bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Contemporary Performance (1983)
Authors: Headley Stephen C
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides a translation from the Javanese of a complete and typical performance of the Murwa Kala as a wayang exorcism. Only the final mantras have been left out, because they are quite incomprehensible when presented in translation without commentary. They will be analysed in Chapter 5. The very ordinary, normal quality of the performance by Ki Gandasuyana, a dhalang from Klathen, recommends it for study because this is the kind of ruwatan one would usually encounter. It was performed for a Chinese family on 6 February 1983 in Beton Mas, a middle-class residential area of Semarang, on the north coast of Java. The Budimulyana family (Chinese often take Indonesian names) felt they needed it because they had suffered financial misfortunes. Budimulyana had his whole extended family purified although not every member would appear on the list of siblings who require ritual purification (cf Appendix 3). He chose an elderly, relatively unknown dhalang from another town in order to negotiate a minimum price.
Aristotle’s Inclusivism
Authors: Crisp Roger
Published: November 2023

Despite the vast literature which has developed around books 1 and 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE], there is no consensus on whether Aristotle’s view of ϵvδaιμovía is dominant or inclusive. Aristotle’s advice on method in ethics is that one look for the truth in competing views. In this paper I shall argue that elements of both dominant and inclusive interpretations are correct.
Plato and Computer Dating: A Discussion of Gerard R. Ledger, Re-counting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato’s Style, and Leonard Brandwood, The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues
Authors: Young Charles M
Published: November 2023

Writing a dialogue, especially a long one, takes time. Moreover, Plato may well have revised his dialogues after he initially composed them. Even so, it seems reasonable to suppose that he wrote the dialogues in some rough order or other;4 and for any of a variety of reasons, ranging from an interest in Plato’s philosophical development to simple curiosity, we might wish to discover what that order was. One approach to this task is the so-called stylometric method. Proponents of this method begin by counting the occurrences of letters, words, phrases, constructions, patterns, etc. in the different dialogues. They assume that differences in counts across the dialogues reflect differences in Plato’s prose style, broadly conceived. Finally, they take the stylistic differences to reflect differences in the dates at which the different dialogues were composed and order the dialogues accordingly.
Quality of Well-Being: Quality of Being
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

It is an old idea that there is quality as well as quantity of well—being-that a distinction (perhaps a number of distinctions) can and should be drawn between higher and lower human goods. The implications of the idea differ according to the wider ethical framework in which one places it. But, since virtually everyone thinks that a notion of individual well-being plays one or another major role in our ethical thought, the questions at stake—whether it makes sense to distinguish between higher and lower goods, and what it might mean to do so—are of wide interest. In this chapter I want first to examine the idea as such (Sections 1-3) and then to consider its place within a moral philosophy that takes the ethical standard to be the well-being of all, impartially assessed (Section 4). We shall find a number of themes from James Griffin’s work guiding us on our way.
An Abortion Argument and the Threat of Intransitivity
Authors: Temkin Larry S
Published: November 2023

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of house sitting for James Griffin while he was on holiday. Throughout the days, and into the nights, I would work in his study, papers—and cats—strewn across his large desk, surrounded by his magnificent library. As a young philosopher, labouring over the initial draft of my book Inequality, the setting was not merely conducive to work, it was inspirational. Sitting in James Griffin’s study in Oxford, I realized how fortunate I was to be a philosopher.

Over the years, I have profited both from discussions with Griffin and from his work. So I am proud to contribute a chapter to a volume honouring him. In addition, I am especially pleased to acknowledge my long-standing personal debt.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Redemption of Life through Art
Authors: Soll Ivan
Published: November 2023

Towards the end of his working life, Nietzsche used the occasion of writing a new preface to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, to distance himself publicly from past errors and allegiances. In this aptly titled ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, he rejected his earlier adherence to the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer and his worshipful admiration of Richard Wagner.
The theory of perception in plato’s theaetetus 152-183
Authors: Day Jane m.
Published: November 2023

IN this paper I wish to re-examine the theory of perception which Plato makes Socrates put forward in the course of developing Theaetetus’ first suggested definition of knowledge, as ‘nothing other than perception’ (Tht. 151 E 2-3). I have two main questions: first, what is the precise content of this theory, and secondly, did Plato think it true?

