bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Relativity Principle and the Fable of Albert Keinstein
Authors: Brown Harvey R.
Published: September 2006

This chapter argues that Albert Einstein was not the first to use the relativity principle (RP) as a postulate in the treatment of a problem in physics. Christian Huygens had done so over two hundred years earlier in his treatment of collisions. It is shown that even Newton in his pre-Principia writings viewed the RP as having the same axiomatic status as his laws. But the prominent role played by the principle in Einstein's 1905 paper on moving bodies in electrodynamics marked the beginning of a new attitude concerning the foundational status of symmetries in physics.
The Trailblazers
Authors: Brown Harvey R.
Published: September 2006

The cradle of the special theory of relativity was the combination of Maxwellian electromagnetism and the electron theory of Lorentz (and to a lesser extent of Larmor) based on Fresnel's notion of the stationary ether. This chapter looks at the contributions of the principal figures concerned with the explanation of the prima facie failure to detect any significant trace of the ether wind on the surface of the earth. Topics discussed include the Michelson-Morley experiment, Michelson-Morley kinematics, FitzGerland and Heaviside, Lorentz, Larmor, and the role of ether prior to Einstein.
Einstein's Principle-theory Approach
Authors: Brown Harvey R.
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on how Einstein arrived at his special theory of relativity. It discusses Einstein's postulates, his derivation of the Lorentz transformations, and experimental evidence for the Lorentz transformations. The chapter then addresses the question of whether Einstein's inertial frames are the same as Newton's.
2 The Life and Career of Peter the Iberian
Authors: Horn Cornelia B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the major stages in Peter the Iberian’s life and career, highlighting the impact of different geographical, cultural, and political influences, namely those of Georgia, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Palestine, Alexandria, and Egypt, and the contributions of individuals from different social roles, such as imperial nobility, patriarchs, monks, pilgrims, and women. Central to this examination is Peter’s multifaceted role of prince, monk, and bishop. He played a central role in the history of the anti-Chalcedonian community in Palestine, both as a figure who decisively influenced events as well as a model and hero that inspired people to adhere to an ideal even after his death.
Asceticism as Locus of Authority: The Case of Peter the Iberian
Authors: Horn Cornelia B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter demonstrates how ascetics gained authority, and used this to promote adherence to the particular religious group with which they were affiliated. It addresses those issues of authority, which surfaced in the anti-Chalcedonian ascetic milieu in the 5th and early 6th centuries in the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, focusing on the people and events pertaining to Peter the Iberian’s life and career. It examines ascetic influences to which Peter was exposed during the formative years of his life, starting in Georgia, then in Constantinople, and, eventually, in a highly concentrated and direct way in the Holy Land. The specific ascetic style which Peter appears to have developed and which his biographer Rufus further worked out in the literary portrait of Peter is highlighted.
4 Weaving the Crown of Pilgrimage: The Spiritual and Polemical Dimensions of Pilgrimage and the Holy Places from an Anti‐Chalcedonian Perspective
Authors: Horn Cornelia B.
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the role of the Holy Land as a singular setting for the Christological controversies in the 5th century. In the context of pilgrimage to the numerous holy places, Peter’s own role as a pilgrim to the Holy Land comes into focus. The spiritual and political implications of his personal pilgrimage as well as the sensitivities of anti-Chalcedonians concerning the fact that the holy places were in the hands of ‘heretical’ Chalcedonians are crucial to understand both Peter’s role as well as the model held out for future generations by Rufus.
Conclusions
Authors: Horn Cornelia B.
Published: September 2006

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of the analysis made in this volume. This study examined the following sources: the Vita Petri Iberi (extant in Syriac, translated into German), the Plerophoriae (extant in Syriac, translated into French), and the De obitu Theodosii (extant in Syriac, translated into Latin), all of which can reasonably be ascribed to John Rufus, the anti-Chalcedonian biographer and likely successor of Peter the Iberian. Based on these texts as well as on supplementary literary, historical, and archaeological sources, this book brought into focus the figure of Peter the Iberian, who until recently had been thoroughly neglected. It is shown that the concerns of Peter and his followers, as presented through Rufus’ lens, were not to engage in a thorough discussion of theology based on hermeneutical or philosophical categories to apologize for and to defend themselves and to prove all else was heresy. Rather, their aim was to live out their belief in their own life, no matter what forms of hardships that would require.
Individuality and Non-Individuality in Quantum Mechanics
Authors: French Steven , Krause Décio
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the concepts of indistinguishability, individuality, and non-individuality in the quantum context. It is argued that the above view of particles as non-individuals is not a necessary consequence of the physics, and that quantum particles can be taken to be individuals, subject to certain constraints. However, the sense of individuality here cannot be understood in terms of the Identity of Indiscernibles, since on a standard interpretation of quantum theory, Leibniz’s Principle is violated by both fermions and bosons. Criticisms of this argument are reviewed, as is Saunders’ recent attempt to defend a Quinean form of the Principle. The consequences of regarding quantum particles as individuals are considered in detail, and Teller’s account of entanglement in terms of non-supervenient relations is developed in this context. The conclusion is reached that quantum physics supports two alternative metaphysical packages of individuality and non-individuality, yielding a stronger form of underdetermination, which can be used to support a form of structuralism.
A Problem for Present-Day Mathematics
Authors: French Steven , Krause Décio
Published: September 2006

