bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Frege and Natural Language
Authors: Rein Andrew
Published: January 2009

It is a commonplace that Frege thought ordinary language to be seriously defective. Yet his remarks about ordinary language are not always unflattering. Comparing the relation between his formal language and ordinary language to the relation between the microscope and the eye, Frege remarked: ‘[the eye], because of the range of its applicability and because of the ease with which it can adapt itself to the most varied circumstances, has a great superiority over the microscope’. The point, of course, is that, for Frege, the deficiencies of ordinary language arise in connection with the scientific endeavour: ordinary language is not an acceptable medium in which to pursue truth. As he goes on to observe: ‘… viewed as an optical instrument [the eye] reveals many imperfections … as soon as scientific purposes place strong requirements upon sharpness of resolution, the eye proves to be inadequate. On the other hand, the microscope is perfectly suited for just such purposes’.
Natural Kinds
Authors: Wilkerson T. E.
Published: January 2009

What is a natural kind ? As we shall see, the concept of a natural kind has a long history. Many of the interesting doctrines can be detected in Aristotle, were revived by Locke and Leibniz, and have again become fashionable in recent years. Equally there has been agreement about certain paradigm examples: the kinds oak, stickleback and gold are natural kinds, and the kinds table, nation and banknote are not. Sadly agreement does not extend much further. It is impossible to discover a single consistent doctrine in the literature, and different discussions focus on different doctrines without writers or readers being aware of the fact. In this paper I shall attempt to find a defensible distinction between natural and non-natural kinds.
The Liar Parody
Authors: Levi Don S.
Published: January 2009

The Liar Paradox is a philosophical bogyman. It refuses to die, despite everything that philosophers have done to kill it. Sometimes the attacks on it seem little more than expressions of positivist petulance, as when the Liar sentence is said to be nonsense or meaningless. Sometimes the attacks are based on administering to the Liar sentence arbitrary if not unfair tests for admitting of truth or falsity that seem designed expressly to keep it from qualifying. Some philosophers have despaired of ever beating the Liar; so concerned have they been about the threat posed by the Liar that they have introduced legislation to exclude the Liar sentence and anything like it.
Philosophy and Common Sense
Authors: Campbell Keith
Published: January 2009

This paper raises once more the question of the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and common sense on the other. More particularly, it is concerned with the role which common sense can play in passing judgment on the rational acceptability (or otherwise) of large-scale hypotheses in natural philosophy and the cosmological part of metaphysics. There are, as I see it, three stages through which the relationship has passed in the course of the twentieth century. There is the era of G. E. Moore, the Quine–Feyerabend period, and now a new and modest vindication of common sense is emerging in the work of Jerry Fodor.
Morality and Determinism
Authors: Wassermann Gerhard D.
Published: January 2009

This paper is intended as a contribution to a recent vigorous debate inThe Times, between the distinguished journalist Bernard Levin, the eminent Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman and the Archbishop of York, John Habgood, among others. The debate concerns morality, ‘free will’ and determinism. As a former German (now British) Jew, who lost close relatives at Auschwitz (e.g. my mother's sister) and who suffered personally severely in my youth under daily virulent Nazi persecution (even from schoolmasters who earlier professed to be ‘good democrats’ but were vicious antisemites), I obviously cannot remain strictly detached and neutral. Yet, I shall attempt to retain as much neutrality as possible, since I think that the main rivals in this debate have all some very relevant, interesting and valid things to say. Let me also state other, probably very relevant, biases. I am an ardent Zionist (and have been so since the experiences of my youth). In addition, I am a diehard mechanistic materialist as regards basic philosophy, although I am tolerant of other people's religious feelings, because I realize that my materialism is as metaphysical as their religious views. With this as background let me return to the technical issues. Obviously, in a philosophical journal one can write at a level above that ofThe Times, where there is, perhaps, insufficient room to debate philosophical, biological, physical and other niceties in some depth.
Contradiction and Freedom
Authors: Slater B. H.
Published: January 2009

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men.
Fictions and Reality
Authors: Falck Colin
Published: January 2009

A literary text or fiction, while making use of the referential or descriptive resources of our ordinary language, nevertheless does not make use of them in a referential or a descriptive manner. Reference may indeed seem to be made to persons or circumstances or events, in the sense that such things are mentioned in the literary text and may even be linked together by it into some kind of a story. Reference is not made to them, in the sense that these persons or circumstances or events have no existence in the actual world in which the text is written or read, or else that it is irrelevant to the nature of the text as a piece of literature if they do have such an existence.
On Wanting to be Somebody
Authors: Palma A. B.
Published: January 2009