The theory is presented in the dialogue as if it were purely a corollary of Theaetetus’ thesis. It is introduced as part of the doctrine of total flux which, Socrates claims, is implicit in Theaetetus’ suggestion. Flux doctrine is rejected in the anti-Heraclitean argument at 181-3, and we hear no more about the associated theory of perception from this point onwards, either during the final refutation of the thesis that knowledge is perception at 184-7, or later in the dialogue. Thus the general context would suggest that the whole function of the theory is dialectical, that is, that it serves to build up the position which Plato intends to demolish, rather than representing his own views
The Stoic Origin of Natural Rights
Authors: Mitsis Phillip
Published: November 2023

The idea that we, as individual human beings, have intrinsic natural rights is often taken to be a distinctive achievement of the late medieval or early modern periods, and hence unknown to antiquity. Whatever particular explanation scholars offer for its origin-for example, the rise of late medieval nominalism with its emphasis on concrete individuals; nascent capitalism and its concern to protect the interests of propertied classes; Hobbes’s eschewal of explanations in terms of a natural telos and his attempt to explain human action in terms of efficient causes and, consequently, to find a source of rights in the ‘efficient motions’ of desire; the attempts of the Levelers to secure religious freedom; etc.-the notion of intrinsic human rights is widely held to be as foreign to antiquity ‘as the internal combustion engine’.1 However, I want to suggest that for a variety of historical and philosophical reasons the Stoics offer the most appropriate starting point for considering the origins of natural-rights theories.Of course, I am not claiming that the notion that all human beings have intrinsic rights ever achieved in antiquity, or indeed in any ancient philosophical theory, anything like the easy and widespread currency that it has today.
Atomic Independence and Indivisibility
Authors: Bodnar Istvan M
Published: November 2023

Aristotle on several occasions voices a two-pronged principle of the atomists, that no plurality may emerge from real unity and no unity from what is real plurality. Understandably, the first injunction has been studied far more extensively than the second. The impossibility of the emergence of a plurality from what is really a unit is a constitutive feature of those indivisible bits of being which, precisely on this account, can be called atomic. In what follows I shall explore the two bans in conjunction. In order to do so, I shall first need some technical vocabulary. Alongside atomic indivisibility-the postulation that atoms cannot be fractured-I shall need to speak about atomic independence. This is the feature of the atoms whereby they do not get absorbed into larger chunks of matter, do not coalesce with one another.
Transcendental Arguments and Non-Naturalistic Anti-Realism
Authors: Bell David
Published: November 2023

Although the debate, sparked off nearly four decades ago by the publication of Strawson’s Individuals, shows little sign of reaching agreement as to whether so-called ‘transcendental arguments’ can be philosophically effective, or sound, or even formally valid, that debate has nevertheless resulted in a widespread and apparently stable consensus as to what such transcendental arguments ought, in general, to comprise.I Ross Harrison, for example, characterizes the relevant notion as follows. Transcendental arguments, he says, are arguments which share a particular purpose, subject matter and form with Kant’s.
Hume’s Moral Psychology
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

IN 1927, A. E. Taylor concluded his Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘David Hume and the Miraculous’ with a judgement of Hume’s attitude to his philosophical work that has been held by many other readers of Hume:

Taylor is here expressing an attitude to Hume that many of us have felt: that his philosophy does not deserve to be taken too much to heart, because for all his intellectual vitality and the disturbing character of much that he says, there is a streak of frivolity in him that leads him to follow arguments to outrageous conclusions without serious consideration of the effect such conclusions may have on those who are driven to them; and that the love of literary reputation that he openly expressed, was of far greater personal importance to him than philosophical truth.
Hume’s Scepticism and the Dialogues
Authors: Penelhum Terence
Published: November 2023

