bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Language
Authors: Fischer Steven Roger
Published: November 2023

“Oh! how lovely their language appeared to us”, wrote the controversial Father Honorè Laval about the Mangarevan tongue in the mid-nineteenth century, though he might have been speaking of any Polynesian language, including Rapanui, once, by dint of work and patience, we were in a position to understand it! Today more than ever I admire its simplicity, distinctiveness, energy, and majesty. Each sentence is in itself an exact definition that explains the nature of the thing and gives a clear idea of it. The locutions are particularly rich and the same sentence can be rendered in a multitude of different ways. What renders this language succeptible to so many casts are the words that are at once nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and interjections. A sentence can even become a verb, an adjective, and a noun. And the particles of the nouns and verbs, to what marvellous effects they lend themselves! The article of the proper nouns and the nouns of number, the dual of the pronouns and three kinds of reduplications as well for the verbs as for the nouns and adjectives, give this language an expression of novelty that I have seen only in Oceania. (Laval, 1938: 209-ro).
The Epigones
Authors: Fischer Steven Roger
Published: November 2023

There have essentially been two kinds of rongorongo “forgeries”: those that innocently imitated and those that purposely deceived. As early as 1877 the Abbès Lacombe and Tryphon were encouraging young island carvers to produce imitation rongorongo at their Catholic trade school on Tahiti. In the 1880s on Rapanui Alexander Salmon was instrumental in promoting the decoration of carvings with the imitative ta’u “script” in order to provide his Rapanui employees and friends with clothing and other valuable items from passing ships in exchange. And in 1934 “a man by the name of Araki was commissioned”, wrote Alfred Metraux years later, “to produce all objects his ancestors had used and we helped him by giving him books and photographs of specimens”.
Claims of Need*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

It has been felt for a long time that there must be some intimate connection between the needs of human beings and their abstract rights. H.L.A. Hart was giving voice to a strong and widespread intuition when he wrote: A concept of legal rights limited to those cases where the law... respects the choice of individuals would be too narrow. For there is a form of the moral criticism of law which ... is inspired by regard for the needs of individuals for certain fundamental freedoms and protections or benefits. Criticism of the law for its failure to provide for such individual needs is distinct from, and sometimes at war with, the criticism with which Bentham was perhaps too exclusively concerned, that the law often fails to maximize aggregate utility.
Truth, and Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

Do moral judgments admit of plain truth? And how is the answer to this question to be decided in a way that does not leave the feeling that, if we had gone about answering it in some other way, then the answer might have been exactly the opposite one? In his article ‘Truth’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1959) Michael Dummett wrote: that we do not call ethical statements ‘true’ or ‘false’, and from this many consequences for ethics were meant to flow. But the question is not whether these words are in practice applied to ethical statements, but whether, if they were so applied, the point of doing so would be the same as the point of applying them to statements of other kinds, and, if not, in what ways it would be different.
Incommensurability: Four Proposals*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

The gist of the assertion that not all lengths are commensurable ... may be expressed as follows. If AB, AC be two lengths along the same straight line, it may happen that, if AB be divided into m equal parts, and AC into n equal parts, then, however m and n may be chosen, one of the parts of AB will not be equal to one of the parts of AC, but will be greater for some values of m and n, and less for others; also lengths equal to either may be taken along any given line and with any given end-points.
On the Concept of Pre-embryo: The Basis for a New ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the Current View about Human Reproduction
Authors: Mori Maurizio
Published: November 2023

The term ‘pre-embryo’ was introduced in the mid-1980s as a general word to denote the earliest stages of human life from fertilization up to a few days afterwards. The upshot of such a proposal is a new partition of pre-natal life: instead of the usual twofold distinction between pre- and post-fertilization (with embryonic and fetal stage), now we have a threefold distinction: pre-fertilization, pre-embryonic stage, and post pre-embryonic stage.
A Woman’s Right to Choose? A Feminist Critique
Authors: Fox Marie
Published: November 2023

The 1990s have witnessed a number of developments in law and politics which reflect a changing climate of thought on abortion throughout the world, and have resulted in challenges to legal access to abortion. Many former Communist states in eastern Europe have witnessed increased conservatism on abortion issues, notably Poland. Even in the West abortion rights cannot be regarded as secure.
OED Sources
Authors: Brewer Charlotte
Published: November 2023

