bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry
Authors: Brook Clodagh J
Published: November 2023

It is impossible to say just what I mean!' Prufrock's frustration in Eliot's celebrated poem underlines the pessimistic view of language at the heart of much Modernist poetry. Locating the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale, firmly within European Modernism, this book examines the struggle with language that is central to his work. What can a poet do when words fail him? Does he put down his pen, retreat into silence? Does he seek instead to push language towards its limits, and, if so, what tools can he employ? What part does metaphor, the via negativa, allusive or understated writing have in this process? These are just some of the issues that Clodagh J. Brook seeks to address. In its unravelling of the inexpressibility paradox, her book offers a new reading of Montale's early verse, and reveals how in articles and metapoetic comments Montale gives us insights into both his poetics and the whole process of expression.
Athens, Democracy and Freedom
Authors: Schofield Malcolm
Published: November 2023

In Karl Popper’s famous book The Open Society and its Enemies, Plato ﬁgures not as the earliest architect of an anti-democratic ideology (that accolade went to Heraclitus), but as the most influential of all anti-democratic thinkers in the Western tradition. Hence the title of Popper’s first volume: The Spell of Plato. His interpretation of the Republic was highly controversial, and in some respects demonstrably mistaken. But although there are lines of thought worked out in the Republic that need not in themselves be regarded as incompatible with democracy, few readers would deny that its main political argument is profoundly undemocratic in basic direction.
Utopia
Authors: Schofield Malcolm
Published: November 2023

One thing everybody knows about the Republic is that it is the first great work of political utopianism ever written—although it was not for another 2,000 years that the word ‘utopia’ was invented (by Sir Thomas More, early in the sixteenth century). In some minds that description will at once ring warning bells. Wasn’ t the construction of utopias a blind alley for political thought and (still more) for the pursuit of happiness? And isn’ t it an activity—whether literary or political—we are now thankfully rid of? Not for nothing, it might be said, was the second half of the twentieth century punctuated by inquests on the entire enterprise: After Utopia, The End of Ideology, Das Ende der Utopie, The End of Utopia, and (ambiguously, but perhaps most notoriously of all) The End of History, even if the note they were striking was seldom uncomplicatedly triumphalist.
Ideology
Authors: Schofield Malcolm
Published: November 2023

The nightmare of society tearing itself apart in mutual hatred and the pursuit of self-interest is a spectre omnipresent in Plato’s thinking about politics: a nightmare for our own times. Plato’s recipe in the Republic and the Laws alike for dispelling it has various components: tightly controlled institutional structures; a common education—at least for the ruling classes—designed to develop or control (as needed) every element in the human psyche for the promotion of virtue; government conducted with wisdom and an overriding concern for the public interest. Another ingredient is the subject of this final chapter: ideology. Not Plato’s word, of course (a late eighteenth-century French coinage). and a word with a range of meanings, although its use as a critical tool by Marx, Marxists and other theorists of false consciousness is per-haps the most celebrated.
The Present State of the Scientific Realism Debate
Authors: Psillos Stathis
Published: November 2023

In this survey article I try to appraise the present state of the scientific realism debate with an eye to important but hitherto unexplored suggestions and open issues that need further work. In Section 2, I mostly focus on the relationship between scientific realism and truth. In Section 3, I discuss the grounds for realists’ epistemic optimism.

There was at one time a feeling in the philosophy of science community that the scientific realism debate had run out of steam. Fine went so far as to declare that ‘realism is well and truly dead’ ([1986a], p. 112) and to write the obituary of the debate, aka the Natural Ontological Attitude. Fortunately, this line of argument has failed to persuade many philosophers, who still think that the scientific realism debate has a glorious past and a very promising future
Getting to Goodness
Authors: Inwood Brad
Published: November 2023

It is a fundamental tenet of Stoicism that the entire repertoire of human concepts comes directly or indirectly from our sensory experience, interpreted broadly. Here (for convenience) is a familiar set of texts which tells us most of what we know about Stoic theories on the acquisition of concepts. Diogenes Laertius 7.52–3 52. According to the Stoics, ‘sense-perception’ refers to [a] the pneumawhich extends from the leading part [of the soul] to the senses and [b] the ‘grasp’ which comes through the senses and [c] the equipment of the sense organs (in which some people are impaired).
Seneca and Self-assertion
Authors: Inwood Brad
Published: November 2023

This essay is, in a sense, the continuation of a line of thought about moral psychology in Seneca first broached in Chapter 5. Between the composition of the two a little over seven years passed. The occasion of the first essay was a conference paper and the earliest version of it was entitled ‘The Will and the Self in Seneca’. But the longer I worked on that paper and the more critical feedback I received, the more self-less it became, until in the end it was entitled simply
The Pet Fish and the Red Herring: Why Concepts Still Can ’t Be Prototypes
Authors: Fodor Jerry , Lepore Ernest
Published: November 2023