This chapter explores Manin’s suggestion that formal axioms for indiscernible objects in physics should be given. Collections of such objects cannot be regarded as sets, since such sets are typically taken to be collections of distinguishable objects. The theory of identity in classical logic and set theory is considered to lay the groundwork for the discussion of the corresponding theory for (truly) indiscernible objects in Chapter 7. The usual ways of accommodating such objects in standard logic and mathematics are critically assessed, with emphasis on the concept of indiscernibility in a structure.
The Logic of Quanta
Authors: French Steven , Krause Décio
Published: September 2006

This chapter begins with a philosophically-oriented outline of quantum field theory that looks at the different ways in which a quantum field can be constructed. The difficulties in articulating a particle ontology are discussed, and it is argued that any putative interpretation of the theory must accommodate the observed particle ‘grin’. A range of metaphysical options are explored, including trope theory and Davudson’s theory of events. The foundations of Fock space are presented in detail from the model-theoretic perspective, and it is suggested that quasi-set theory provides the appropriate formal foundation. Thus, the quanta of quantum field theory can also be accommodated in terms of the overall framework of this work.
3 New World Order Policeman: Responding to Iraqi Aggression Against Kuwait
Authors: Malone David M.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the second phase of UN involvement in Iraq, which seemed to herald the emergence of the Security Council as a New World Order Policeman. The Security Council’s capacity to legitimize the use of force provided a legal basis for international action to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The chapter recounts the diplomatic and military success of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm — mandated to compel the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and conducted by a coalition of states — drawing legitimacy from Security Council decisions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Chapter VII also provided a newly assertive basis for traditional activities, such as ceasefire implementation and border-monitoring tasks, the Council gave to a new mission, UNIKOM, deployed along the border between Iraq and Kuwait. This new police role for UN peace operations was part of a larger ‘New World Order’ heralded by President George H. W. Bush, which seemed to hold the promise of an international rule of law, enforced by a united P-5 operating through the Security Council.
4 Creeping Unilateralism: Humanitarian Interventions and No‐Fly Zones
Authors: Malone David M.
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the third phase of UN involvement in Iraq, characterized by creeping unilateralism, occurring within the context of a more multidisciplinary approach to peace operations. That approach often incorporated humanitarian objectives into peace operations, as reflected in the deployment of UN ‘Guards’ to northern Iraq; but it was also characterized by the early resort (or reversion) by several Security Council members to unilateral action. The chapter specifically examines the imposition by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of no-fly zones over Iraq in 1991 and 1992, and the launch of Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. This creeping unilateralism was a harbinger of further unilateral enforcement measures to come that would sunder the unity of the Security Council’s purpose on Iraq by 1998.
8 Crisis of Confidence: Annus Horribilis and a ‘Vital’ Role
Authors: Malone David M.
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines events in Iraq during the most recent fifth phase of UN involvement. Having been largely sidelined on Iraq in the fourth phase, the UN underwent a Crisis of Confidence between 2004 and 2005, searching for a means to address its demotion. It is argued that that the deadlock in the Council over Iraq in 2003 had critically undermined the UN’s credibility globally, which no amount of activity elsewhere, notably in Africa, could recover. During this period, under Council resolutions, the UN was meant to be playing a ‘vital’ role in Iraq, but its margin for maneuver was circumscribed on the one hand by the continuing strong guiding hand of the United States in Iraqi affairs and on the other by the dreadful security situation in Iraq, precluding deployment of a large UN international staff. During these years, various aspects of the UN’s earlier activities in Iraq, notably the OFF Program, returned to haunt it, making 2004 Kofi Annan’s ‘annus horribilis’.
9 Conclusions: Serious Consequences: How Twenty‐Five Years of Involvement with Iraq Has Changed the Security Council
Authors: Malone David M.
Published: September 2006