One of the many ways in which the OED differed from its predecessors was in the attitude it took towards its sources, both in selecting and in recording them. The earliest English monolingual dictionaries, from Cawdrey (1604) onwards, had taken lists of words and of definitions, without acknowledgement, from preceding dictionaries (mono- and bilingual) and from glossaries to printed works (see Starnes and Noyes (1946) and Schafer (1989) ). But no hint of this was to be found in their texts, which printed definitions only, without supporting quotations. It is clear from both the title-pages and the prefaces to these works that they were initially conceived as ‘hard-word’ dictionaries, designed to help women, boys, and less-well educated men to improve their use and understanding of the English language; consequently the range of words was limited. By the early eighteenth century, dictionaries had become far more comprehensive works, vying with each other in their boasts of including vast numbers of words which were drawn from a much wider range of registers. But not until Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 did a lexicographer substantiate definitions with quotations from (mostly) documented sources, and this development brought about a profound change in lexicographical principle and practice. Johnson’s ‘chief intent’, as stated in his Plan of a Dictionary (1747), was to ‘preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom’ by registering the usage of writers from the golden age of Elizabeth to the best usage of his own day.
The Compass of the Vocabulary
Authors: Curzan Anne
Published: November 2023

The apparent objectivity of dictionaries rests on an extensive series of subjective editorial decisions. In the seventeenth century, when the aim of dictionaries of English shifted from being collections of ‘hard words’ to being comprehensive compilations of ‘the language’, one of the most fundamental decisions in the dictionary-making process became what words should be included as ‘English’ and what words excluded. Lexicographers came to wield authority not only over how to define words but also over what words merited definition-an authority that belies Samuel Johnson’s description of the lexicographer as a ‘harmless drudge’. In fact, dictionaries and dictionary makers define what constitutes ‘the language’ as much as they do any individual word in the lexicon.
Epistemic Freedom1
Authors: Velleman J David
Published: November 2023

Epistemic freedom is the freedom to affirm any one of several incompatible propositions without risk of being wrong. We sometimes have this freedom, strange as it seems, and our having it sheds some light on the topic of free will and determinism. I think that there are two equally important reasons why we seek an alternative to determinism as an account of how our actions come about. One reason is phenomenological: we just feel free. Determinism seems incompatible, in the first instance, with what it’s like to be an agent. Our other reason for seeking an alternative to determinism is conceptual. We fear that if determinism is true, then we shall have no grounds for applying concepts such as responsibility and desert to ourselves and our fellows.
What Happens When Someone Acts?1
Authors: Velleman J David
Published: November 2023

A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent’s body. Provided that these causal processes take their normal course, the agent’s movements consummate an action, and his motivating desire and belief constitute his reasons for acting. This story is widely accepted as a satisfactory account of human action—or at least, as an account that will be satisfactory once it is completed by a definition of what’s normal in the relevant causal processes. The story is widely credited to Donald Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events (1980), but I do not wish to become embroiled in questions of exegesis. I shall therefore refer to it simply as the standard story of human action.
The Definition of Morality
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

We use such terms as good, bad, right, wrong, should, ought, in many ways other than moral: good evidence and bad argument, right answers and wrong notes, novels which should be read, and policies which ought not to be adopted. The moral is a sphere of the practical and the practical itself only a sphere of the normative. Norms guide us in all we believe, feel, and do. Do these normative words then have a specifically moral sense? If so can it be defined?

I think they do have a moral sense. That calls for some supporting argument, but I shall not go into it here.1 I want rather to consider an attempt to define that sense. It is not a definition which illicitly reduces the nor mative to the non-normative. It purports rather to define moral senses of goodness, rightness, wrongness, and obligation in non-moral but still normative terms. ‘Definition’, however, will turn out not to be quite the right word. We shall see, I think, that ‘moral’ is strictly speaking indefinable, and why it is un definable. Nevertheless, I shall defend the spirit of the definition; even though ‘moral’ cannot be defined I shall argue that we can still construct its sense (as one might say) using only non-moral normative concepts.
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

The history of liberalism is the history of an ethical ideal as well as a set of political and social arrangements. In the latter sense liberalism entrenches the juridical equality of all citizens, their equal civil and political rights including among those rights a set of liberties strong enough to restrict the authority of society over the individual in a fundamental way. How to express in institutions this politically fundamental restriction is an important matter of debate, but that debate will not concern us. For present purposes I assume I can refer to liberalism as a set of political and social arrangements without further examination. Our concern will instead be the liberal ethical ideal and its present prospects.
Autotroponomy
Authors: Fellbaum Christiane
Published: November 2023