THERE is a standard objection to the idea that concepts might be prototypes (or exemplars, or stereotypes; we ’ll use these terms inter changeably): Because they are productive, concepts must be compositional. Prototypes are n ’t compositional. So concepts can ‘t be prototypes. However, two recent papers (Osherson and Smith 1988 (OS2); Kamp and Partee 1995 (KP)) reconsider this consensus. They suggest that, although the standard objection is probably right in the long run, the cases where prototypes fail to exhibit compositionality are relatively exotic and involve phenomena that any account of compositionality is likely to find hard to deal with; for example, the effects of vagueness, quantifiers, indexicals, contextual constraints, etc.
Strawson and Analytic Kantianism
Authors: Glock Hans-Johann
Published: November 2023

It is a commonplace that the reputation of, and interest in, philosophers of the past waxes and wanes from decade to decade. But while even the greatest members of the philosophical pantheon can become unfashionable, some of them have never been neglected entirely. Plato and Aristotle belong to that select group, and so do the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes, and its most eminent representative, Kant. Still, there was a time when interest in Kant was mainly historical in nature, roughly between the 1920s and the 1960s. After the First World War the neo-Kantianism that had dominated academic philosophy on the Continent for fifty years finally ran out of steam. As a dynamic motor of philosophical development neo Kantianism was replaced by phenomenology and its hermeneutic offspring on the one hand, by analytic philosophy on the other.
Transcendental Arguments and Realism
Authors: Grundmann Thomas , Misselhorn Catrin
Published: November 2023

It almost amounts to a platitude that realism and transcendental arguments do not go well together. To see why, let us briefly rehearse the characteristics of transcendental arguments. (i) Their premisses have to be justified independently of any experience about the external world, i.e. they must be justified introspectively or a priori. (ii) The premisses cannot be rejected by the sceptic. (iii) Transcendental arguments uncover necessary conditions of thought and experience. (iv) The conclusion of the argument entails truths about the external world. But, as Barry Stroud has emphasized since the late 196os, the premisses of transcendental arguments seem to have only psychological status. They, therefore, do not warrant any inferences about the external world.
On Strawson ‘s Naturalistic Turn
Authors: Stern Robert
Published: November 2023

It is customary when considering Strawson ‘s philosophical outlook to categorize him as a Kantian, and understandably so: Strawson ‘s The Bounds of Sense is one of the most influential studies of Kant ‘s first Critique; his use of transcendental arguments in that work and in his earlier book Individuals is clearly inspired by Kant; and Strawson ‘s opposition to certain kinds of empiricism and anti-philosophical scientism (the former embodied for him by Ayer and the latter by Quine) appears to reflect Kant ‘s own hopes for his transcendental philosophy, as offering a ‘third way ‘ between these and a rationalistic traditional metaphysics. Above all, perhaps, it has been assumed that it is in relation to the problems posed by scepticism that Strawson is close to Kant, in attempting to undercut the sceptical position by showing that it rests on a questionable underlying assumption (for example, that inner sense is possible without outer sense, or that first-person experience is possible without experience of others), and that once the fallaciousness of this assumption is exposed, the sceptical position can be rebutted.
Program Explanation: A General Perspective
Authors: Jackson Frank , Pettit Philip
Published: November 2023

The essay is in three sections. The first section introduces three plausible assumptions about the role of properties in causal explanations. We will not be questioning these assumptions here. The second section shows how these assumptions generate a problem when combined with a fourth assumption that looks equally difficult to resist. The third section offers a solution to the problem by showing how, nevertheless, we can and should resist this fourth assumption. The fourth assumption is that the only way in which a property can be causally relevant to an effect is by being causally efficacious in its production. In order to resist that assumption, the essay draws on an account of causal relevance under which a property can be causally relevant without being causally efficacious.
Structural Explanation 1n Social Theory
Authors: Jackson Frank , Pettit Philip
Published: November 2023

Social facts are easier to illustrate than define. They include facts, if they are facts, like the following: that the rich enjoy higher social status than the poor; that there has been a world-wide fall in the number of smokers; that the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan; that the crime00ADrate in Australia is lower than in the US; that every successful entrepreneur maximizes expected net revenue; and that the birth00ADrate in Western countries fell in the twentieth century.
Minimalism and Truth Aptness
Authors: Jackson Frank , Oppy Graham , Smith Michael
Published: November 2023