There are many people in the world (in all sorts of societies) who want to be Somebody. Let us describe someone as Somebody who comes to believe that, in one or more respects, he or she is a special or significant person and who succeeds, through whatever means, in acquiring some sort of reputation and (in some cases) some sort of fame. People want to become Somebody because they believe that unless they succeed in that respect they will turn out to be a mere mediocrity, or worse still, to be thought of as a mere mediocrity. People want to leave some sort of mark in this world before they die. They do not want their passage through this world to be utterly ineffectual. This, I think, is the seed from which the ideal of being Somebody emerges.
Warranted Doability
Authors: Reinhardt Lloyd
Published: January 2009

Objectivity is not the same thing as independence from the mind. Because the word ‘mind’ has been used to cover myriad things from pains to practices, care must be taken as to just what it is independence from which is in question. The gut notion of objectivity is captured in an anecdote from the life of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and a political colleague were discussing how to get a policy across and the colleague suggested labelling the policy in a certain way; they happened to be near a donkey and their dialogue went like this:

‘Sir, how many legs does this donkey have?’

‘Four, Mr. Lincoln’

‘And how many tails has it?’

‘Why, just one, Mr. Lincoln’

‘Tell me, sir, what if we were to call the tail a leg; how many legs would the donkey then have?’

‘Five, Mr. Lincoln’.

‘No, sir; for you cannot make a tail into a leg by calling it one’.
Wittgenstein on Language and Rules
Authors: Malcolm Norman
Published: January 2009

A paradoxical situation exists in the study of Wittgenstein. There is a sharp disagreement in the interpretation of his thinking about the concept of following a rule. According to one group of philosophers Wittgenstein's position is that this concept presupposes a human community in which there is agreement as to whether doing such-and-such is or is not following a particular rule. A second group of philosophers hold that this interpretation of Wittgenstein is not merely wrong, but is even a caricature of Wittgenstein's thought: for when Wittgenstein says that following a rule is ‘a practice’ he does not mean a social practice, he does not invoke a community of rule-followers, but instead he emphasizes that following a rule presupposes a regularity, a repeated or recurring way of acting, which might be exemplified in the life of a solitary person. On the first interpretation it would have no sense to suppose that a human being who had grown up in complete isolation from the rest of mankind could be following rules. On the second interpretation such isolation would be irrelevant.
Head Colds and Thoughts in the Head
Authors: Champlin T. S.
Published: January 2009

‘There just has to be some connection between thinking and what goes on in my head when I am thinking,’ said someone to me recently. ‘When I am thinking,’ he continued, ‘the thinking is going on in here’, at which he pointed with his forefinger at his head. I indicated mild dissent. ‘You seem to me to be overlooking plain facts,’ he retorted. ‘There are thoughts in my head. Nothing could make me doubt that. If I am given a complicated calculation to do, I might start off by trying to do it in my head (once again, pointing at his head) but, finding it too hard, I might continue the calculation I had begun in my head on paper, on the table in front of me (now pointing at an imaginary piece of paper in front of him). The calculation started off being done in my head and finished up being done on paper.’
Ethics and the Absolute Conception
Authors: Heal Jane
Published: January 2009

The purpose of this paper is to examine some contentions advanced by B. A. O. Williams in his books Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. In particular I shall be concerned with the claims he makes about the nature of ethics—namely that it cannot be ‘objective’ or ‘realistic’ and that we may not hope for rational convergence in ethical judgments. My claims will be that Williams's case on these matters is importantly unclear and incomplete and that we lack cogent reasons to accept the conclusions he offers us. But a good deal of scene-setting is necessary before we can pose the questions I wish to address.
How Can We Seize the Past?
Authors: Cherry Christopher
Published: January 2009

My concern is to understand how it is that contemplation of the past— better, of this or that preferred past—evokes in some people an impression which is distinctively weird. It is unmistakable; and anyone who has felt it will soon know what I am talking about. What is the impression, and whence the impressionability?