Reflections on polysemy necessarily raise questions about the principles that govern the mappings of concepts and labels (lexemes, or word forms). In an idealized lexicon, one might expect a one-to-one mapping of distinct concepts and word forms, but polysemy packs several meanings together under the same label. By definition, these meanings are related, unlike in the case of homonymy, where unrelated meanings share the same word form. But just how are the meanings associated with a polysemous word related? A look at the entries for polysemous words in different dictionaries shows that lexicographers cannot agree on how to divide up the semantic space covered by a polysemous word; dictionaries disagree with respect to the number of senses and subsenses and with respect to the way these senses are distinguished. The lexicographers’ disunity is mirrored in linguistically naive speakers’ judgements about polysemous words. Jorgenson (1990) asked speakers to distinguish senses of highly polysemous words and found that they consistently refused to recognize more than about three senses, even after being shown the dictionary entries for polysemous words that differentiated a dozen or more senses. These speakers lumped arguably distinct meanings together and failed to carve up the conceptual space as finely as the lexicographers had done. Fellbaum et al. (1995; 1997; 1998) asked speakers to select the appropriate dictionary sense for each polysemous noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in a text. The annotators showed considerable disagreement both with each other and with a control group of experienced lexicographers. Cross-dictionary comparisons and the results of sense sorting experiments and semantic annotation tasks all show that there is no agreement among proficient speakers in dividing the semantic contents of polysemous words into distinct senses. Yet polysemy does not pose a problem for language users, who disambiguate polysemous words in their contexts without apparent difficulties, indicating that speakers easily accommodate a lot of meaning in the space of one word, and do so with sufficiently high agreement to permit effortless and efficient communication.
Lexical Representations for Sentence Processing
Authors: Miller George A , Leacock Claudia
Published: November 2023

A rhetorical question will take us quickly to the topic of this paper. The question is simple: Why isn’t a dictionary a good theory of the lexical component of language? We can offer two answers, a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that a dictionary is not a good theory of the lexical component of language because it does not deal with lexical aspects of sentence processing. The long answer explains why lexical aspects of sentence processing must be part of any adequate theory of the lexical component of language. Before embarking on the long answer, however, the question needs to be clarified. To those who would complain that a dictionary is a book, not a theory, we must agree. But the book could not be written unless its authors held some kind of theory-implicitly, if not explicitly-about the lexical component of language. Without a theory, how could the authors decide what to include and what to omit? It is that theory we want to examine. But, since the theory is expressed only via the book that results, the theory can only be criticized by criticizing the book itself.
Particularizing Particularism
Authors: Crisp Roger
Published: November 2023

Although particularism has come under a good deal of scrutiny in the last quarter of a century, particularizing it is not easy, since the arguments and positions advanced by those known as particularists vary considerably. In this essay, I shall discuss three different but related forms of particularism, concerning, respectively, rules, reasons, and motivation. My conclusion will be that particularism has fewer implications for normative ethics than have sometimes been claimed,3 because its true forms are largely uncontroversial. I shall end with a brief defence of a form of Rossian generalism.
Ethics as an Inexact Science: Aristotle’s Ambitions for Moral Theory
Authors: Irwin T H
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, (hereafter EN), Aristotle warns that we must not demand too much exactness in ethical inquiry (1094bll-14). The difficulty of finding an exact account in ethics results not from our lack of diligence, but from an ineliminable feature of the subject matter. The variability of fine, just, and good things makes it impossible to reach necessary and universal principles; we must say something ‘roughly and in outline’, contenting ourselves with ‘usual’ (or ‘for the most part’: hos epi to polu) rather than necessary principles (1094bl4-27).
Against Deriving Particularity
Authors: Blum Lawrence
Published: November 2023

Since the mid-1980s, the distance in substantive ethical views between impartialists or adherents of principle-based ethics (generally, Kantians and consequentialists) and partialists or particularists has greatly diminished. There is general agreement that compassion, friendship, generosity, and familial devotion are good things that should play a part in any morally adequate life. Both sides agree that virtue is a central moral idea, and that an adequate account of the moral life can not jettison it. At the same time, both sides seem to agree that concern for the welfare of strangers, commitment to some general principles, and a concern for the general good must play their part as well.
The integration of spatial vision and action
Authors: Brewer Bill
Published: November 2023

Spatial vision and action are normally extremely well integrated. So much so that William James’ suggestion of a mysterious, immediate psychophysical link between them has some intuitive plausibility (James, 1890, ch. 26). But this intuition is notoriously difficult to accommodate theoretically. In this chapter I bring together two important psychological insights into the subpersonal organization of visuo-motor control with more general philosophical reflection on its personal level structure, to get a better understanding of how the spatial components of the visual and motor systems interact so smoothly.
Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues
Authors: Churchland Paul M
Published: November 2023