Non-cognitivism in ethics holds that ethical sentences are not in the business of being either true or false-for short, they are not truth apt. No-truth theories of indicative conditionals (on one labelling of the relevant class of conditionals) hold that indicative conditionals have assertability or acceptability conditions, but not truth conditions; they are not truth apt. The arguments for these views are typically local to ethics and conditionals, respectively. They are not usually set within a specific theory of truth, and the question of how they connect to the various theories of truth is typically left unaddressed. This is surprising.’ An obvious question to ask about non-cognitivism and no-truth theories of conditionals is how they fare in the light of various views about truth.
Backgrounding Desire
Authors: Pettit Philip , Smith Michael
Published: November 2023

Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision00ADmaking, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in the foreground?
Function and Design Revisited
Authors: Buller David J
Published: November 2023

The concept of design has played a central role in several prominent theories of biological function. Williams, for example, argues that the demonstration of design is both necessary and sufficient for the demonstration of function (1966: 209). Millikan says: ‘Having a proper function is a matter of having been “designed to” . . . perform a certain function’ (1984: 17). And Kitcher echoes: ‘the function of S is what S is designed to do’ (1993: 380). None of these authors, however, provides an analysis of design. Williams assumes, instead, that ‘design is something that can be intuitively comprehended’ by analogy with human engineering (1966: 260; see also 1992: 40).
The Continuing Usefulness Account of Proper Function
Authors: Schwartz Peter H
Published: November 2023

In the last quarter century, etiological accounts have dominated much of the debate over the concept of function. Following Larry Wright (1973), these accounts say that a trait has a function F only if it has been favored by natural selection for doing F. Even critics now agree that this approach is needed to explicate at least one of the concepts at work in biology, which some have termed ‘proper function’ (cf. Millikan 1984, 1989b). Attempting to work out the details, Griffiths (1992, 1993) and Godfrey-Smith (1994) have presented convincing arguments that an etiological account should require that the relevant natural selection occurred recently, often in the form of maintenance selection.
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
Authors: Sedley David
Published: November 2023

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. The essays in this volume focus in particular on Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics.
Human Bonding and OikeiŌsis in Roman Stoicism
Authors: Reydams-schils Gretchen
Published: November 2023

For he who is either fast bound in the love lures of his wife or under the stress of nature makes his children his first care, ceases to be the same to others, and unconsciously has become a different man, and has passed from freedom into slavery. The Stoics inherited from Plato2 and Aristotle (Art’ io98bi3-i4) a threefold division of ‘goods’ into ‘goods of the soul, goods of the body, and externals’. Emphasizing the opposition between soul and body, Plato also puts such a division to work in the Phaedo (63 e- 69 e; esp. 68 b, c), in order to pinpoint virtue and happiness. In this same context Plato has Socrates send his spouse, ‘the women’, and his children away (60 a; i 16 b), in order to ‘avoid the unseemliness’
Non-Rational Perception in The Stoics and Augustine
Authors: Brittai Charles
Published: November 2023

Augustine was interested in the experience of ordinary cognitive agents. In his view, human experience involves three quite different kinds of cognitive information: the products of the non-rational faculties we have in common with animals, and those of the rational and intellectual faculties that distinguish us from them. His analyses of the relation between ordinary rational thought and intellection are relatively well known, if still profoundly puzzling. His views on the relation between ordinary thought and non-rational perception are less well known, though perhaps equally puzzling. In either case, his approach seems to lead to two problems: about the way in which the relevant faculty (the intellect, the senses) grasps its objects, and about how the information grasped by that faculty (intellectual objects, sensory input) is ‘translated’ or applied in ordinary rational thought. In this paper I look at some of Augustine’s views about the objects and contents of non-rational perception, in the hope that getting some idea of its scope will ultimately contribute towards a clearer understanding of Augustine’s conception of ordinary rational thought.
The Stative Value of the PIE Verbal Suffix *-‹éh1-
Authors: Ruijgh C J
Published: November 2023

In this paper I shall plead for the stative value of the PIE verbal suffix *-éh1-as established, among others, by Watkins (1971), and against the fientive value defended recently by Harðarson (1998) and Rix (1998). Since the passive Greek -η- aorist is used by the latter two as an argument for the fientive meaning, I shall show that the original form of this aorist morpheme was *-η-σ-.
Spoken Language and Written Text: The Case of αλλοϵ ι δ ϵ α (Hom. Od. 13. 194)
Authors: Cassio A C
Published: November 2023

Brought back home by the Phaeacians, Odysseus wakes up in his native Ithaca but is unable to recognize it because of the mist Athena has poured around him: the features of the surrounding landscape look strangely unfamiliar to him:
The ‘Swimming Duck’ in Greek and Hittite
Authors: Katz Joshua T
Published: November 2023