THE question of whether Hume is a sceptic and, if he is, what sort of sceptic he is, is probably the most vexed problem of the subtle subscience of Humeneutics. I will say at the outset that I think Hume is a sceptic, but a sceptic of an aberrant kind. I shall try in what follows to indicate what I take the nature of his scepticism to be, the place that it has in his philosophical system in the Treatise and the first Enquiry, and the extent to which it leads him into inconsistencies. I shall then attempt to use the results to interpret the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

There are still well-informed philosophers who find it odd that any one should even suggest that Hume is not a sceptic. To most students of philosophy the two paradigms of scepticism are the Descartes of the first Meditation and the Hume of the fourth and fifth sections of the first Enquiry. But it has come to be quite widely held that Hume’s views, rightly understood, are not sceptical at all.
The Forms Fracture
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

Philosophical systems are never decisively refuted; like old soldiers, they simply fade away. The great medieval synthesis of biblical, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian themes, which came to be known as Scholasticism, was the culmination of a metaphysical tradition which, in many different guises and with more or less power, had held sway for the best part of 2,000 years. Yet it came to be dis carded and replaced in the seventeenth century by a quite new style of philosophizing conducted within a radically different conceptual framework. This is not to say that the new ‘modern’ philosophy is entirely discontinuous with the older concerns we have been charting; that would be manifestly false. But whilst details of the doctrines of the seventeenth-century philosophers are often only intelligible against the background of medieval discussions, they breathe a different spirit and their thinking has a different intellectual orientation.
The Emergence of Historicity
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

The gradual and halting recognition of the contingency of the world made possible the even more halting recognition of the historicity of human being. Indeed, it is arguable that, even today, the fundamental significance of historicity for the way we are in the world is still not fully appreciated by many philosophers. It would be too much to attempt here to trace all the different conceptual developments which have contributed to the emergence of an understanding of our very being as historical. But the first necessary step was the emergence of a sense of history as involving more than a chronology of past events.
Truth as a Social Construct
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

When Truth is taken to consist in some kind of identity between an object and the thought of a thinking subject, the question of how such an identity is attainable be comes an inescapable issue, and how it is dealt with affects the conception of truth. Hegel’s answer was that truth is attained only by the eventual convergence of thought and reality in the Absolute. That answer, unconvincing as it was, nevertheless marks the great watershed in modern philosophy. For if one docs not accept Hegel’s answer, the very possibility of truth is thrown into question.
Truth and the Analysis of Logical Form
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

The thinkers discussed in the last two chapters have all, in their different ways, been responding to Hegel’s incorporation of historicity into the heart of the philosophical endeavour—and to the common judgement that his attempt at a grand synthesis was not successful. In the twentieth century, a quite different philosophical tradition has developed, mainly in English-speaking countries, which has taken little or no account of Hegel and whose inspiration comes from a quite independent source: the new mathematical logic initiated by Gottlob Frege. Although this tradition operates in a way which ignores Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, its practitioners nevertheless often express heated hostility towards him and his followers, a curious phenomenon which probably mirrors his rejection of the assumption that formal structures are adequate to thinking through concrete realities.
Truth in Action
Authors: Campbell Richard
Published: November 2023

The ,principal division amongst philosophers today does not overtly turn on any question of doctrine; it does not present as a dispute between opposing theses on certain issues. Rather it manifests as a radical difference in philosophical style, a difference which I have suggested reflects different ontological presuppositions, unacknowledged and not precisely defined.
Moral Fecundity
Authors: Ferrari G R F
Published: November 2023