This chapter focuses on the instrumental approach of all five permanent members to the Council as a resource for their own purposes, in effect their instrumental multilateralism. It addresses conceptions of legality, legitimacy, representation, and democracy in the Council, seeking to draw lessons from the Council’s drift into decision-making in a legal-regulatory (rather than politico-military) mode, not least with respect to accountability. It also examines some of the challenges the UN and its Member States face when attempting peacebuilding, perhaps better thought of as (responsible) state-building.
The Language and Reality of Time
Authors: Sattig Thomas
Published: September 2006

The book develops a comprehensive framework for doing philosophy of time. It brings together a variety of different perspectives, linking the ordinary conception of time with the physicist’s conception, and linking questions about time addressed in metaphysics with questions addressed in the philosophy of language. Within this framework, the book explores the temporal dimension of the material world in relation to the temporal dimension of our ordinary discourse about the world. The discussion is centred around the dispute between three-dimensionalists and four-dimensionalists about whether the temporal profile of ordinary objects mirrors their spatial profile. Are ordinary objects extended in time in the same way in which they are extended in space? Do they have temporal as well as spatial parts? Four-dimensionalists say ‘yes’, three-dimensionalists say ‘no’. The book develops an original three-dimensionalist picture of the material world, and argues that this picture is preferable to its four-dimensionalists rivals if ordinary thought and talk are taken seriously. Among the issues discussed are the metaphysics of persistence, change, composition, location, coincidence, and relativity; the ontology of past, present, and future; and the semantics of predication, tense, temporal modifiers, and sortal terms.
Four‐Dimensionalist Supervenience
Authors: Sattig Thomas
Published: September 2006

This chapter presents a new account of temporal predication — the representational account — combined with four-dimensionalism to yield the temporal-parts account of temporal supervenience. This elegant account asserts and explains the theses that the facts of persistence logically supervene on facts about the spatiotemporal location of temporal parts of objects, and that the facts of temporal instantiation logically supervene on facts about the atemporal instantiation of properties by temporal parts of objects. It is further shown that the questions of temporal supervenience as well as the four-dimensionalist answers to these questions have interesting spatial and modal analogues. Despite its success in explaining the supervenience of facts of persistence and change, the temporal-parts account has objectionable consequences. Three problems are raised, the most serious of which is the problem of predicational overkill. Each of these problems concerns the account’s failure to capture certain ordinary temporal facts.
Three‐Dimensionalist Supervenience
Authors: Sattig Thomas
Published: September 2006

This chapter develops a three-dimensionalist account of temporal supervenience — the temporal-regions account — and argues that the latter shares the main virtues and avoids the main drawbacks of its four-dimensionalist rival. The three-dimensionalist account asserts and explains the theses that the facts of persistence logically supervene on facts about the spatiotemporal location of objects, and that the facts of temporal instantiation logically supervene on the atemporal instantiation of properties by temporally unextended spacetime regions occupied by objects. Structural similarities of the temporal-regions account and the temporal-parts account are pointed out, and the temporal-regions account is shown to avoid the problems that threaten the temporal-parts account. The remainder of the chapter deals with various consequences and apparent difficulties of three-dimensionalist supervenience.
4 The Auld Enemy
Authors: Hussain Asifa , Miller William
Published: September 2006

Questions in the 2003 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey were used to compare Islamophobia with four other Scottish phobias: sectarianism (primarily anti-Catholic), and phobias about Europe, Asylum seekers, and ‘the auld enemy’(England). Social factors affected all phobias the same way, but political factors discriminated. Conservative voters scored low on Anglophobia but high on every other phobia; SNP voters scored high on Anglophobia but not on other phobias. This suggested that Anglophobia itself displaced Islamophobia by providing another target, and that England itself helped reduce within-Scotland phobias by providing Scots with a common, external and very significant ‘other’. Scotland is too small, too peripheral, and too insignificant to play a corresponding role in displacing phobias within England. However, by stimulating English nationalism without providing a truly significant ‘other’, Scottish nationalism may actually increase Islamophobia in England, but not in Scotland.
6 Harassment, Discrimination, Abuse
Authors: Hussain Asifa , Miller William
Published: September 2006

Two-thirds of Pakistanis and two-fifths of English report being subjected to ‘intentional insults’, although most claim that their abusers were not really ‘typical Scots’. Integration may reduce the harassment of English immigrants, but the more Pakistanis integrate, the more they suffered. Those who were born in Scotland, spoke English at home, or worked outside the home or the family business experienced more harassment and abuse. For ethnic Pakistanis, more contact meant more harassment, and perhaps greater sensitivity to it. General perceptions of conflict between minorities and majority of Scots were strongly linked to personal experience, with frequency having more impact than severity; even irritating ethnic jokes created a perception of conflict if they were frequent. The impact of personal experience on general perceptions of conflict with majority Scots was as strong amongst English immigrants as they were amongst ethnic Pakistanis.
8 Identity and Identifying
Authors: Hussain Asifa , Miller William
Published: September 2006