This paper, a version of which was presented at the 206th Meeting of the American Oriental Society in Philadelphia in March 1996, expands on and revises a passing suggestion in Katz (2001: 210, with n. 16). It is a pleasure to dedicate a small and ‘anatine’ Graeco-Hittite etymology to Anna Morpurgo Davies, whose contributions to Greek and Anatolian linguistics have been astounding. For helpful comments I am grateful to Gillian R. Hart, P. Oktor Skjærø…, Brent Vine, Calvert Watkins, Michael Weiss, and especially H. Craig Melchert; I hereby acknowledge with thanks support from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
I nomi delle figure dei miti greci nelle lingue dell’Italia arcaica. The First Traces of Achilles and Hercules in Latin
Authors: Rix Helmut
Published: November 2023

L’influsso greco in Italia centrale non si limitava alla cultura materiale, per quanto importante esso fosse in questo campo; comprendeva bensì anche l’area spirituale. In modo palese ed eminente ciò si verificò nella trasmissione dei miti, che sono un’interpretazione del mondo per mezzo di storie facilmente concepibili e raccontabili. A prescindere da pochi precursori (v. p. 437) miti greci erano presenti presso gli Etruschi, come e› noto, ma anche presso i Latini, a partire dal sesto secolo a.C., tanto in rappresentazioni artistiche o artigianali su vasi, specchi, gemme o pareti, quanto in didascalie aggiunte a queste rappresentazioni, talvolta anche in dediche.
Did Plato Have a Philosophy of Science? A Discussion of Andrew Gregory, Plato’s Philosophy of Science
Authors: Netz Reviel
Published: November 2023

0ne is reminded of those clever web-squatters who identify, well in advance, that domain names such as ‘free.com’, ‘money.com’, ‘loveatfirstsight.com’ would be worth registering. But what a surprise to discover such an obvious domain registered so late! Apparently, this is the first book entitled ‘Plato’s Philosophy of Science’ and, besides all other praise deserved by Andrew Gregory, one must congratulate him for filling this important gap. For, of course, the matter is not merely that of title, and is of serious importance. Philosophers commonly make mention of Plato’s Philosophy of Science. This would imply the following assumption: that Plato had a body of doctrine that we can put under the heading ‘Philosophy of Science’. Most philosophers of science who are not specialists in ancient philosophy seem to take this assumption for granted. Here is the first reason why I am grateful for Gregory’s book. University introductions to ‘Western Intellectual History’ etc. make regular stops at this station-Plato’s Philosophy of Science-and now, finally, the students (as well as the instructors) have some guidebook. I wonder what most ancient specialists would think about this assumption that Plato had a philosophy of science. I am genuinely perplexed, thinking about it. Gregory put me into this perplexity: here is the second reason why I am grateful. In this essay I try to sketch my way out of the perplexity.
Platonic Souls as Persons
Authors: Long A A
Published: November 2023

The concept of psyche is central to Plato’s philosophy. If you doubt that, try to imagine subtracting psyche from his metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, or ethics. The theory of Forms, the structure of the universe, the conditions of understanding, virtue and happiness—all of these are intimately connected with Plato’s doctrine that rationality and desire for objective goodness are properties of the psyche at its best. In spite of its centrality, Plato’s generic concept of psyche is neither one of the most discussed nor one of the most admired features of his philosophy.1 Two principal reasons, I think, account for this state of affairs.
Reasons
Authors: Broome John
Published: November 2023

Within the philosophy of normativity, the 1970s was the age of the discovery of reasons. Joseph Raz was one of the first explorers. In his Practical Reason and Norms, Raz carefully codified the concept of a reason, and he has been a leader in its development ever since. Since those years of discovery, reasons have come to dominate thinking about normativity. Some authors now believe normativity consists of little else. Raz himself says: The normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, or provides, or is otherwise related to reasons. All is reasons.
The Truth 1n Deontology
Authors: Pettit Philip , Smith Michael
Published: November 2023

Let a deontological constraint be a pattern of action that people ought to adopt, even when doing so will not be for the best; more precisely, even when it will not be for the best in promoting conformity to that very course of action on the part of agents overall, or perhaps on the part of that agent over life as a whole. Deontologists argue that such constraints have a wide-spread and fundamental presence in moral thought. They govern how we should behave across a wide front, whether in our dealings with ourselves, with one another, or with the rest of nature. And the authority they have over us is not derived from the impersonal value of satisfying them, as teleologists or consequentialists would argue; it is in that sense fundamental.
Introduction
Authors: Erteschik-Shir Nomi
Published: November 2023