Anthony Price has written a subtle, vivid, and engaging book. His prose might be described as mandarin with muscle (I quote a characteristic sentence: ‘Various interpreters offer a variety of turns of phrase … that, for all their felicity, seem rather to sheathe the problem than to bate it’, 33). It is a fitting vehicle for the intricate and tenacious exegesis which makes up the book, and which merits by its content the slow and concentrated reading that it demands by its form.
The Rationality of Morality
Authors: Lawrence Gavin , Quinn Warren
Published: November 2023

A central preoccupation of Professor Foot, as of Plato, to whom she often refers, is with the rationality of morality. This she has pursued in a series of brilliant and searching papers across several decades. And, like Plato, she invites trisection. My contribution takes off from criticisms of some views in her early and middle periods, and leaves aside her recent, and as yet unpublished, work. I wish to stress right from the start that these are not her present views, and that she is, if anything, too severe a critic of her earlier work. For, though I shall take issue with a certain strand of thought in her early and middle papers, I think they are among the very best in moral philosophy, demanding and deserving the very hardest of study. Where they are wrong, they are importantly and illuminatingly wrong, and where they are right, I do not think their points have even yet been fully appreciated.
Putting Rationality in its Place
Authors: Quinn Warren
Published: November 2023

One kind of metaethical debate between realists and antirealists is about the character of ethical truth, with realists asserting and antirealists denying that truth in moral thought transcends our capacity to find reasons in support of our moral judgments. The antirealist in this kind of debate, no less than the realist, thinks that there is objective moral truth and knowledge. And the truth in question is not merely disquotational. Both parties think that a true moral claim corresponds, in some way or other, to the way the world is. Their disagreement, like that of their counterparts in mathematics, is about the nature of this correspondence. The antirealist sees it as a relation between the claim and the publicly available facts that could be adduced as good reasons to accept it, while the realist sees it as a relation to what he thinks of as the truth condition of the claim-a state of the world that may transcend our ability to detect its presence by way of reasoned argument. This issue is surely an important one, but it is posterior to the more fundamental question that has dominated metaethics in the last half-century. This is the question whether what lies at the heart of moral thought are beliefs capable of genuine truth or noncognitive attitudes that cannot be so assessed: feelings, emotions, desires, preferences, prescriptions, decisions, and the like.
Fear of Relativism
Authors: Scanlon T M
Published: November 2023

Relativism is a hot topic. By this I do not mean merely that it is now much discussed but, rather, that its discussion always arouses certain passions. From some, relativism provokes passionate denial, the passion and haste of these denials suggesting a kind of fear. Others are eager to affirm it, and often do so with a particular exhilaration and sense of satisfaction, perhaps even of superiority. The question that I will begin with here is, what gives the topic this heat? Since my own reaction to relativism has generally been one of opposition, I will approach the question mainly from that side, by asking why we should want our judgements of value in general, or our moral judgements in particular, to have some property that relativism would deny them. As will become clear, my thoughts about this topic have been in large part shaped by Philippa Foot’s writings.
Plato’s Cratylus: The Naming of Nature and the Nature of Naming
Authors: Silverman Allan
Published: November 2023

The Cratylus is Plato’s only dialogue-length treatment of an issue which today we would consider to be part of the philosophy of language. While his way of putting the question under consideration – ‘What is [the cause of] the correctness of names?’–and the proposed answers–convention or nature–are slightly unusual, the nexus of elements which dominate his discussion is quite familiar. The Cratylus is an investigation into the problem of how names hook on to the world. and the familiar triad of the world, language, and speakers properly serve as the three points from which we are to triangulate an answer.
The Cyrenaic Theory of Knowledge
Authors: Tsouna Mckirahan Voula
Published: November 2023

In the analytical literature on epistemology of the 1960s and 1970s versions of foundationalism such as sense-data theories and adverbial theories are to be found at the core of the then current debates. But their glory was rather short-lived. Thanks to the fervour and industriousness of its critics, sensory foundationalism withdrew from the limelight of contemporary philosophical discussions.
Substantial Holism
Authors: Scaltsas Theodore
Published: November 2023