To help identify my concern (and make it seem less eccentric) I shall let it emerge from some highly selective remarks about an issue in philosophy of history which is, by contrast, familiar and respectable: the debate between constructionists and realists. We cannot conceivably have direct acquaintance with, direct access to, the past; by their very nature, past events are over and done with and so unavailable for inspection. This much both camps agree on. However, they differ massively over what follows from this truth. For the constructionist concludes that what he calls the ‘real past’, what actually happened, can play no part whatsoever in historical thought. It is necessarily hidden, and we can have no inkling of it. What, and all, the historian can sensibly claim to know is the ‘historical past’, something which is constituted by and exists only in relation to his thought. Against this, the realist maintains that of course historians do not, necessarily or even typically, constitute the past; rather, they construct accounts of it which will be true if they conform to it as it actually was and false if they do not. And he charges his opponent with a number of fundamental confusions: mistaking accounts of historical events for the events themselves, confusing epistemological matters with ontological, and worst of all equating knowledge with direct perceptual awareness. Now, the realist is, in basics at least, fairly obviously right. And his criticisms are reinforced when we note that constructionists tend to combine with their vision of the impenetrability of the ‘real’ past the thesis that we undoubtedly know that there is a real past, with real people and real events. However, this piece of knowledge must for him, like that of an intelligible world for Kant, ever remain contentless, ‘factually vacuous’.
Compromise
Authors: Day J. P.
Published: January 2009

Human conflict and its resolution is obviously a subject of great practical importance. Equally obviously, it is a vast subject, ranging from total war at one end of the spectrum to negotiated settlement at its other end. The literature on the subject is correspondingly vast and, in recent times, technical, thanks to the valuable contributions made to it by game theorists, economists, and writers on industrial and international relations. In this essay, however, I shall discuss only one familiar form of conflict-resolution. There is room for such a discussion, because philosophers have lately neglected compromise, despite the interest shown in it by the aforementioned experts, and despite the classic treatments of it by Halifax, Burke and Morley. Truly, ‘…compromise is not so widely discussed by philosophers as one might expect’, and ‘…the idea of compromise has been largely neglected by Anglo-American jurisprudence’.
Following a Rule
Authors: Williamson Colwyn
Published: January 2009

These remarks on following a rule are especially concerned with what Peter Winch has had to say on the matter, and with the flawed logic of his reasoning; but they are also intended to cast some light on the logical character of metaphysical reasoning generally. In The Idea of a Social Science, one of Winch's main aims is to show that what he calls meaningful behaviour must involve some kind of understanding or reflection. His strategy appears to consist in trying to show, first, that all such behaviour, or perhaps behaviour as a whole, is rule-governed and, secondly, that following a rule necessarily involves ‘matters for reflection’. It will be my contention that the method employed in this argument, like the method employed throughout his book, is essentially metaphysical and incapable of yielding anything other than vacuous conclusions.
How to Define Terrorism
Authors: Teichman Jenny
Published: January 2009

The philosophical interest of terrorism is due partly to the fact that the term is notoriously difficult to define, and partly to the fact that there is some disagreement about whether and when terrorism so-called can be justified.
Are There Inalienable Rights?
Authors: Nelson John O.
Published: January 2009

In the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights a quite large number of things are said to be ‘human rights’ and though in that Declaration the term ‘inalienable’ is not used to describe the rights in question it has been so used by commentators—at least with respect to some of the rights enumerated. I shall forgo asking the prior question as to whether any such thing as a human right exists and ask simply whether any such thing as an inalienable right exists. My intention will be to show that it does not.
Prostitution, Exploitation and Taboo
Authors: Green Karen
Published: January 2009

It is so generally accepted that prostitution is immoral, that this is one of the least discussed of all ethical issues. Few serious philosophical treatments of the subject have been published. Of these, at least one, Lars Ericsson's, ‘Charges against Prostitution’, throws into stark relief the apparent inconsistency of our community attitudes. For it demonstrates that, from the point of view of the simple free market liberalism, to which many subscribe, there is nothing immoral about prostitution. The prostitute is a free agent who sells his or her services on the market at the going price. Why should the exchange of sexual services for money be more unsavoury than other exchanges of fee for service? The desire for sexual gratification is natural, as is the desire for food. So prostitution must be morally on a par with catering. Yet it is hemmed about by restrictions. Prostitutes are social outcasts, they may be pitied but are more often vilified and despised. From the liberal point of view, the moral disgust aroused by prostitution can only be the expression of an archaic and irrational taboo.
What is a Natural Property?
Authors: Cargile James
Published: January 2009

In Principia Ethica Moore held that the meaning of the word ‘good’ is a simple, unanalysable, non-natural property. Several features of this claim might be questioned. It might be questioned whether there are properties at all, and whether, even if there are, they are ever the meanings of words. Again, it might be questioned whether the word ‘good’ expresses a property, even assuming that some other words do. Moore considers this latter question, but not the former (in Principia Ethica). The two questions may seem connected by the fact that a negative answer to the first trivially leads to a negative answer for the second. But this triviality should be a caution to us. Otherwise we may confuse nominalism with ethical non-cognitivism or ‘anti-realism’.
A Puzzle About Telling
Authors: Welbourne Michael
Published: January 2009