The possibility of optional divergence from basic word order is a universal property of natural language. While some approaches have tried to account for this in purely syntactic terms, others have provided purely pragmatic explanations, and yet others hold mixed views, which allow for semantic or pragmatic triggers to syntactic operations.
Configurations
Authors: Erteschik-Shir Nomi
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapters, we have seen that topic and focus play a central role in all languages, but that these notions can be signaled in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we examine the relationship between word order and topic-focus articulation. First, we examine languages in which the basic word order functions to signal topic and focus and contrast them with languages in which basic word order functions to signal syntactic argument type. We continue to investigate the role of the left periphery of the sentence in determining topic and focus roles (section 2). Fronting to the left periphery can also be altruistic. In such cases the fronted element itself does not play a particular IS role, yet its movement enables another element to take on an IS role it could otherwise not have. Altruistic fronting is examined in section 3. In section 4, we show that word order also marks information structure in cases of scrambling. Scrambling is then compared to Scandinavian object shift (section 5).
Identity, Cause, and Mind
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

This is an expanded edition of Sydney Shoemaker’s seminal collection of his work on interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Reproducing all of the original papers, many of which are now regarded as classics, and including four papers published since the first edition appeared in 1984, Identity, Cause, and Mind’s reappearance will be warmly welcomed by philosophers and students alike.
Time without change
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

It is a widely held view that the passage of time necessarily involves change in such a way that there cannot be an interval of time in which no changes whatever occur. Aristotle spoke of time as “a kind of affection of motion,” and said that, although time cannot be simply equated with motion or with change, “neither does time exist without change.”1 Hume claimed that ‘“tis impossible to conceive ... a time when there was no succession or change in any real existence.”2 And McTaggart presented as something “universally admitted” the contention that “there could be no time if nothing changed” (from which, he claimed, it follows that everything is always changing, at least in its relational qualities).3
Causality and properties
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

It is events, rather than objects or properties, that are usually taken by philosophers to be the terms of the causal relationship. But an event typically consists of a change in the properties or relationships of one or more objects, the latter being what Jaegwon Kim has called the “constituent objects” of the event.1 And when one event causes another, this will be in part because of the properties possessed by their constituent objects. Suppose, for example, that a man takes a pill and, as a result, breaks out into a rash. Here the cause and effect are, respectively, the taking of the pill and the breaking out into a rash. Why did the first event cause the second? Well, the pill was penicillin, and the man was allergic to penicillin. No doubt one could want to know more - for example, about the biochemistry of allergies in general and this one in particular. But there is a good sense in which what has been said already explains why the one event caused the other. Here the pill and the man are the constituent objects of the cause event, and the man is the constituent object of the effect event.
Identity, properties, and causality
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

I want to discuss in this essay a view about identity that goes back at least to Hume, namely that identity through time, or at any rate what we count as identity through time, consists at least in part in the holding of causal relations of certain kinds between momentary entities - events, or momentary thing-stages (phases, slices) - existing or occurring at different times. The idea is that what links these entities into the history of a single persisting object, or at least what makes us regard them as belonging to the history of a single object, is their being causally related in certain ways. The causal relation is, of course, not itself held to be the relation of identity.
A Site for Sorites
Authors: Priest Graham
Published: November 2023

The Sorites is a very hard paradox; I think it is harder than the paradoxes of self-reference. A measure of this is the fact that the paradoxes of selfreference may be solved by abandoning the law of noncontradiction. This has seemed to some a very drastic solution. But even this cannot help solve the Sorites: Sorites arguments lead not just to contradictions that can be isolated, but to wholesale contradiction. Using Sorites arguments one can prove nearly everything.
A Definite No-No
Authors: Sorensen Roy A
Published: November 2023

From the summit of Delia Graff’s ‘Infinitely Higher-Order Vagueness’ (Graff 2003), I spied a curiosity nestled in the valley below; I was primed by Professor Graff’s high-altitude discussion of the relationship between definite operators and rules of inference. The puzzle I will discuss below echoes her interests; it raises, in miniature, an issue about the relationship between definiteness and proof. Since those presiding over this conference gave commentators wide latitude in their responses, I will not resist the temptation to lower the level of discussion.
Reference and Paradox
Authors: Simmons Keith
Published: November 2023

There are only finitely many syllables of English. And so there are only finitely many phrases of English with fewer than nineteen syllables. But there are infinitely many integers, so there are integers not nameable by any phrase of English with fewer than nineteen syllables. And among these integers there is a least, cal1 it k. Then the phrase B denotes the integer k. But the phrase B itself has eighteen syllables. So the number not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables is denoted by a phrase with eighteen syllables. We have a contradiction, and we are landed in paradox.
Linguistic Categorization
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