These are the early days of what I hope will be a long and fruitful intellectual tradition, a tradition fueled by the systematic interaction and mutual information of cognitive neurobiology on the one hand and moral theory on the other. More specifically, it is the traditional sub-area we call metaethics, >including moral epistemology and moral psychology, that will be most dramatically informed by the unfolding developments in cognitive neuro biology. And it is metaethics again that will exert a reciprocal influence on future neurobiological research-more specifically, into the nature of moral perception, the nature of practical and social reasoning, and the development and occasional corruption of moral character.
Rationality and Action
Authors: Searle John R
Published: November 2023

A certain conception of rationality and of the relationship between rationality and decision making is pervasive in our philosophical tradition. This Classical Model, as I will call it, begins with Aristotle’s claim that deliberation is always about means and never about ends; it receives its most famous formulation in Hume’s slogan: Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions; and it has its most sophisticated contemporary expression in mathematical decision theory. I believe that the Classical Model is mistaken, that at best it describes only a very special class of cases and does not give us a general account of the role of rationality in action. I do not have the space here to expose all of its weaknesses but will concentrate on one major feature.
Wright on Abstraction and Set Theory
Authors: Parsons Charles
Published: November 2023

The present chapter discusses the programme, adumbrated in Crispin Wright’s chapter in this volume, of extending his neo-Fregean approach to the foundations of arithmetic by using abstraction axioms for analysis and set theory.
Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice
Authors: Burge Tyler
Published: November 2023

In recent years a number of philosophers have worried about whether we can reasonably believe that mental properties are causally efficacious. They are concerned whether the intentional ‘aspects’ or qualitative ‘aspects’ of mental events are epiphenomenal-that is, lacking in causal power and irrelevant to causal transactions. They typically assume that mental events themselves are causes. But this is supposed to be ensured by the prior assumption that mental events are physical events. Individual mental events are assumed to be instantiations or tokens of physical event-kinds. The doubt is whether the mental ‘aspects’ of these states and events play any significant role in causal processes.
The Union Theory and Anti-Individualism
Authors: Honderich Ted
Published: November 2023

There is something called psychoneural intimacy. Hence what you may now recollect, the mental or conscious event M of your intending to turn to this page, was bound up with a simultaneous neural event N–certain activity in a certain neural locale. More precisely, there was some necessary and direct connection between M and N. This conviction of psychoneural intimacy is an assumption of neuroscience, and denials of it are rare enough to be strange. There is also something called mental indispensability. Hence M is an indispensable part of what explains your action A of having turned to this page. More precisely, taking explanations of A which include only events at the time of M, none is complete without M, and, taking complete explanations of A after M, all include something explained partly by M. The conviction of mental indispensability, which concerns the explanation not only of actions but of many mental events, is a denial of epiphenomenalism. The conviction has hardly ever been questioned by philosophers. It is not explicitly or implicitly questioned in the practice of neuroscience, mainly since neuroscience does not seek complete explanations. Nor is the epiphenomenalism which turns up in neuroscientific philosophizing the real thing.
Object-Dependent Thoughts: A Case of Superficial Necessity but Deep Contingency?
Authors: Noonan H W
Published: November 2023

One version of externalism is the Evans-McDowell doctrine of ‘object-dependent’ or ‘Russellian’ thoughts: thoughts about a particular concrete object, or objects (other than the thinker and the time of the thought), which are possible for a thinker only if he stands in some relation to that object, or those objects—a relation perhaps appropriately thought of, in Russellian terms, as one of ‘acquaintance’ (see Evans 1982 and McDowell 1984, 1986).
Leibniz And The Animalcula
Authors: Wilson Catherine
Published: November 2023

Leibniz’s theory of immaterial atoms or monads might well be described as a continuation of policy by other means. For although his theory is in line with the seventeenth century’s generally favourable attitude towards atomism, his version, according to which atoms are sentient and even living, is highly unorthodox. It is now safe to say that his opposition to the theory of physical atoms, as well as his objections to the non-atomistic corpuscular physics of Descartes, are well understood. The problems of cohesion, division, composition, and the continuum, and the inadequacy of “matter” as a substratum for force, were sufficient to convince him that the substance of the world could not be composed of atoms or particles possessing only extension, figure, and motion. Less well understood are the developments in seventeenth-century natural science which suggested a different approach to the question of the nature of substance from that supplied by the mainstream of corpuscularian mechanists, and this paper is addressed to that issue.
The Full Voic’d Quire: Types of Interpretations of Music
Authors: Hermerén Göran
Published: November 2023