Identities or self-images are multiple, nested, hyphenated, flexible, and instrumental. Culture and identity provide both bridges and walls between Scots and minorities, but what is a bridge for one is a wall for another. For English immigrants, culture is the bridge and identity the wall, while for ethnic Pakistanis, culture is the wall and identity the bridge. Since English immigrants’ identities are primarily territorial, they cannot identify with Scotland despite respecting its traditions. Since Pakistani identities are primarily cultural (Muslim), their territorial identities are flexible and instrumental. They identify quickly and easily with Scotland, despite wishing to change its culture and traditions by adding more variety. The SNP’s welcoming political stance and its opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq has made it even easier for Muslims to identify with Scotland.
The Value of Humanity in Kant's Moral Theory
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

The humanity formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative demands that we treat humanity as an end in itself. Because this principle resonates with currently influential ideals of human rights and dignity, contemporary readers often find it compelling, even if the rest of Kant’s moral philosophy leaves them cold. Moreover, some prominent specialists in Kant’s ethics recently have turned to the humanity formulation as the most theoretically central and promising principle of Kant’s ethics. Nevertheless, despite the intuitive appeal and the increasingly recognized philosophical importance of the humanity formulation, it has received less attention than many other, less central, aspects of Kant’s ethics. This book is the most sustained and systematic examination yet of the humanity formulation. It argues that the ‘rational nature’ that must be treated as an end in itself is not a minimally rational nature consisting of the power to set ends or the unrealized capacity to act morally, but instead is the more properly rational nature possessed by someone who gives priority to moral principles over any contrary impulses. In other words, good will is the end in itself. This non-standard reading of the humanity formulation provides a firm theoretical foundation for deriving plausible approaches to particular moral issues. Contrary to first impressions, it does not impose moralistic demands to pass judgment on others’ character. This reading of the humanity formulation also enables progress on problems of interest to Kant scholars such as reconstructing Kant’s argument for accepting the humanity formulation as a basic moral principle, and allows for increased understanding of the relationship between Kant’s ethics and supposedly Kantian ideas such as ‘respect for autonomy’.
Introduction
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

This chapter introduces the basic ideas of the book. It connects the main idea of part I — that good will is the end in itself — to the further examination of the humanity formulation in part II. The scholarly and practical points of part II are linked to part I because they rely on taking good will to be the end in itself, and because both parts of the book emphasize Kant’s concept of value, which says that talk about value is just a way to capture the conceptually prior idea of rational choice.
The Textual Dispute, and Arguments in Favour of Minimal Readings
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

Commentators more or less universally agree that the ‘humanity’ that must be treated as an end in itself is not literally membership in the human species, but rather some minimal form of ‘rational nature’ possessed by all typical adult humans. But there is more disagreement than is generally recognized about exactly what aspect of rational nature qualifies someone as an end in herself. Although Kant’s texts are not perfectly consistent, the most justified overall reading is that Kant means the end in itself to be the will of a being committed to morality, rather than the end in itself being just the power to set ends (Willkür), the self-legislation of moral principles through Wille, or the overall capacity to act morally. Many of the texts offered in favor of one of the minimal readings of ‘humanity’ actually favour the good will reading if taken within their larger context, and some key passages favouring the good will reading have been overlooked or minimized.
The Argument for the Humanity Formula
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

It is no easy task to decipher Kant’s argument for accepting the humanity formulation as a fundamental principle of morality (often called his ‘derivation’ of the humanity formulation). The argument may be viewed as having two steps. The first step, establishing that each rational agent has reason to treat her own rational nature in certain ways, is justified because one’s own rational nature is the necessary condition of the value of any other ends one has. The second step, establishing that each rational agent also must treat others’ rational nature in certain ways, depends on Kant’s idea that any formulation of the Categorical Imperative must embody basic everyday assumptions about the nature of morality. A principle of morality must give people common ends to work toward, rather than spurring them toward inevitable conflict. Thus, a moral principle based on the importance of rational nature must emphasize the importance of everyone’s rational nature, instead of telling each person to care only about her own.
Kantian Value, Beneficence, and Consequentialism
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