The verb know has the following well-known property. If someone is correctly described as knowing that p then it is the case that p, and if someone is correctly described as knowing wh (what time it is, where the cat is, when lunch will be and so on), then any proposition which spells out what they know in knowing wh will be true.
Punishment as Language
Authors: Primoratz Igor
Published: January 2009

A number of philosophers and legal scholars have pointed out a fact about punishment that had not been sufficiently appreciated by many traditional accounts, utilitarian, retributive, or ‘mixed’: that evil inflicted on the person punished is not an evilsimpliciter, but rather the expression of an important social message—that punishment is a kind of language. The message which it is seen to communicate can broadly be described as condemnation by society of the crime committed. In what is still the only attempt at a generalandcritical discussion— Anthony Skillen's ‘How to say Things with Walls’—this way of understanding punishment is termed ‘expressionism’. In this paper I propose to sort out the main varieties of expressionism in the philosophy of punishment, and to discuss some of their pros and cons.
Hegel, Marx and the Cunning of Reason
Authors: Parkinson G. H. R.
Published: January 2009

This paper is concerned with two theories of history—those of Hegel and of Marx. Its primary aim is to clarify. The writings of Hegel are notoriously obscure, and those of Marx have been variously interpreted, so there is room for a paper which tries to ensure that when the theories of history propounded by Marx and Hegel are criticized, what are criticized are views which they actually held. It is no part of this paper's thesis that, in his theory of history, Marx consciously borrowed from Hegel. But it will be argued that there is more of Hegel in Marx than is sometimes supposed, and that if this fact is ignored one seriously distorts Marx.
Morality and Interest
Authors: Harrison Bernard
Published: January 2009

Among the miscellany of philosophical achievements bequeathed us by the Enlightenment is the account, worked out by Hobbes, Locke, Hume and others, of the conditions for the existence of the kind of civil or commercial association that depends upon contract. The theory of civil association has subsequently exercised the kind of fascination for moral philosophers that a highly successful theory is apt to exercise in any field of enquiry: it has, that is, both inspired later writers and to some extent restricted their horizons.
Narrative in African Philosophy
Authors: Bell Richard H.
Published: January 2009

P. O. Bodunrin, in his 1981 essay, asks: ‘Is there an African Philosophy, and if there is, what is it?’ This question has occupied centre stage among younger African intellectuals for about a decade now. The most articulate among these intellectuals, who are themselves philosophers, are Bodunrin (Nigeria), Kwasi Wiredu (Ghana), H. Odera Oruka (Kenya), Marcien Towa and Eboussi Boulaga (Cameroon), and Paulin Hountondji (Benin). These philosophers among others are in dialogue with one another and currently are seen to be the principal architects of a new orientation in African thought.
Plato's Ion: The Problem of the Author
Authors: Pappas Nickolas
Published: January 2009

Today Plato's Ion, thought one of his weaker works, gets little attention. But in the past it has had its admirers–in 1821, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley translated it into English. Shelley, like other Romantic readers of Plato, was drawn to the Ion's account of divine inspiration in poetry. He recommended the dialogue to Thomas Love Peacock as a reply to the latter's Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley thought the Ion would refute Peacock's charge that poetry is useless in a practical world.
The Demography of the Kingdom of Ends
Authors: Robinson Daniel N. , HARRE Rom
Published: January 2009

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals' Kant is explicit, sometimes to the point of peevishness, in denying anthropology and psychology any part or place in his moral science. Recognizing that this will strike many as counterintuitive he is unrepentant: ‘We require no skill to make ourselves intelligible to the multitude once we renounce all profundity of thought’. That the doctrine to be defended is not exemplified in daily experience or even in imaginable encounters is necessitated by the very nature of morality which cannot be served worse ‘… than by seeking to derive it from examples’. Thus, the project of the moral philosopher begins with the recognition that the moral realm is not mapped by anthropological data and does not get its content therefrom. Rather, moral philosophy must be ‘completely cleansed’ of everything that is appropriate to anthropology:
Reclaiming the Conversations of Mankind
Authors: Phillips D. Z.
Published: January 2009