The role and the freedom of the musician or the conductor, if any, is, of course, not always the same; it varies in different kinds of music (jazz, classical music, pop music, raga, folk music, etc.). It is therefore important to specify which music we are dealing with; the problems of interpretation may be very different depending on what sort of music we have in mind. Moreover, music is not a static phenomenon. It is historical in the sense that the structure and texture of musical compositions have changed over the centuries. This is true also of instruments, forms of production, channels of distribution, and ways of listening, as well as of the expectations and purposes of composers, musicians, and listeners.
Projective Probability
Authors: Logue James
Published: November 2023

This book presents a novel theory of probability and judgements of probability: strong coherentist subjectivism. Logue combines three claims in his exposition of this theory. The first states that probabilities may be treated as the degrees of partial belief of (ideally rational) agents, best established by the examination of behaviour. Thus, probability is personalist. The second claim contends that only such degrees of belief can be construed as probabilities: on this strongly subjectivist view the notion objective chance is, if not conceptually impossible, at any rate redundant. The third, coherentist, claim maintains that minimal coherence of probability-beliefs is all that is necessary for those beliefs to be rational; that is, on this view, weak coherence of a set of beliefs is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the rationality of those beliefs. This theory suggests a quasi-realist perspective, in which probabilities are viewed as projections of subjective evaluations. Provided that these evaluations conform to the standards of coherence, they come legitimately to be expressed in apparently realist of objectivist language. This projectivist outlook provides a convincing rationale for the theory, helps to free it from psychologism and excessive 'Bayesian' zeal, and provides it with smoother solutions to longstanding problems in the area of probability.
Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought
Authors: Mohanty Jitendra Nath
Published: November 2023

In this book, Professor Mohanty develops a new interpretation of the ontology and nature of Indian philosophical thinking. Using the original Sanskrit sources, he examines the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity, and the theories of meaning and truth, and explicates the concept of theoretical rationality that underlies the Indian philosophies. The author brings to bear insights from modern Western analytical and phenomenological philosophies, not with a view to instituting direct comparisons but in order to interpret Indian thinking. In doing so, he highlights some very distinctive features of Indian thinking.
Language, Education, and Development
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

Papua New Guinea's struggle for development is intimately bound up with the history of Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin which is the product of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Pacific. The language has since become the most important lingua franca in the region, being spoken by more than a million people in a highly multilingual society. Suzanne Romaine examines some of the changes that are taking place in Tok Pisin as it becomes the native language of the younger generation of rural and urban speakers. These linguistic processes, which are by no means complete, have to be understood in the socio-historical context of colonial expansion and strategies for socio-economic development in the post-colonial era.
Likeness and Likenesses in the Parmenides
Authors: Schofield Malcolm
Published: November 2023

Ever since Gregory Vlastos’s epoch-making article of 1954 Plato’s Parmenides has meant-for most scholars and philosophers-just one thing: the Third Man regress argument (TMA). This was the effect chiefly, as I judge, of three distinct but intimately connected features of the article.
The Politicus: Structure and Form
Authors: Rowe Christopher
Published: November 2023

This chapter is almost exclusively about the Politicus, one member of the group of the Platonic dialogues generally described as ‘late’ or ‘later’. It represents an initial stage in a much larger project covering Plato’s use of the dialogue form in the corpus as a whole, and his general conception-though that of course may turn out not to be simple or wholly stable-of the doing of philosophy and of writing and the relationship between them. One of the main distinguishing features of this project is that it aims to approach the subject from the bottom up, through the detailed study of particular dialogues, rather than from a generalized discussion of the possible uses to which Plato, and we, might put the method of writing in dialogue form. Given the indirect nature of most of the evidence, it may appear disingenuous to expect much from such an approach. I believe, however, that it is not only useful but necessary, not least in order to set some limits to what has often been a distinctly speculative discussion.
Beyond The Boundaries: Lëtzebuergesch Outside The Grand Duchy
Authors: Hoffmann Jean-Paul
Published: November 2023

The use of Lëtzebuergesch in Belgium, France, and Germany would fall into category (I). The West Moselle Franconian dialect continuum either coexists with a single standard language alone, as with German in Germany and French in France, or else shares strict allocation of domain with standard French and standard German, as in Luxembourg. In the case of Belgium, a further distinction must be drawn between those parts of the country ceded to her by the Netherlands in I 839 (‘Old Belgium’, e.g. Arion) and the ones ceded by Germany in 1920 (‘New Belgium’, e.g. St Vith). Both of these share borders with the grand duchy.
Mobilian Jargon
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

