traditional formalism—the formalism of Hanslick. Gurney, and their followers—has always been associated with the denial that music can be described in emotive terms. Hanslick. as we have seen, denied flat out that music could embody the garden-variety emotions, in the only two possible ways he could envision: as dispositional properties of the music to arouse the emotions, or as representations of the emotions. Gurney may have been somewhat more liberal; but his formalism, in the end, amounted to the same thing as Hanslick’s as regards any possible role for the garden-variety emotions in musical aesthetics. For, although he did allow that music could be sad, happy, and so forth, he thought this was completely irrelevant to the aesthetic structure. In other words, the fact that a passage of music might be sad had no more to do with its beauty, or other relevant aesthetic features, than the fact that a peach is fuzzy has anything to do with its taste.
Discussion
Authors: Clapin Hugh
Published: November 2023

Cummins Well, depending on how biological you think language is, if you’re over toward Pinker [1994) on that side of things, then that strikes me as a really good candidate for exactly this sort of thing. Dennett What strikes you? Cummins Spoken language as opposed to written language, on the grounds that the former is much more biological, as the latter is clearly cultural. And it was witting in its origins, at least, if not in its continued use, whereas the other, presumably, just evolved.
Morality, Ideology, and Reflection; or, The Duck Sits Yet
Authors: Railton Peter
Published: November 2023

Morality does make an almost irresistible target, a sitting duck, for Ideologiekritik. For it presents itself as a set of evaluations and commands of lofty impartiality or universal validity; yet a glance at history shows instead a succession of norms-all at one point or other widely viewed as moral-that have sanctioned slavery, the subjugation of women, and a host of other purported rights and duties that seem to us in retrospect to correspond more closely to the prevailing distribution of power, privilege, and interests than to conditions of absolute value or universal reason.
The Stylometric Study of the Aristotelian Writings
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

In recent years A. Q. Morton, A. D. Winspear, and S. Michaelson have applied stylometric techniques to a number of works of Aristotle with a view to settling long-standing scholarly questions about the genuineness and composition of certain disputed texts. (See, in particular, ‘ The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle’ , in It’ s  Greek  to  the  Computer by Morton and Winspear (1971); and ‘ The Authorship and Integrity of the Athenaion Politeia’ by Morton and Michaelson in Proceedings  of  the  Royal  Society  of  Edinburgh, 1971-2). The technique used has been to select a stylistic feature (e.g. sentence-length, or the occurrence of frequent words such as conjunctions and introductory particles) and to study it both in the disputed text in question and in two or three texts taken as definitively Aristotelian-texts such as the Parts  of  Animals, the De  Interpretatione, the De  Caelo, or the De  Anima, the authorship of which can be regarded as a defining characteristic of the Aristotle of tradition.
Thrasymachus and Definition
Authors: Chappell T D J
Published: November 2023

Stephen Everson’s sparkling paper, ‘The Incoherence of Thrasymachus’ [‘Incoherence’], argues, against a number of other interpreters, including myself in ‘The Virtues of Thrasymachus’ [‘Virtues’], that Thrasymachus’ position in Republic book 1 is incoherent. There is much in Everson’s paper that I enthusiastically accept. For a start, I now much more nearly agree with him about the relative importance of Thrasymachus’ and Glaucon’s challenges than I did when I wrote ‘Virtues’, and first heard his objections to it in conversation. Again, I happily applaud his suggestion that part of the point of the encounter with Thrasymachus is to demonstrate how the old-style Socratic method makes ‘Socrates’ pursuit of understanding’ hostage to his interlocutor’s ‘own level of understanding and ability to follow an argument’, and why, therefore, it is ‘philosophically useful to provide Socrates with the more docile and passive interlocutors we find in the rest of the Republic’ (Everson, ‘Incoherence’, 131). Since the docility and passivity of Socrates’ interlocutors is one of Republic 2–1o’s most perplexing and infuriating features (though some other features come to mind too), it is nice to have an apt explanation of it.
Auditor’s Emotions: Contention, Concession, and Compromise
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

If a gradual move towards consensus is a sign of progress in philosophical enquiry, then there certainly does seem to have been progress, in recent years, with regard to the age-old question of what it might mean to ascribe emotive predicates to music. For more and more philosophers seem willing to accept, nowadays, that when one calls a piece of music sad or yearning, contemplative or angry, joyous or melancholy, what one must mean, at least, if not at most, is that that music possesses those emotions as heard, perceptual, ‘phenomenological’ properties of the musical surface and structure itself. As a matter of fact, the philosophical adversary with whom I will be contending in the present paper agrees with me (I think) on that, as do many others, although there is substantial disagreement about how the emotions become or are constituted perceptual properties of the music.
Aristotle on Sign-inference and Related Forms of Argument
Authors: Allen James
Published: November 2023

This account of sign-inference, then, is part of an effort to understand existing practices of argument in the light of the theory of the categorical syllogism, Aristotle’s—and history’s first—formal logic. It is presented again in two passages of theRhetoric. As is made plain by its presence there and references to rhetoric in the above passage fromPrior Analytics 2.
Prospects for a Value-Based lntuitionism
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: November 2023

Throughout most of the twentieth century, and certainly since W D. Ross published The Right and the Good in 1930, intuitionism has been standardly conceived as an uncompromisingly deontological theory. The concept of duty has been considered to be its central normative notion; and although Ross recognized the relevance of non-moral intrinsic values to what our duties require, he apparently regarded their bearing on moral conduct as derivative from their role in determining the content of some of our primary moral duties. Consider, for instance, the duty of beneficence, which reflects the positive value of pleasure: the enhancement of pleasure in the lives of others is among the central targets of beneficent conduct.