Many philosophers, of very different persuasions, think that the time has come for philosophy to give up its epistemological pretensions. It must cease to see itself as the arbiter of rationality and truth. Its role as such an arbiter is due, in part, to confusions involved in representationalist theories in epistemology. According to these, our epistemic practices are judged by whether they adequately represent something said to be independent of them all called Reality or Truth. These judgments are said to be the business of philosophy. But, now, it is said that philosophy is redundant in this respect The trouble was not that it did its work badly. There was never any work to perform. Philosophy traded under false pretences.
Causation and Intelligibility
Authors: Sanford David H.
Published: January 2009

I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori, but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other.
Platonist Manifesto
Authors: Hunter Geoffery
Published: January 2009

Here is a short, rough statement of the Platonism I defend:

There exist things that are not the objects of any actual or possible sense-experience, and that are not themselves experiences of any sort. These things can only be grasped by the intellect: they can′t be seen, touched, tasted, heard or smelt but they can be known.

Further, these things are a main concern of philosophy.
Religion, Virtue and Ethical Culture
Authors: Cottingham John
Published: January 2009

There is a long-standing tradition in Western thought that sees religion as a bolster for morality. In its vaguest version, the idea is that religious belief provides a kind of social cement, fostering an ‘ethos’ in which traditional moral values are respected.1 Religious observances are thus often prized by the ethical conservative, who fears secularization as subversive of the moral and social fabric. Religion, at the very least, serves to keep people in line: as Descartes put it, ‘since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after life’.2
User-Friendly Self-Deception
Authors: Rorty Amelie Oksenberg
Published: January 2009

Since many varieties of self-deception are ineradicable and useful, it would be wise to be ambivalent about at least some of its forms.1 It is open-eyed ambivalence that acknowledges its own dualities rather than ordinary shifty vacillation that we need. To be sure, self-deception remains dangerous: sensible ambivalence should not relax vigilance against pretence and falsity, combating irrationality and obfuscation wherever they occur.
St. Augustine and the Paradox of Reflection
Authors: McLure Roger
Published: January 2009

Notoriously, problems about time proliferate the moment we reflect on time-consciousness, or look for conceptual consistency between our ordinary temporal locutions. But it matters that reflection and language might be cited as alternative sources of this perplexity; for it is a sound principle of philosophical reasoning that answers to problems must, on pain of missing the point, be given in the same context as that in which they arise. If, for example, logicolinguistic analysis showed the notion of tense to be self-contradictory, as McTaggart claimed, it would be an act of scientific imperialism to lay it down that the fact that a favoured interpretation of time in relativity physics dispenses with tense means that there is no real problem.
Mill′s Principle of Liberty
Authors: Chopra Y. N.
Published: January 2009

Although J. S. Mill′s essay On Liberty was intended by its author to be read as a self-contained work,1 and even though a careful reading would justify seeing it in this way, it has far too often been denied this right even by its defenders. There is a crucial distinction to be made between eliciting some point of substance from a particular work by an author and then turning to the rest of his work to throw further light on it, and employing other texts from the corpus of his writings to put the construction on certain things said in it which the work by itself cannot sustain, thus treating the former as essentially a fragment, albeit a most important fragment, of a whole.2 I would suggest that recourse to the latter course is justified only when the possibilities of treating it autarchically have already been explored. In this paper I propose to treat a celebrated text in the former way only because I believe that the results will show such an approach to be uniquely worthwhile, or at least fruitful enough to justify a paper conceived in this way. And, with a view to putting what I want to say about it in maximum focus I shall with one or two exceptions eschew giving supporting evidence from Mill′s other writings, even when this is permitted by the distinction I have made in this opening paragraph.
The Intellectual Virtues
Authors: Cooper Neil
Published: January 2009

An old Arab proverb runs as follows:

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a sage; follow him.
Wittgenstein 1929–1931
Authors: Lee H. D. P.
Published: January 2009

The following brief memoir of Wittgenstein needs a few preliminary words of explanation. Among those who attended his lectures and discussions in the years it covers was D. G. James, who later became Professor of English at Bristol University and then Vice-Chancellor of Southampton University. I met him both in Bristol and Southampton, and on one occasion suggested to him that some of us who had known Wittgenstein, but who had not become professional philosophers, might write down our recollections of him, and that he and I should start. What prompted the suggestion was, I think, the publication of Norman Malcolm's book, and a feeling that the non-professionals might have something to contribute to the assessment of Wittgenstein, particularly as a person. I wrote a preliminary draft and sent it to James; but he never responded, there was much else to do, I let the matter rest, and now James is dead. I wrote in about the year 1960 (my typescript bears no date) on holiday and away from any books of reference and from my own notes of Wittgenstein's lectures and conversations. I have shown the typescript to a few interested people, but because of its preliminary and unfinished nature have not previously thought of publication. It has recently been suggested to me that it might be of more general interest, and I publish it now as it was written, with one or two trifling alterations. I am well aware of its limitations. It was intended to give an impression of Wittgenstein as a person rather than as a philosopher, and the rather miscellaneous collection of remarks in section 3 have that in view rather than any more strictly ‘philosophical’ intention. Others may well question some of the detail and disagree with some of the opinions expressed. And there are some things which I might put rather differently today. But if the memoir has any interest it is best left as it was written.
Metaphysics and Reification
Authors: Inciarte Fernando
Published: January 2009