The study of Native American languages has traditionally paid little attention to linguistic convergence, just as linguists focusing on language contact have often neglected Native American cases. Drawing both on fieldwork and on archival research Emanuel Drechsel presents a grammatical, sociolinguistic, and ethnohistorical study of Mobilian Jargon, a Muskogean-based American Indian pidgin of the Mississippi valley. Mobilian Jargon functioned as an interlingual medium of communication among linguistically diverse southeastern Native American groups, and in contact between these groups and non-Indians, from at least 1700 until the mid-twentieth century. It also served as a a sociolinguistic buffer, providing native peoples with some protection against outside intrusions. The linguistic and extralinguistic evidence points to a pre-Columbian origin, and a role as a lingua franca among mound-building paramount chiefdoms of the lower Mississippi valley. Because of its focus on a non-European based case, Drechsel's study questions the universality of some concepts developed in pidgin and creole linguistics. It also carries significant implications for the ethnology of Native American peoples, and for the history of North America, suggesting that Native American peoples have had a greater historical role than has been acknowledged hitherto.
Kant’s Theory of Imagination
Authors: Gibbons Sarah L
Published: November 2023

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are ofen thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in 'bridging gaps' between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental insight into the complexity of cognition for finite rational beings such as ourselves. Gibbons begins with an interpretation of synthesis which shows it to be a broader activity than most accounts suggest. Examining the first Critique, she presents a reading of the Transcendental Deduction and the chapter on Schematism that spells out the extraconceptual activities of imagination essential to cognition. This account of imagination is built upon in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant elaborates its role in characterizing the subjective conditions of judgement. Throughout, the cooperation of imagination and reason is highlighted; Gibbons shows that on Kant's account, human beings pursue reason's ideal ends through the provisional and continuing attempt to articulate them. This attempt involves an appeal to a shared social and historical imagination - thus, a full characterization of the subjective conditions of judgement must include the role of imagination.
Swinburne’s Argument from Religious Experience
Authors: Gale Richard m.
Published: November 2023

I have long admired Richard Swinburne’s work, not only for the way it has raised the level of discussion in the philosophy of religion by the introduction of technical sophistication and rigour, but even more for its courageous honesty in espousing and defending to the hilt his deepest beliefs and convictions, regardless of whether they are currently in vogue. He is a true professor whose concern is not to look good but to seek the truth, and for this he deserves our deepest respect as a philosopher. Of all his many important contributions to philosophy, the one for which he is most likely to achieve lasting fame is his empirical argument for the existence of God in The Existence of God, a book that will become a classic in my opinion.1 As a result of this work, a return visit from Hume’s Philo is needed, but he had better come loaded for bear, because the weapons that he used so effectively to stop poor Cleanthes in his tracks will be of no avail.
The Philosophical Economy of Plato‘s Psychology: Rationality and Common Concepts in the Timaeus
Authors: Frede Dorothea
Published: November 2023

It is and will remain a sound maxim that a Platonic dialogue should not be interpreted in terms of what Plato says elsewhere. Needless to say, however, this maxim is violated by the exegete all the time. And it is all the more tempting to sin against it if Plato introduces seemingly crucial concepts at crucial points in a text, but then leaves it to the reader to fathom the depth of what is merely hinted at in his all too brief remarks. Especially the recurrence of these crucial concepts in different dialogues provokes the attempt to construe a pattern of explanation into which the isolated remarks can be fitted like the pieces of a puzzle. Such constructions cannot be more than conjectural; there is no guarantee that Plato meant us to fit his scattered remarks together to form a neat picture, no matter how ‘pregnant’ his terminology may seem. But the fact that this is often our only resort is my justification for reading a crucial passage in the Timaeus in the light of the results of a line of interpretation that I have developed in an article on the common concepts in the Theaetetus. Since the limitations of that article did not allow a further pursuit of this line I am glad for the opportunity to resume the discussion here.
Rule and Exception: on the Aristotelian Theory of Equity
Authors: Brunschwig Jacques
Published: November 2023

‘For what is indeterminate, the rule (xαvώv) also is indeterminate (αóϱiσπ o ζ). like the leaden rule used by the Lesbian masons: instead of being rigid, this rule bends and adapts itself to the shape of the stone’ (EN 5. 14. u37b29-32).
Perfection and Reduction in Aristotle‘s Prior Analytics
Authors: Striker Gisela
Published: November 2023