This book provides a readable and clearly articulated introduction to the field of Cognitive Linguistics. It explores the far-reaching implications of Eleanor Rosch’s seminal work on categorization and prototype theory, extending the application of prototype theory from lexical semantics to morphology, syntax, and phonology. The third edition is fully revised and updated to include the considerable developments in Cognitive Linguistics since 1987. It covers recent research on polysemy, meaning relatedness and metaphors, as well as expanding the discussion of syntactic categories and the relevance of computer simulations.
Language and National Identity in Asia
Authors: Simpson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Language and National Identity in Asia is a comprehensive introduction to the role of language in the construction and development of nations and national identities in Asia. Leading scholars from all over the world investigate the role languages have played and now play in the formation of the national and social identity in countries throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia. They consider the relation of the regions' languages to national, ethnic, and cultural identity, and examine the status of and interactions between majority, official, and minority languages. Illustrated with maps and accessibly written this book will interest all those concerned to understand the dynamics of social change in some of the most important countries in the world. It will appeal to all those studying, researching, or teaching issues in Asian society, language, and politics from a comparative perspective.
Bangladesh
Authors: Thompson Hanne-Ruth
Published: November 2023

The link between language and national identity and the significance of linguistic realities in the emergence of a new state could hardly be more poignant than in the case of Bangladesh, which attained independence in 1971. In asking the question ‘What actually makes us the people we are?’, we naturally think of our beliefs, our languages, and the places we call home, but are all of these of equal significance, and what happens when they are in conflict with one another? The story of Bangladesh is embedded in a network of ever-changing tensions, shifting threads, and an overlap of religious allegiances, geographical and economic factors, and language. The portrayal of how this country fought for the right to stand on its own feet, the emotions of people finally able to reclaim a song or a poem as part of their own heritage, the accounts of short-sightedness, stupidity, and brutal force on the part of governments, and the indomitable spirit of a small country with great people power make for a fascinating and at times troubling example of the human search for identity and belonging. And at the very centre of the struggle for independence and identity in Bangladesh following the partitioning of India has very clearly been language and a determined refusal to accept the imposition of a foreign language as a new symbol of national identity in place of a familiar and well-loved local mother tongue, showing just how critically important language issues can be in the definition of new nation-states.
China
Authors: Chen Ping
Published: November 2023

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) currently contains the world’s largest single-country population, with over 1.3 billion Chinese citizens distributed over an area approximately three times the size of western Europe. As a modern nation-state, China is comparatively young, having emerged during a twentieth century filled with tremendous internal turmoil and social change. As a civilization populated and maintained by a single dominant ethnic group sharing a common culture, however, China has a vast history with a writing system dating back at least as far as 1700 bc. This chapter examines issues relating to language and the establishment and support of national identity in modern, post-imperial China, and how language use is presently directed in contemporary China. In doing so, the chapter will make important reference to a distinction between ‘ideological’ versus ‘utilitarian’ views of language in relation to the development of modern nation-states, and to the value of languages as markers of the national, regional, and ethnic identity of their speakers.
Thailand and Laos
Authors: Simpson Andrew , Thammasathien Noi
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines language and national identity issues in Thailand and also Laos. These two neighbouring states are grouped together here for the reason that both contain heavily dominant ‘Tai’ populations and have a long history of interaction with each other. The term ‘Tai’ itself refers to a particular group of languages which form a language family distinct from other major language families of east and southeast Asia such as the surrounding Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian groups. Speakers of the Tai group of languages originated in southeast China but migrated far and wide during the seventh to thirteenth centuries, reaching Assam in the west, northern Vietnam in the south, and modern-day Thailand and Laos in the southwest, where the greatest concentration of Tai speakers is still to be found, with 57 million in Thailand (90 per cent of the population), and 4 million in Laos (66 per cent of the population). The term ‘Thai’ (pronounced with an aspiration on the initial consonant which is absent from the pronunciation of ‘Tai’) is normally used to refer just to the inhabitants of Thailand, both as formal citizens of the country and as members of a single ethnic group identified by a largely shared language and culture. It is also frequently used to refer to the standardized variety of speech which has been strongly promoted within Thailand – Standard Thai. The term ‘Lao’ performs a similar function within the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, being used to refer to citizens of the country and also to the particular sub-variety of Tai language and culture which is found throughout significant parts of the country. As will later be seen, both the terms ‘Thai’ and ‘Lao’ have been of considerable importance in attempts to mould national identities within the two countries.
Vietnam
Authors: Minh-Hăng Lê , O’Harrow Stephen
Published: November 2023