In order to properly understand the duties that Kant thinks follow from the humanity formulation, it is important to keep Kant’s conception of value firmly in mind. If one fails to take account of Kant’s idea that choice is conceptually prior to claims about value, then it is easy to arrive at exaggerated conclusions about the duties that we have toward others. It is argued that this kind of mistake is the source of some commentators’ claims that the humanity formulation leads to a strong duty of beneficence: a requirement to treat others’ ends in the same way we treat our own. It also is a major problem in David Cummiskey’s arguments for ‘Kantian Consequentialism’.
Non‐Human Animals, Humanity, and the Kingdom of Ends
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

A strategy developed by Thomas E. Hill Jr. — that of using the kingdom of ends as a moral constructivist device for deliberating about specific moral questions — is adopted as a further interpretive tool for moving from the basic humanity formulation to particular duties. But unlike Hill, it is emphasized that this use of the kingdom of ends presupposes that to be an end in oneself, or a deliberator in the kingdom of ends, one must be committed to morality. As an example of a specific moral issue, the moral status of non-human animals is considered. The examination of animals’ moral status shows that although the good will reading of the humanity formulation may seem extreme, it can lead to moderate conclusions about specific moral issues. It is also suggested that the emphasis on a distinction between direct and indirect duties is an oversimplification of a Kantian view of animals’ moral status.
Autonomy as an End in Itself?
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

The idea that autonomy is the end in itself deserves more careful examination, since it captures an idea that many readers of Kant find intuitively appealing about the central importance of freedom in Kant’s overall philosophical system. Paul Guyer has defended the idea that the value of freedom is actually the foundation of Kant’s moral philosophy, and other commentators have pointed out texts in which Kant seems to identify the more specifically defined free and autonomous self-legislation of moral principles as the end in itself. It is argued that most of the case for these readings depends either on ambiguous texts or on identifiable misunderstandings of Kant’s statements.
Some Big Pictures
Authors: Dean Richard
Published: September 2006

This chapter makes three large-scale points about the positions developed in the book. First, it explains that taking good will as an end in itself is consistent with Jerome Schneewind’s emphasis on the historical context of Kant’s revolutionary moral insights. In particular, Kant’s opposition to voluntarism or divine command theory fits with the good will reading. The second point is that of all the possible readings of the humanity formulation, the least justified is the one which takes the mere power of choice or Willkür to be the end in itself. The third point is just a final emphasis on the role of humanity in Kant’s moral theory, that Kant not only takes humanity to be an object of moral concern, but also a moral ideal toward which we should strive continuously.
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Paradox of Early Exit from Work
Authors: Ebbinghaus Bernhard
Published: September 2006

Early retirement has become a major issue of current welfare state reforms in aging societies. This introductory chapter discusses the different protection-oriented ‘pull’ and production-oriented ‘push’ factors that caused more early exit from work prior to age 65. It argues for systematic comparison of welfare regimes, production systems, and labor relations, as well as the study of the key role of social partners in institutional change.
Chapter 3 Protection, Production, and Partnership Institutions: From Institutional Affinities to Complementarities
Authors: Ebbinghaus Bernhard
Published: September 2006

Three major regime typologies are compared: welfare regimes, production systems (or ‘varieties of capitalism’), and labor relations between employers and trade unions. These ideal type classifications are compared with empirical indicators for eight European countries, Japan, and the USA. The institutional affinities between protection, production, and partnership institutions, and the consequences they have are considered.
Chapter 5 The Protection‐Pull Factors: Multiple Pathways to Early Exit
Authors: Ebbinghaus Bernhard
Published: September 2006

There are multiple pathways to early exit from work: early pensions (retirement age before 65), flexible and partial pensions, special preretirement schemes, long-term unemployment benefits, and disability pensions. Early exit from work often emerged as an unintended consequence of progressive social policies. But once institutionalized, these exit pathways were difficult to reform, particularly in Continental European welfare states. In contrast, fewer and less generous pathways exist in Scandinavia, Anglophone economies, and Japan.
Chapter 7 Exit from Early Retirement: Paradigm Shifts, Policy Reversals, and Reform Obstacles
Authors: Ebbinghaus Bernhard
Published: September 2006

Governments have realized the negative impact of early retirement on social expenditures and labor costs, responding with a paradigm shift away from passive labor market policies. Governments seek to reverse early exit by raising the retirement age in pension systems, reforming disability insurance, closing special early retirement programs, activating older workers, and fostering gradual transitions to retirement. These reforms met many obstacles given the entrenched multiple pathways and status quo defense of the social partners, particularly as benefits came to be viewed as acquired rights.
Chapter 8 Conclusion: From Path Dependence to Path Departure?
Authors: Ebbinghaus Bernhard
Published: September 2006