I must admit that I was long tempted to choose a different title for this lecture—one which seemed to give a better idea of its contents. On the other hand, the title I found so attractive did not seem suited to the note of solemnity which normally accompanies an inaugural lecture. I was forced to suppress it—until today, at any rate; for today I have the opportunity of justifying it, and I hope to make the most of it. The title I wanted to use was ‘The Thing with the Thing’.
Quine on Meaning and Translation
Authors: Bolton D. E.
Published: January 2009

In Word and Object Professor Quine formulated his Principle of Indeterminacy of Translation as follows:

Manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another. In countless places they will diverge in giving, as their respective translations of a sentence of the one language, sentences of the other language which stand to each other in no plausible sort of equivalence however loose. The firmer the direct links of a sentence with non-verbal stimulation, of course, the less drastically its translations can diverge from one another from manual to manual.
Omniscience, Omnipotence and Pantheism
Authors: Francks Richard
Published: January 2009

Spinoza is a pantheist: he believes that everything that is, is God. Traditional Judaeo-Christian theologians dislike the idea, and Spinoza has always been unpopular for it. Nevertheless, I want here to suggest that, simply by following out the logic of omniscience and omnipotence—two attributes of God on which both Spinoza and his opponents are agreed—it is possible to arrive at a conception of God which is at least very close to Spinoza's own. I do not claim that any of the arguments I use are to be found in Spinoza, but I do think that this way of thinking helps to explain the motives behind his ‘hideous hypothesis’.
Harris's Modest Proposal
Authors: Green Michael B.
Published: January 2009

In ‘The Survival Lottery’ John Harris raises the following issue. Suppose it is possible for physicians to save the lives of two patients, Y and Z, otherwise doomed to die through no fault of their own, by taking the life of a third person, P, and using various of his organs appropriately for transplants. To provide a fair and impartial way of selecting the organ donor, a survival lottery is proposed for the society. This lottery randomly selects an organ donor from the population at large. Harris, speaking from the point of view of Y and Z, defends the demand that such a lottery be established. What if anything is wrong with this scheme?
Forgetting Dreams
Authors: Johnson D. M.
Published: January 2009

It is a familiar fact that dreams are hard to recall. Because of this, memory alone is not a reliable indication of what they are like.

Consider the following examples. (1) Some people claim that they never dream. The truth is, psychologists assure us, that they do not remember having dreamt. Researchers say that they can tell when someone is dreaming, by his rapid eye movements (REM) and a certain pattern of brain waves recorded on an electroencephalograph (EEG). When a sleeper's eyes move rapidly, and he registers the appropriate pattern of brain-waves on the EEG, and then he is awakened, he almost always reports a dream. By this test, no one has yet been discovered who does not dream at all. In fact, psychologists have established that the average person has four to six periods of dreaming each night. (2) Some people say that they always dream in black and white, never in colour. Again, however, they have apparently forgotten the colours that occur in dreams, as is shown by the fact that most often, if we wake a sleeper in the middle of a dream, when it is still fresh in his mind, he then can report colours. (3) Another claim that some people make is that dreams never last more than a few seconds. This also seems to be a case of forgetting dreams, since periods of REM, together with EEG readings, indicate that dreams take longer than this; in fact they may last as long as thirty-five minutes. (4) Finally, it is a piece of folk wisdom that eating rich foods just before sleep causes nightmares. According to scientists, however, all that eating such foods can do is to cause a person enough bodily discomfort to wake him often during the night. This leads him to remember more of his dreams—and therefore more of their vividness and strangeness—than he usually does.
Wittgenstein on Language and Games
Authors: Hunter J. F. M.
Published: January 2009

In reading Wittgenstein one can, and for the most part perhaps should, treat the expression ‘language-game’ as a term of art, a more or less arbitrarily chosen item of terminology meaning something like ‘an actual or possible way of using words’. It would then be a fairly routine task to work out answers to such questions as what features of the ways a word is used are emphasized by this term of art, what philosophical purposes are served by the description of primitive language-games or of variations on actual language-games, or in exactly what way those purposes are supposed to be served.
Why People Prefer Pleasure to Pain
Authors: Goldstein Irwin
Published: January 2009