Vietnam is a country which has lived through extended periods of foreign influence and occupation, significant internal conflict and upheaval, and yet emerged from this into the late twentieth century with a distinct and vigorous national identity, and a remarkable sense of independence. At the centre of this identity, forming one of its critical, distinguishing components, is language, a broadly-shared national language (Vietnamese) that is now fully widespread in all domains of formal and informal life. This study of language and national identity in Vietnam is divided into six major sections. Section 19.2 provides basic information on the country of Vietnam and the languages spoken within its borders. Section 19.3 then considers language in Vietnam from an early historical perspective and how the majority ‘Kinh’ ethnic group and the Vietnamese language came into existence and spread throughout the territory of modern-day Vietnam following a long period of Chinese dominance of what eventually became the northern and central parts of the modern country. Section 19.4 subsequently focuses on the important competition which occurred between different written forms of language in Vietnam during the time of French colonial rule, and how the eventual triumph of a form of Romanized vernacular Vietnamese known as quocngu over previous systems based on Chinese characters reflected the development of nationalism in Vietnam and struggles within the country both against the French and older Confucianist traditions and the institutions and elites which maintained these as mechanisms of power. In section 19.5 the chapter turns to consider the energetic development of Vietnamese in post-WWII and independent Vietnam, and its expansion into a language that could be used in all areas of life, while section 19.6 reflects on language policy in Vietnam towards the country’s ethnic minority groups. The chapter is then closed in section 19.7 with a brief overview of the status of Vietnamese and its contribution to national identity in the present day.
A Defense of Presentism
Authors: Markosian Ned
Published: November 2023

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist. According to Presentism, if we were to make an accurate list of all the things that exist-i.e. a list of all the things that our most unrestricted quantifiers range over-there would be not a single non-present object on the list.
New reproductive technologies: Whose human rights?
Authors: Almond Brenda
Published: November 2023

As a new era of reproductive choice opens up, it raises many questions about where this expansion of possibilities may be leading. Some see a need for caution and would prefer to hold back on institutionalizing the untested social experiments made possible by novel progenitive procedures. Others welcome them as offering a new dawn for the family, which, they believe, has not been diminished, but renewed and regenerated in myriad new forms. They welcome the opportunity to create new kinds of family beyond the ‘traditional’ nuclear family — a man and a woman raising their own offspring.
Plato’S Metaphysics of Morals
Authors: Reeve C D C
Published: November 2023

Because craft (τ∊Xvn) constituted the paradigm of knowledge when Plato began to develop his philosophy, he used it-critically as a model. He uncovered epistemological flaws in the crafts and described, in outline at least, a craft-like science that avoided them. This science, which has the Good itself as its un hypothetical because dialectically defensible-first principle, is the superordinate craft that occupies the pinnacle of an allegedly unique craft hierarchy. It is philosophy as Plato conceives of it. Its deep similarities to Aristotle’s science of first principles-metaphysics or primary philosophy-should be evident, though there are, it goes without saying, deep differences as well.
Is There Room for Anaxagoras in an Aristotelian Theory of Mind?
Authors: Lewis Frank A
Published: November 2023

In De anima 3. 4, Aristotle sets himself the twin tasks of identifying what is distinctive about mind or nous-about ‘the part of the soul with which the soul knows and understands’ (429"10-11, cf. 23)-and of explaining how thinking ever comes about. At the close of the chapter he pursues two connected puzzles that threaten to undermine his work on the second task.
Introduction: Prospects and Problems for Teleosemantics
Authors: Macdonald Graham , Papineau David
Published: November 2023

The programme that has come to be known as ‘teleosemantics’ aims to offer a naturalistic account of mental representation. That is, it aims to show how the representational powers of mental states fit into the world revealed by the natural sciences. It is distinguished from other naturalistic approaches to mental representation by its reliance on a notion of function that plays a prominent role in biology: thus it explains the truth conditions of belief-like states, say, or the satisfaction conditions of desire-like states, in terms of the biological functions of these states. In the next section we shall give fuller details of the ways in which teleosemanticists have used the notion of function to explain representation. But first it is worth considering exactly how teleosemantics might contribute to the general project of naturalization. The notion of ‘naturalism’ is much contested.
Language, Modularity, and Evolution
Authors: Sterelny Kim
Published: November 2023

Language is at the core of the cognitive revolution that has transformed that discipline over the last forty years or so, and it is also the central paradigm for the most prominent attempt to synthesize psychology and evolutionary theory. A single and distinctively modular view of language has emerged out of both these perspectives, one that encourages a certain idealization. Linguistic competence is uniform, independent of other cognitive capacities, and with a developmental trajectory that is largely independent of environmental input (Pinker 1994, 1997). Thus language is seen as a paradigm of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides’ concept of ‘evoked culture’: linguistic experience serves only to select a specific item from a menu of innately available options (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In explaining this concept, Tooby and Cosmides appeal to the metaphor of a jukebox. The human genome prestores a set of options, and the different experiences provided by different cultures select different elements out of this option set. I shall argue to the contrary that variability between speakers, the sensitivity of linguistic development to environmental input, and the limits of encapsulation are not noise. They are central to the language and its evolution.
Representation, Teleosemantics, and the Problem of Self-Knowledge
Authors: Dretske Fred
Published: November 2023