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, evaluating the protection-oriented ‘pull’ and production-oriented ‘push’ approaches to explain the long-term development and cross-national variations in early exit from work. It discusses the difficulties of ‘path dependence’ as well as the opportunities of institutional change to reverse early retirement policies. It recommends a paradigm shift away from early retirement in combination with integration policies that facilitate older workers to remain active.
Models, Truth, and Realism
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This book mounts an argument against one of the fundamental tenets of much contemporary philosophy, the idea that we can make sense of reality as existing objectively, independently of our capacities to come to know it. Part One argues that traditional realism can be explicated as a doctrine about truth — that truth is objective, that is, public, bivalent, and epistemically independent. Part Two argues that a form of Hilary Putnam’s model-theoretic argument demonstrates that no such notion of truth can be founded on the idea of correspondence, as explained in model-theoretic terms. Part Three argues that non-correspondence accounts of truth-truth as superassertibility or idealized rational acceptability, formal conceptions of truth, and Tarskian truth also fail to meet the criteria for objectivity. Along the way, it also dismisses the claims of the latter-day views of Putnam, and of similar views articulated by John McDowell, to constitute a new, less traditional, form of realism. The Coda bolsters some of the considerations advanced in Part Three in evaluating formal conceptions of truth, by assessing and rejecting the claims of Robert Brandom to have combined such an account of truth with a satisfactory account of semantic structure. The book concludes that there is no defensible notion of truth that preserves the theses of traditional realism, nor any extant position sufficiently true to the ideals of that doctrine to inherit its title. So the only question remaining is which form of antirealism to adopt.
Realism and Objective Truth
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This chapter begins by examining and adapting a characterization of realism offered by Michael Devitt, settling on an initial formulation of realism about objects of kind K as the doctrine that objects of kind K exist objectively, and explaining objective existence in terms of intersubjective warrant. Since object realism is an inadequate framework for the discussion of some debates between realists and their opponents, the apparatus of situations and facts is invoked to do justice. However, the argument discussed in literature reveals that the apparatus of situations is too fragile to bear any explanatory weight. The developing analysis can be freed from reliance on this apparatus by semantic ascent, where fact realism is supplanted by semantic realism. Realism is linked with a commitment to the applicability, across the field for which realism is maintained, of a concept of truth which is intersubjective, epistemically independent, and bivalent.
Realism Explicated
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This chapter sets out to extract more of the properties of objective truth. It inquires into the principles governing certification. Principles governing the logical connectives are borrowed from Crispin Wright, and tested for adequacy against intuition, particularly on the question of the distributivity of objective truth across the connectives. It is argued that objective truth can be explicated as truth with the hallmark traits, without commitment to the literal truth of the framework, which has helped us to identify them.
Changing the Rules
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines other ways the Argument from Completeness might be attacked. It identifies two strategies that the realist might deploy in order to avoid the difficulties engendered by the applicability of the Completeness Theorem to the ideal theory. The first is to insist that the theory be cast in some non-first-order language which resists completeness. The second is to allow ideal theory to continue to be rendered in first-order form, but to argue for a semantics in which interpretations take such a new shape that there is no longer any guarantee that any consistent theory has a model in the new sense.
The Status of Natural Properties
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the case for natural properties made by David Lewis. Section 5.1 looks at the role such properties play in Lewis’s system. Section 5.2 sets out his reasons for believing in them: that they are required to accommodate Moorean facts about the similarity of objects; and that they are indispensable to philosophical theorizing. Section 5.3 proposes an alternative to natural properties: these are the T-cosy predicates, defined by the role predicates play in theories. Section 5.4 argues that T-cosy predicates can be used to accommodate the Moorean facts as well as natural properties can do; and section 5.5 that where natural properties have an uncontroversially legitimate role to play in philosophical theory, T-cosy predicates will once again do the job. The conclusion is that natural properties constitute unnecessary metaphysical baggage, to be rejected along with the Eliteness Constraint they underpin.
Taking the Hierarchy Seriously
Authors: Taylor Barry
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines Crispin Wright’s account of truth as superassertibility, and the account with which Putnam proposes in Reason, Truth, and History — of truth as idealized rational acceptability. It is argued that both can be represented as attempts to take a version of Part One’s Hierarchy of Certification as a serious analytic tool rather than as a disposable heuristic ladder.
Neuroscience, Psychoanalysis, and Memory
Authors: Cavell Marcia
Published: September 2006