Substances are the most unified wholes in Aristotle’s metaphysics, being paradigmatically single but complex entities. My concern in this paper is to understand the nature of their unity, and through it, explicate an important aspect of the relation of the potential to the actual, which is fundamental in Aristotle’s system. Although the nature of this relation is illuminated by examples offered by Aristotle, this is not sufficient, in view of the enormous explanatory weight that is placed by Aristotle on this relation. An attempt must be made to understand why it is that this relation can deliver such fundamental and rather spectacular—denigrated as ‘magical’ by its critics —metaphysical results.
Essences, Powers, and Generic Propositions
Authors: Moravcsik Julius
Published: November 2023

What are essences? Aristotle and the student of the modern natural sciences are both concerned with this question. Some recent analytic philosophy assumes that the essence of a natural kind K will be a collection of truths that are necessarily and uniquely of it and its members. If so, essences should be expressed by sentences of the form: ‘All and only As are Bs’ in which ‘A’ names the natural kind under scrutiny. This essay shows that such a conception of essence is inadequate. It neither captures Aristotle’s notion of the essential, nor that of the modern biologist. For the essence of a natural kind includes constituency, structure, and function. Thus an adequate analysis has to account for all three of these ingredients. Functioning is, however, not an all-or-nothing affair. Things can function better or worse. Thus an entity can more fully embody its essence, or less so.
Rhetoric, Dialectic, and the Passions
Authors: Cooper John M
Published: November 2023

That Aristotle devotes the major part of the second book of his Rhetoricto a discussion of a fairly wide range of emotions or passions is I suppose fairly widely known among philosophers. And I know that philosophers interested in the emotions either from the point of view of philosophy of mind in general or moral psychology and the philosophy of action in particular do read these chapters for the light they may throw on the phenomena that interest them. However, the fact is that very close, philosophically informed work has not been done on this (or in fact any) part of the Rhetoric by Aristotelian scholars nothing to compare with what has been done on the Ethics, or the Physics, or Aristotle’s various writings on metaphysics and logic. The result is that, despite its recognized interest and presumed philosophical value, Aristotle’s treatment of the emotions in the Rhetoric, which is the only extended treatment of them anywhere in his writings, is still very little understood. This is not terra incognita, but it is territory very little explored. It still needs to be mapped and marked so that what it has to offer for philosophical history, as well as for the rest of philosophy, can be made available to us. It is to such a preliminary mapping and marking that I devote this paper.
Problems with Graham’S Two-Systems Hypothesis
Authors: Goldin Owen
Published: November 2023

in  Aristotle's Two Systems  1 Daniel Graham has put forward a bold new hypothesis concerning the development of Aristotle’s thought, which he labels ‘the Two Systems Hypothesis’. Graham recognizes that the interpreter of Aristotle faced with conflicting doctrines sometimes has no recourse but to posit a development in Aristotle’s thought. But, with the notable exception of the speculations of Owen,2 Graham finds previous developmental accounts of Aristotle’s thought philosophically unsatisfactory. This is because genetic accounts (like those of Jaeger)3 have typically explained changes in Aristotelian doctrine on the basis of a shift in general outlook, not on Aristotle’s attempts as a philosopher to resolve tensions arising in his earlier views. Graham’s book is an attempt to give a developmental account of Aristotle’s thought in metaphysics and philosophy of science without this shortcoming.
Animals in the Poetics
Authors: Gallop David
Published: November 2023

According to Aristotle, art (techne) imitates nature. This celebrated doctrine is not limited to what we call the ‘fine arts’, or to works of’art’ in any narrow modern sense; and it does not mean that such art-works copy things in the natural order. It means, more generally, that craftsmen adopt means to produce ends; and that in doing so, they follow a pattern found throughout organic nature.
A Philosopher’s Coming of Age: A Study in Erotetic Intellectual History
Authors: Fisch Menachem
Published: November 2023