Ever since Lukasiewicz reinstated Aristotle as the founder of formal logic, there has been a wealth of studies of Aristotle‘s syllogistic as a formal system. Against Lukasiewicz‘s claim that syllogistic is a system in which certain theses function as axioms, others as theorems derived from these, it has been argued-convincingly, to my mind-that it would be historically more accurate to represent syllogistic as a system of natural deduction that starts from a set of primitive rules and demonstrates the validity of inferences by showing how their conclusions can be deduced from their premisses.
The Real Molyneux Question and the Basis of Locke’s Answer
Authors: Bolton Martha Brandt
Published: November 2023

William Molyneux, who was dedicated to the experimentalism of the Royal Society, had no use for a priori speculation, but he was fond of posing his question about the newly sighted man. The question concerns a man born blind who has learned to distinguish a solid cube from a globe by touch. If he were made to see, could he immediately distinguish those figures by sight alone? Neither Molyneux nor those to whom he posed this question had closely observed the behaviour or someone cured of congenital blindness. Neverthel , Molyneux thought he knew the answer to the question. The once-blind man would not be able to distinguish the figures by sight alone.
Sensory Ideas, Objective Reality, and Material Falsity
Authors: Alanen Lilli
Published: November 2023

This chapter deals with the problematic notion of material falsity introduced by Descartes in the Third Meditation to account for the unreliability of a subclass of ideas: sense perceptions or sensory ideas. It is one of Descartes’s professed doctrines that ideas, when considered in themselves, without being referred to anything else, cannot be false. Falsity occurs in judgements, and a judgement depends on an independent act of the will: there can be no falsity properly speaking in ideas as such.1 Material falsity, however, seems to be an exception to this rule-it is described as another kind of falsity, intrinsic to some adventitious ideas, notably those of sensory qualities, like heat and cold, of which there is no telling whether they are true or false (AT VII 43; CSM II 30). Is Descartes, as Amauld worried, confusing idea with’ judgement, or worse, is this to be seen as another instance of the inconsistency of his theory of ideas, for which Descartes has been so often charged? The brief account in the Third Meditation is very unsatisfactory indeed—yet I think it is possible to make perfectly good sense of the view there introduced, once all the statements and scattered comments Descartes makes on this obscure topic are put together.
Descartes: The End of Anthropology
Authors: Voss Stephen
Published: November 2023

What is a human being? Any systematic philosophy ought to offer an answer to that question. You would think that Descartes’s philosophy would; it is natural to think that his new vision of souls and bodies provides a new way to do anthropology —a new way to conceive human beings. His first intuition, indeed, is that a human being is a compound of a Cartesian soul and a Cartesian human body. But I believe that, when all is said and done, he concludes that he has no answer at all to this question. In the following pages I will display Descartes’s failure to incorporate human beings into his new universe as the culmination of a historical process discernible in his writings. I will argue that he had good metaphysical reasons to conclude that no Cartesian anthropology is possible. Appreciating the story requires attention to shifting patterns within his writings, and to passages absent from as well as present in the text. The story clearly has large philosophical implications, but we cannot examine them now.
Kripke
Authors: Hughes Christopher
Published: November 2023

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.
Where and What is Phonology? A Representational Perspective
Authors: Burton-Roberts Noel
Published: November 2023

There is a tension surrounding the nature of phonology, centring on phonological content and its relation to phonetic phenomena. The ‘what’ in my title concerns this. This chapter highlights the connection between that question and another concerning the status of phonology. The ‘where’ refers to this. Although this latter issue is seldom explicitly raised, the two issues are surely connected. In asking ‘where’ phonology is, I am asking whether phonology should be thought of as included in the language faculty. As the linguistic is usually conceived, phonology is an essential component of the linguistic. So, in questioning the status of phonology, this chapter seeks to place the issue of the nature of phonology in the context of a general tension surrounding the nature of language.
Speaker, Speech, and Knowledge of Sounds
Authors: Docherty Gerard , Foulkes Paul
Published: November 2023