Although psychoanalysis has been attacked on every conceivable level, contemporary research supports Freud’s most important thesis: that much mental functioning is unconscious, and kept out of consciousness by anxiety and defence against anxiety. Research also supports other important Freudian propositions, such as that childhood catastrophes reverberate in the adult mind, causing pathological ways of thinking and behaving; that memory has different ways of working, many of which are unconscious; and that anxiety misunderstood fixes us neurotically to the past. This chapter focuses on the concepts of the unconscious and emotional memory. It argues that as there are many kinds of unconscious mental processes, so are there multiple memory systems, each obeying different rules of operation, which interact to produce the subjective experience of remembering.
On Judgment
Authors: Cavell Marcia
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses Freud’s idea of ‘the reality principle’ as in effect containing an analysis of the necessary conditions for prepositional thought. In calling ‘the setting-up of the reality principle’ a ‘momentous step’, Freud is explicitly contrasting judgments about things as they are with wishes, or expressions of personal taste, or sentences that look like judgments about what is but that are really expressions of disguised wishes. With judgment, come the capacities for reality testing, and also for fantasy, self-deception, delusion, and illusion. Attempts by psychoanalysts, notably Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, to derive prepositional thought from fantasies are criticized.
Self-Reflections
Authors: Cavell Marcia
Published: September 2006

This chapter claims that investigations into the nature of the self that do not consider the background conditions for being able to think thoughts such as ‘I am thinking’ or ‘I believe that p’, are bound to give a peculiar idea of selfhood. One can take neither the capacity for self-reference nor the unity of the self, as given; such unity as there is comes about through processes of integration. It is argued that Harry Frankfurt’s idea of integrity as wholehearted caring is unsatisfactory because it neglects the roles of other people and an openness to reality in the integrating process.
Irrationality and Self-Transcendance
Authors: Cavell Marcia
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses the thoughts of Davidson and Freud about irrationality. It then examines the problem of self-transcendence, where a person forms a positive or negative judgment of some of his own desires, and acts to change these desires. From the point of view of the changed desire, there is no reason for the change — the reason comes from an independent source, and is based on further, and partly contrary, considerations.
Experience and the World's Own Language
Authors: Gaskin Richard
Published: September 2006

John McDowell’s attempt to revive the doctrine of empiricism in a ‘minimal’ or ‘transcendental’ form is seriously undermined by inadequacies in the way he conceives what he styles the ‘order of justification’ connecting world, experience, and judgement. For example, his conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity. The requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the ‘order of justification’, and thus deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell’s position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege’s radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell’s metaphysical economy. To correct this mistake, Frege must first be followed in his location of concepts at the level of reference. Second, one must move beyond Frege to locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level. This, in turn, requires the serious consideration of an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us ‘in the world’s own language’. Despite the correction recommended here, if empiricism is to have any chance of success, it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows. In particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the ‘order of justification’.
I Minimal empiricism and the ‘order of justification’
Authors: Gaskin Richard
Published: September 2006

McDowell’s minimal empiricism holds that empirical thought’s directedness at the world is routed essentially via experience. He wants us to conceive experience not as an interface but as a conduit, enabling us to be open to the world. On this conception, experience mediates in both a causal and a normative way between world and mind. However, there are difficulties with a number of his formulations of his position. It is argued that these can be overcome if McDowell is represented as offering a staging-post model according to which causal and normative relations obtain between world and experience on the one hand, and experience and judgement on the other. With that model in place, McDowell thinks we will be able to move to a simpler model in which experience functions as a relation between world and mind, rather than itself a relatum.
III Experience and judgement
Authors: Gaskin Richard
Published: September 2006

There are several obstacles in McDowell’s thought to his embracing a conduit conception of experience. The main ones are: the idea that thinkers are free in making observational judgments, the suggestion that subjects are infallible about how things seem to them to be, and the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell puts upon the ‘order of justification’. The last of these means that McDowell insists that each individual must have self-conscious and articulable access to the propositional contents which justify his or her observational judgements. It is argued that this is a mistake: a subject can have an experience with a particular content even if he, she, or it lacks the mental resources to entertain self-conscious and verbalizable thought about that content, and so lacks the capacity to make the observational judgment which that experience would justify.
V Diagnosis and treatment
Authors: Gaskin Richard
Published: September 2006

McDowell’s view is that if infants and animals did have conscious experience, they would be confronted with private objects in Wittgenstein’s sense — bits of unstructured sensory Given. It is argued that since we are obliged to accord conscious experience to infants and animals, McDowell is in effect saddled with supposing that they confront Kantian things-in-themselves, objects which are noumenal with respect to the conceptual. This fits with his location of the world at the level of sense rather than reference in the Fregean semantic hierarchy. On McDowell’s metaphysical picture, objects — the inhabitants of the realm of reference — are banished from the world to a noumenal penumbra. To unpick ourselves from this nominalistic entanglement, we need to follow Frege in locating concepts/properties at the level of reference. McDowell’s hostility to doing so, which seems to be based on a fear of an excessive platonism, must be set aside.
VI The world's own language
Authors: Gaskin Richard
Published: September 2006