Whewell’s intellectual undertakings were enormous. He wrote widely on almost every topic on the early Victorian agenda. He was indeed a polymath, but, as noted in the introduction to this volume, the term polymath fails to do full justice to the nature of his universal scholarship. Whewell’s works both literary and scientific, historical and philosophical, moral and theological were written with an explicit view not merely to embrace the world of learning but to synthesize it and render it a unified intellectual whole. As is evident from various of the contributions to this collective effort to assess Whewell’s achievement, there exists a measure of disagreement as to the extent to which he succeeded in his ambitious interdisciplinary project. Contributors also differ in their location of the underlying unifying components of Whewell’s multi-faceted enterprise. Yet there is no doubt that Whewell himself regarded his History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences as both the hallmark of his career and the unifying ‘hard core’ of his entire system of thought.
William Whewell’s Philosophy of Knowledge and its Reception
Authors: Yeo Richard R
Published: November 2023

During Whewell’s lifetime references to his polymathic aspirations coloured most assessments of his achievements. Like Sydney Smith’s well-known aphorism, these characterizations often carried negative judgements concerning Whewell’s metascientific deliberations. Even before embarking on his vast history and philosophy of the inductive sciences Whewell himself anticipated the opinions of ‘people [who] bid us beware of the Demon of universal knowledge’, although he freely confessed to George Morland in 1815 about ‘certain yearnings after the whole circle of the sciences, certain ecstatic aspirations after universal knowledge, certain indefinite desires to approximate to something like omniscience’. Thirty years later he referred to the Greek philosopher Erastosthenes whose activites embraced philosophy, geometry, astronomy, and poetry and, clearly with his own case in mind, observed that: ‘It is seldom that one person attempts to master so many subjects without incurring the charge, and perhaps the danger of being superficial. ‘
Structural Questions
Authors: Gibbard Allan
Published: November 2023

Throughout the book I have read morality narrowly. We can mark it off, I proposed, through its connection to narrowly moral sentiments, guilt and resentment. Morality on this narrow reading looks to the kinds of acts for which a person can be to blame. A person is to blame for an act if it makes sense for others to be angry at him-from a stand point of full, impartial engagement, I added-and if it makes sense for the person himself to feel guilty for what he has done. Morally wrong acts are not always acts a person is to blame for; there can be excuses. Still, the connection is tight. Wrong acts, roughly, are acts a person would be to blame for if he chose them in a normal state of mind.
Socratic piety:In Response to Scott Calef
Authors: Mcpherran Mark
Published: November 2023

I am happy to see the arguments and views of my paper ‘Socratic Piety in the Euthyphro’ serve as a springboard for Scott Calef’s investigation of the Euthyphro. By focusing on my ‘constructivist’ reading of the dialogue’s latter half, he hopes to show that although the Euthyphro encapsulates positive Socratic teaching on the nature of piety, that teaching does not-as I argued-identify piety as a part of justice. Instead, he maintains that the dialogue is best read as being compatible with the view that piety is identical to the whole of justice, and thus that it presents no prima-facie conflict with the Socratic doctrine of the unity of the virtues (as found, for example, at Prot. 329 C-D). In what follows I want to show that while Calef’s challenge helps to clarify the search for piety in the Euthyphro, he has neither undermined my own position nor made plausible his own constructivist account.
Further Reflections on Socratic Piety: A Reply to Mark Mcpherran
Authors: Warren Calef Scott
Published: November 2023