A verbal description of Clyde represents him as having three children. A portrait of him as a young man represents him as having had a bushy moustache. A thermometer represents him as now having a temperature of 103 F. Verbal descriptions, portraits, and thermometers are ordinary physical objects. So thinking of the mind in representational terms is the first step in conceiving of the mind in naturalistically congenial terms— as like other physical objects and events: measuring instruments, words, and pictures. Thoughts and experiences of Clyde, just like thermometers, words, and pictures, are physical objects that say things about Clyde that may or may not be true.
On Thinking of Kinds: A Neuroscientific Perspective
Authors: Ryder Dan
Published: November 2023

Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. In this chapter, I will suggest a particular teleosemantic strategy to solve this problem, grounded in the neurocomputational details of the cerebral cortex. It is a strategy with some parallels to one that Ruth Millikan has suggested, but to which insufficient attention has been paid. This lack of attention is perhaps due to a lack of appreciation for the severity of the problem, so I begin by explaining why the situation is indeed a dire one.
Teleosemantics and the Consumer
Authors: Matthen Mohan
Published: November 2023

Perceptual systems are automatic sorting machines. (See Matthen 2005, pt.) By processing the energy or chemical signals emanating from environmental stimuli, they sort these stimuli into classes on some consistent basis. From the perceiver’s point of view, this activity culminates in perceptual appearance . Stimuli that have been assigned to the same class present the same appearance: for example, things that are assigned to the same class by the colour vision system look the same with respect to colour. Conversely, things that have been assigned to different classes present different appearances: things that have been assigned to different classes by colour vision look different with respect to colour.
The Practice Of A Philosopher
Authors: Woolf Raphael
Published: November 2023

IN a competitive field, Socrates’ pronouncement that the philosopher practises dying and being dead (Phaedo 64 A 5-6) must rank as one of the most startling in all of Plato’s works. What does he mean by it? The following, at least, seems tolerably clear. Death is the release or separation of the soul from the body (64 c), so that one who practises death strives even in life to effect this separation to the greatest possible extent. Given that the soul is one’s true self, 1 the philosopher’s task is to keep his soul-i.e. himself-free from his body. This in turn seems to encompass two related forms of disengagement. Firstly, the philosopher avoids the snares of bodily indulgence. He has no interest in the pleasures of food, drink, sex, fine clothing, and so on (64 D-65 A). At best these are a matter of indifference to him, and at worst a positive distraction from the philosopher’s goal, which is the attainment of wisdom.
Quiddistic Knowledge
Authors: Schaffer Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Is the relation between properties and the causal powers they confer necessary, or contingent? Necessary, says Sydney Shoemaker on pain of scepticism about the properties. Contingent, says David Lewis, swallowing the sceptical conclusion. I shall argue that Lewis is right about the metaphysics, but that Shoemaker and Lewis are wrong about the epistemology. Properties have intrinsic natures (quiddities), which we can know. On route I shall also argue that (i) the main necessitation arguments do not converge on a single view, (ii) properties are trans world entities that cannot be handled by counterpart theory, and (iii) quiddistic scepticism is merely external world scepticism writ small. Could like charges attract? In general, is the relation between properties and the causal powers they confer necessary, or contingent? Necessary, says Shoemaker [1980, 1998], on pain of scepticism about the properties. Contingent, says Lewis [forthcoming], swallowing the conclusion that, ‘we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties’. I shall argue that Lewis is right about the metaphysics, but that Shoemaker and Lewis are wrong about the epistemology. That is, I shall argue that properties have intrinsic natures, or quiddities; and that we can knowthe quiddities. Is the relation between properties and their powers necessary, or contingent? If necessary, why so? If contingent, to what extent so? There are at least five distinct viewsrevealed by these questions, which differ in the range of worlds they countenance.
Content Externalism, Entitlement, and Reasons
Authors: Brueckner Anthony
Published: November 2023

I want to explore the question of whether there is some connection between externalism about mental content and the concept of epistemic justification. One quick, naive, negative thought concerning the possibility of such a connection runs as follows. Externalism is, in part, a thesis about the truth conditions of a believed content, which are distinct from justification conditions, conditions under which a belief of the content is epistemically justified. So it is prima facie hard to see how externalism about content could tell us anything deep about justification. A quick, not-so-naive response to the prima facie worry proceeds from the idea that justification is truth-conducive.