Happiness requires something in its own nature, or in ours, to give it influence, and to determine our desire of it and approbation of pursuing it (Richard Price, Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, Ch. 1, Sec. 1).
Religious Faith and Prometheus
Authors: Kellenberger J.
Published: January 2009

Recent philosophy of religion, particularly neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, has reminded philosophers that there is more to religion than belief and, indeed, that there is more to religious belief than mere belief. D. Z. Phillips is among those who have made a contribution here. He has emphasized how religious belief is very different from the kind of belief that amounts to holding a hypothesis, even a God-hypothesis. However, perhaps because of his non-cognitivist tendencies, Phillips, unlike Kierkegaard to whom he often appeals, has failed to bring into relief another quintessential fact about belief in God, namely that it is for the believer an entered relationship with God. We do well to appreciate that belief in God is not identical with making a truth claim. But if the essential core of religious belief is construed as an attitudinal or affective response, as non-cognitivists tend to construe it, an important conceptual dimension of religious faith will all but be overlooked, as, paradoxically it seems it has been by the philosophical approach that strives to describe the religious ‘form of life’ in its own terms. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring into relief what I take to be an essential dimension of religious belief, one which presupposes that religious belief is an entered relationship for the believer. This I shall do by pursuing a contrast which, I think, at once clarifies and makes undeniable religious belief's essential nature as a relationship to God.
What Nonsense Might Be
Authors: Diamond Cora
Published: January 2009

There is a natural view of nonsense, which owes what attraction it has to the apparent absence of alternatives. In Frege and Wittgenstein there is a view which goes against the natural one, and the purpose of this paper is to establish that it is a possible view of nonsense.
Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter
Authors: Phillips D. Z.
Published: January 2009

What is one to make of Sartre's treatment of his waiter in one of his famous analyses of bad faith? The example is supposed to be an obvious one, but the more we examine it, the less obvious it becomes. Let us remind ourselves of Sartre's example:

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with a recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand.
Compensatory Discrimination
Authors: Day J. P.
Published: January 2009

Like theories of punishment, theories of reverse (positive) discrimination can usefully be divided into forward-looking (teleological) ones and backward-looking (compensatory/retributive) ones. One example of the former type of theory is Dworkin's, who defends the policy on the ground that it will (perhaps) produce ‘a more equal society’. Another is Sher's, who defends it on the ground that it increases equality of opportunity. This essay is an examination of the latter type of theory. Compensatory discrimination is related, then, to discrimination thus: discrimination is the genus, of which reverse discrimination is a species, of which compensatory discrimination is a sub-species. It will be convenient to proceed by examining successively the ideas of discrimination, of compensation, and of compensatory discrimination.
Time
Authors: Charlton William
Published: January 2009

It is often held that movement can be defined in terms of places and times. Thus Russell says:

We must entirely reject the notion of a state of motion. Motion consists merely in the occupation of different places at different times, subject to continuity as explained in Part V (Principles of Philosophy §447).
The Question of African Philosophy
Authors: Bodunrin P. O.
Published: January 2009

Philosophy in Africa has for more than a decade now been dominated by the discussion of one compound question, namely, is there an African philosophy, and if there is, what is it? The first part of the question has generally been unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative. Dispute has been primarily over the second part of the question as various specimens of African philosophy presented do not seem to pass muster. Those of us who refuse to accept certain specimens as philosophy have generally been rather illogically said also to deny an affirmative answer to the first part of the question. In a paper presented at the International Symposium in Memory of Dr William Amo, the Ghanaian philosopher who taught in German universities in the early part of the eighteenth century, Professor Odera Oruka identified four trends, perhaps more appropriately approaches, in current African philosophy.
Reality and the Problem of Access
Authors: Cherry Christopher
Published: January 2009

Deep beneath the surface of Kant's theory of knowledge lies the metaphysical doctrine of noumena, things in themselves, intelligible entities. For lengthy periods these creatures are surprisingly unobtrusive and can be safely disregarded. But at certain points Kant hauls them to the surface and tries to put them to work in perplexing ways. My concern is not with these attempts, but with what can be learned, if not salvaged, from the metaphysical doctrine as it is expounded in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena’. I shall start by giving, for the most part in Kant's own words, as blunt an account as possible of how he appears to reduce his own doctrine to nonsense. I shall then argue that such an account, while not straightforwardly wrong, ignores matters of very great interest. I shall do so in terms of two theories, which I distinguish, about the relationship between knowing, changing and conceptualizing. Finally, I shall draw some more and less general conclusions.
An Enquiry Concerning the Humean Woman
Authors: Battersby Christine
Published: January 2009