I have great respect for Mark McPherran as a thinker and scholar. Unfortunately, I cannot reply to all of his criticisms of my paper here, nor give to those I do discuss the attention they no doubt deserve. Many involve subtle misreadings and cannot be individually addressed. In the following I hope to further the discussion in a positive way by focusing on McPherran’s most substantive points. These include his discussion of the clarification passage and Socrates’ use of the fear/shame and number/odd analogies, his objection that my account supposes that there is something correct in Euthyphro’s ‘long-winded’ answer at I4A II-B 7,andhisclaim that my account of the gods’ chief ργov is ‘unlikely to be found an acceptable candidate by Socrates.
The subjecthood of souls and some other forms:
Authors: Shields Christopher
Published: November 2023

abstract

If he denies subjecthood to souls, Aristotle contradicts himself. For then he accepts the third member of an inconsistent set of propositions-whose first two members he also accepts: (1) souls are substances (Dean. 412 19-20, 412 10-11, 415 8-12); (2) substances are πoKϵµíμϵνa (substrates or subjects; M etaph. 1028 36-7, 1029 1-2, 1029 17-19, 1038 15); and (3) souls are not πoKϵµíμϵνa (evidently at De an. 412 18-19, and perhaps indirectly at De an.408b11-15). Wondering whether Aristotle had really contradicted himself on a point so near the surface of his mature writings, I undertook to explain how in the De anima he could suggest that souls fail to be subjects. For it seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that Aristotle accepts both (1) and (2). Still, I maintain, there is no genuine contradiction: as I argued then, and shall argue more fully now, Aristotle does not accept (3) in any form inconsistent with (1) and (2). If I am correct, there is no problem of internal inconsistency.
Truth Definitions and Actual Languages
Authors: Peacocke Christopher
Published: November 2023

According to Davidson, his Tarski-style theory of truth for a natural language is an empirical theory, and ‘like any theory, it may be tested by comparing some of its consequences with the facts’.1 Of particular importance among the consequences of the truth theory for a particular language are the so-called T-sentences it yields as theorems, and Davidson holds that ‘the verification of instances of the T-sentences, or rather their surrogates in a theory relativized to speakers and times, remains respectably empirical’.2
On Understanding the Structure of One’s Language
Authors: Peacocke Christopher
Published: November 2023

ACTION-ASCRIBING sentences are susceptible of adverbial modification of such a kind that a proposition expressed by a sentence so modified entails any proposition obtained from it merely by shearing away some or all of the modifiers. Different theories are current which purport to explain our grasp of the structure of these entailments. In general there is a contrast between a theory, like Professor Davidson’s,1 which explains these relationships by reference to well-understood logical structures represented as underlying the surface forms of action-ascribing sentences, and any theory which finds an explanation closer to the surface of ordinary language by recognizing a more complicated basic syntax than a Davidsonian theorist is prepared to allow for.
Existence and Tense
Authors: Woods Michael
Published: November 2023

This paper is concerned with the problems involved in the semantics of existence in giving a truth theory for English. My particular concern is with the difficulties that are presented by the phenomenon of tense for those aiming to give a Tarski-style semantics for English in accordance with the programme envisaged by Donald Davidson and in other recent work. I shall therefore be presupposing a Davidsonian framework, though what I say is presumably capable of adaptation to alternative semantic approaches.
The De Re ‘Must’: a Note on the Logical Form of Essentialist Claims*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

Quine mocks essentialism. But are his strictures levelled at unreflect ing acceptance of the ancient Aristotelian ontology of three-dimen sional changeable continuants in terms of which we are still doing our unthinking best to make sense of the everyday fabric of the world? Or does he maintain that, even while we remain within that provincial ontology, we have the choice to discriminate or not discriminate in favour of some of the concepts which the things we recognize fall

* This paper continues one of the themes of ‘Identity, Designation, Essentialism, and Physicalism’, forthcoming in Philosophia (1975) and in my contribution to the symposium ‘Identity, Necessity and Physicalism’ to appear in the Proceedings of the 1974 Bristol Philosophy of Logic Conference (ed. S. Komer and M. Welbourne, Blackwell, Oxford, 1975). It nowhere presupposes that paper. The stimulus to attempt the continuation came from trying to defend some of these contentions at the Corso Estivo di Filosofia 1974 in Montagnana, Italy. The appendix which Christopher Peacocke has very kindly agreed to write for the piece is some sign of the nature and extent of my great debt to him both as one of the discutants there and subsequently. I am also indebted to J. A. W. Kamp in the section on negation.
Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification ?
Authors: Kripke Saul
Published: November 2023