It is not enough to merely locate objects and concepts (properties) at the level of reference. If these are not to be merely two different kinds of thing-in-itself, we also need to locate propositional combinations of objects and concepts at that level. It is argued that semantical and metaphysical considerations oblige us to take this step beyond Frege. We should recognize the existence of both true and false propositions at the level of reference, and identify the world with the level of reference, so understood. That yields a good sense in which the world ‘speaks its own language’, an idea McDowell mentions only to reject. The resulting linguistic idealism, provides the only safe context in which a genuinely minimal empiricism can thrive.
7 The Knowledge of God
Authors: Hägg Henny Fiskå
Published: September 2006

The relationship between Clement’s apophaticism and his epistemology is discussed. Particular attention is paid to the consequences of the negative way to God — as an expression of Clement’s view of God’s absolute incomprehensibility — and to the negative way’s relation to the positive, or cataphatic way: the way of knowing the unknowable.
Open Economy Complications
Authors: Stiglitz Joseph E. , Ocampo José Antonio , Spiegel Shari , Ffrench-Davis Ricardo , Nayyar Deepak
Published: September 2006

This chapter extends the analysis of the previous chapter to an open economy by introducing exchange rate policy; analyzing the complex relationships between exchange rate, fiscal, and monetary policies; and examining the ways in which capital flows complicate traditional analyses. Despite the greater complexities associated with open economy macroeconomics, the policy conclusions for a closed economy remain remarkably unaffected. While Keynesians and heterodox economists believe that government should actively intervene, conservatives remain skeptical about the desirability of such interventions. The objective of this chapter is to shed some light on how economists can come to such diverse views on economic policy. The first section examines the macroeconomic effects of exchange rates on employment, trade, inflation, aggregate demand, growth, and balance sheets. The second section examines the complex interactions between fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies in open economies with either fixed or flexible exchange rate regimes. This section also examines the effects of interest rates and exchange rates on capital flows in both crisis and non-crisis situations.
Formal Approaches
Authors: Stiglitz Joseph E. , Ocampo José Antonio , Spiegel Shari , Ffrench-Davis Ricardo , Nayyar Deepak
Published: September 2006

This chapter discusses advances in formal economic theory by examining how different positions among economists arise from their different assumptions and models. The discussion focuses on ways in which real world economies differ from the ‘competitive equilibrium’ model that has become the benchmark model. The current benchmark competitive equilibrium framework includes new classical, representative agent, and real business cycle models which assume that all markets (including the labor market) have clear, perfect information, complete markets (including perfect capital and insurance markets), perfect wage and price flexibility, perfect competition, perfect rationality, and no externalities. If these models accurately portrayed reality, the economy would be efficient and there would be no need for government intervention. The assumptions of these models, however, are unrealistic and it is difficult to reconcile the required macro-formulations with what is known about microeconomic behavior (without resorting to ad hoc assumptions about the nature of the stochastic shocks to preferences and technology). The inadequacies of these models are even greater for developing countries where information imperfections are more pervasive and more markets are missing or incomplete (e.g., insurance markets). Accordingly, economic research since the 1990s has focused on identifying the most important limitations of the standard competitive model, particularly those limitations that help to explain the nature of economic volatility.
Kant on Autonomy and Moral Evil
Authors: Kosch Michelle
Published: September 2006

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s approach to moral evil. It lays out an apparent problem with Kant’s account of the connection between the freedom required for moral responsibility and the freedom of rational autonomy: that if the former requires the latter, then imputable moral evil is impossible.
Idealism and Autonomy in Schelling's Early Systems
Authors: Kosch Michelle
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines Schelling’s early systematic philosophy, with special attention to his solution to the freedom-determinism problem (a form of idealist compatibilism that was widely influential) and his account of the unity of reason.
Freedom against Reason: Schelling's Freiheitsschrift and Later Work
Authors: Kosch Michelle
Published: September 2006

This chapter examines the post-1809 change in Schelling’s view of the system-freedom problem, shows the change to arise from consideration of the problem of freedom for evil, and introduces the main ideas of the late positive philosophy.
Religiousness B and Agency
Authors: Kosch Michelle
Published: September 2006

This chapter outlines Kierkegaard’s account of Christian belief and the foundations of Christian ethics, and his positive account of moral agency.