To discover David Hume's views on women it is necessary to bring together remarks scattered somewhat sparsely throughout his philosophical and historical writings. Although the titles of Hume's major works might suggest that he was describing the understanding and nature of all human beings, both male and female, in none of the works do we find a specific section devoted to an analysis of sexual differences in these two respects. There is a tidy chapter on female morality in A Treatise of Human Nature, but nothing comparable for female nature as such (T, 570–573). This omission does not, however, imply that Hume thought that biological differences had no concomitants in character and understanding. Neither, despite Hume's bantering remark that an essay on a ‘Subject so little to be understood as Women’ would be ‘unintelligible’, does this neglect imply that Hume was uncertain about these attendant differences (L, i, 45). Hume's exclusion of such a section seems to stem only from his desire to stress human uniformity, not from any lack of recognition of human variety. Because of the absence of any systematic treatment of the subject by Hume, it is necessary to proceed cautiously in interpreting his remarks on women. There is a further reason for caution in that Hume offers ‘jests and pleasantries’ as well as more serious comments on this subject; Hume, on occasions, gallantly woos his so-called ‘favourites’, his female readers, and when he does so sincerity is gallantly put aside.
Towards a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History
Authors: Bann Stephen
Published: January 2009

A British historian might be excused for looking slightly askance at any collection of recent books relating to the philosophy of history. This is because we have been told, several times over and by distinguished members of the profession, that such speculative and analytic activity has little, if anything, to do with the actual business of historiography. One of the most forthright warnings was delivered on the very first page of Professor G. R. Elton'sThe Practice of History(1967), when we were advised that: ‘Every new number ofHistory and Theoryis liable to contain yet another article struggling to give history a philosophic base, and some of them are interesting. But they do not, I fear, advance the writing of history’. For Elton, therefore, there could be little point in granting his colleague in another discipline the right to assess the cognitive claims of historiography. The historian himself, and he alone, was qualified to determine, for all practical purposes, the aims and applications of historical method. It was left to the late Arnold Toynbee to diagnose (inToynbee on Toynbee, 1974) the dangers in this protectionist approach. He claimed that Elton was ‘trying deliberately to create a closed circuit of “professional” historians’ which was, in his opinion, ‘fatal to any form of study’. But of course Toynbee's own lack of standing within the historical profession could be put forward as a telling index of the dangers of transgressing the barriers between history and philosophy.
Ethics and Science
Authors: Smart J. J. C.
Published: January 2009

It has frequently been lamented that while the human species has made immense progress in science it is nevertheless ethically backward. This ethical backwardness is all the more dangerous because the advanced state of scientific knowledge has made available a technology with which we are able to destroy ourselves—indeed a technology which may have got so much out of hand that we may not even have the capacity to prevent it from destroying us.
The Reality of Mental Illness
Authors: Champlin T. S.
Published: January 2009

My three main points are:

(a)Mental diseaseis a metaphor, butmental illnessis not.

(b) Feeling ill and having a physical illness are logically related. If there were no such thing as feeling ill, there would be no such thing as suffering from a physical illness. Yet there is no logical connection between feeling ill and being mentally ill.

(c) Mental illness is manifested in various forms of behaviour, for example, suspiciousness, elation, depression, etc.; if a form of behaviour is to count as mental illness, it has to be an insane form; yet it is possible to be mentally ill without being insane and it is possible to be insane without being mentally ill.
On Desiring the Desirable
Authors: Bond E. J.
Published: January 2009

In a famous passage in her book, Intention, Professor G. E. M. Anscombe argues that we can only render intelligible the idea of someone wanting a thing if we know under what aspect the person sees the thing as desirable. The wanted thing must be characterized by the wanter as desirable in some respect. ‘[What] is required for our concept of “wanting”’, she says, ‘is that a man should see what he wants under the aspect of some good’ (p. 74). And furthermore, ‘the good (perhaps falsely) conceived by the agent to characterize the thing must really be one of the many forms of good’ (p. 76). Thus, while the object of desire need only be conceived as good by the wanter, and need not be really good, this can only be because the object does not have the desirable character the wanter believes it to have, not because the character supposed to be desirable is not really so. Desire cannot but be for one of the real forms of good.