Our aim in this chapter is to offer a reflection on the theme of ‘where and what is phonology’ from the perspective of investigators whose prime interest is to develop an understanding of variability in speech production. Recent work by the authors (e.g. Docherty et al. 1997; Docherty and Foulkes 1999; Foulkes et al. 1999; Milroy et al. 1999) has investigated aspects of ‘sociophonetic’ variation in a number of varieties of British English. In carrying out this work, we specifically set out to look at what value could be added to our understanding of sociolinguistic variation by bringing to bear a more refined (auditory and instrumental) phonetic analysis than is typically employed in the analysis of consonantal variation, and by considering the findings in the light of accounts of phonological alternations in English appearing in the recent phonological literature. As a result of taking this approach, we have been led to reflect on the interface between these three areas—phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics—particularly in respect of whether, jointly, they provide a coherent account of the systematic properties of speech production. The nature of this interface lies at the heart of the issues that are tackled by this volume.
The Anti-Materialist Strategy and the ‘Knowledge Argument’
Authors: Robinson Howard
Published: November 2023

There is an argument (which is generally called the ‘knowledge argument’) which has been used to show that physicalism faces a serious problem. Versions of this argument, in slightly different forms have been much discussed and criticized in recent years. My purpose in this paper is to present the strongest version of the argument and then defend it. Put informally, the argument can be expressed as follows. A deaf scientist (DS) might become the world’s leading expert on the physical aspects of sound and hearing. Assuming science to be more advanced than at present, DS’s knowledge of the physiology, physics, chemistry and AI-style cognitive psychology of hearing might be complete. But there remains something which he does not know. The information he lacks concerns what might variously be characterized as what it is like to hear or what things sound like,orthe phenomenal nature of sound or the qualitative nature of sound. Since he knows all there is to know about the physical process of hearing, that about which he does not know must not be a physical state of affairs: so what it is like to hear, what things sound like, and the phenomenal and qualitative natures of sound must be non-physical features of hearing.
Difficulties with Physicalism, and a Programme for Dualists1
Authors: Forrest Peter
Published: November 2023

Physicalism is not a precise and articulate theory so much as a programme for metaphysical speculation. It has at its core the physicalist thesis, which states that the world, including human beings, can be completely described in physical terms. In addition, the physicalist programme relies only on scientific and causal ways of understanding the world. So it concerns both description and understanding. There are well-known difficulties with physicalism, which are ultimately based on our experience of ourselves. But because it is a metaphysical programme, and not just an isolated thesis, these difficulties are not, and ought not to be, persuasive until we have a satisfactory rival programme of metaphysical speculation. Now, there are equally well-known difficulties with most versions of dualism. And physicalists complain that these force dualists into a series of ad hoc responses. If so, then there is a stalemate. On the one hand, physicalism is charged with empirical inadequacy, because it ignores much of our experience. On the other hand, dualism is charged with theoretical incompetence, because of too frequent a resort to the ad hoc. As a result of this stalemate we would be forced to choose between the scientific and manifest images. The purpose of this paper is to argue that things are not so. We can reconcile the manifest and scientific, by defending a non-Cartesian dualist programme.
Irreducibility and Teleology
Authors: Papineau David
Published: November 2023

How do such ‘special sciences’ as psychology, economics, genetics, pharmacology, meteorology, and so on relate to physics? There is currently a widespread consensus among analytic philosophers on this question. Namely, that we should be physicalists but non-reductionists about the special sciences. We can take physicalism here to mean the supervenience of the special on the physical: if two situations are physically identical, then they must be psychologically (and so on) identical too. Non-reductionism means that any given psychological state will be variably realized at the physical level: no common physical property will characterize all instances of any given psychological property. (To avoid unnecessary repetition, I shall sometimes refer to psychology as the typical science. But, unless I say otherwise, my points are intended to apply to the other special sciences as well.)
Structural Explanation in Social Theory
Authors: Jackson Frank , Pettit Philip
Published: November 2023

Social theory pursues the relatively abstract explanation of social facts. Thus it is distinguished on two fronts: by its subject-matter, social facts, and by its method of explanation, one that is relatively abstract. 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 worldwide fall in the number of smokers; that the Soviet Union has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan; that the crime-rate in Australia is lower than in the US; that every successful entrepreneur maximizes expected net revenue; and that the birth-rate in Western countries has fallen this century.
Reduction, Causality, and Normativity
Authors: Lennon Kathleen
Published: November 2023

Is it possible to maintain a causal explanatory view of intentional explanation, hold some strong(ish) version of antireductionism with regard to intentional states and intentional laws, and be respectably materialist enough not to be accused of closet Cartesianism? The causal explanatory view I shall be considering is one in which the causal relation between our intentional states and intentional acts is supported by lawlike generalizations employing intentional vocabulary. The causal relations are predicated on the backs of the rationalizing links between intentional states. The intentional causal generalizations characterize empirical regularities between states as a consequence of these states having contents which bear rationalizing links to each other.