Three Recent papers, two by John Wallace and one by Leslie Tharp,1 have attempted to prove that the distinctions usually made between ‘substitutional’ and ‘referential’ quantification are untenable. Now I have not only been puzzled that able authors should advance such a thesis; I have also been surprised to find that many able readers of their papers have believed that they have succeeded, or may possibly have succeeded. Sample statements of the thesis are:

(1) Advantages which were supposed to attach to substitutional quantification by virtue of its ‘lighter’, less predication committed, recursion are all lost. The range for quantified variables and the bias toward extensionality are present in the derived recursion on satisfaction (Wallace (2), p. 208).
Aristotle on the Truth of Utterances
Authors: Crivelli Paolo
Published: November 2023

The first of this paper’s four parts ascribes to Aristotle the view that the linguistic items which are bearers of truth and falsehood are utterances (sentence-tokens). The second part defends the idea, at first sight implausible, that an utterance can have different truth values at different times. The third part endorses the ancient commentators’ claim that for Aristotle an utterance having different truth values at different times undergoes mere Cambridge change. The fourth part contains a definition of truth for utterances of categorical sentence-types.
Perspectives on Time and Memory: An Introduction
Authors: Hoerl Christoph , McCormack Teresa
Published: November 2023

What is the connection between the way we represent time and things in time, on the one hand, and our capacity to remember particular past events, on the other? This is the substantive question that has stood behind the project of putting together this volume. The methodological assumption that has informed this project is that any progress with the difficult and fascinating set of issues that are raised by this question must draw on the resources of various areas both in philosophy and in psychology.
‘Lost in a Sea of Time’: Time-Parsing and Autism
Authors: Boucher Jill
Published: November 2023

It is well known that autism is defined in terms of a triad of impairments affecting social interaction, communication, and creativity. It is also widely known that other impairments, such as general learning difficulties (mental handicap) and motor incoordination often co-occur with autism, but that people with autism may also show peaks of relatively high ability typically in rote learning and memory, and sometimes on visuo-spatial tasks. What is much less widely recognized, except by those regularly in contact with people with autism, is that they have-probably universally-a very poor intuitive sense of time.
Scepticism and Epistemology
Authors: Stern Robert
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I will explore the nature of the sceptical challenge in some detail, in order to see at what, points a transcendental argument might be used against it, and what form that argument might take. I hope to show that, in considering how to deploy transcendental arguments against scepticism, not all forms of scepticism should be treated alike, so that different ways of using transcendental arguments are available. In particular, my claim will be that we can distinguish between epistemic and justificatory scepticism, and then between reliabilist justificatory scepticism and normativist justificatory scepticism, and that each calls for a different conception of these arguments and the role they are required to fulfil.
Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room
Authors: Searle John R
Published: November 2023

I want to use the occasion of this volume dedicated to the twenty-first anniversary of the Chinese Room Argument to reflect on some of the implications of this debate for cognitive science in general, and indeed, for the current state of our larger intellectual culture. I will not spend much time responding to the many detailed arguments that have been presented. I have already responded to more criticisms of the Chinese Room Argument than to all of the criticisms of all of the other controversial philosophical theses that I have advanced in my life. My reason for having so much confidence that the basic argument is sound is that in the past twenty-one years I have not seen anything to shake its fundamental thesis. The fundamental claim is that the purely formal or abstract or syntactical processes of the implemented computer program could not by themselves be sufficient to Buarantee the presence of mental content or semantic content of the sort that is essential to human cognition.
A Chinese Room that Understands
Authors: Simon Herbert A , Eisenstadt Stuart A
Published: November 2023

The thesis of this chapter is that a computer can be programmed (and has been programmed) to understand natural language, in the sense of being able to translate natural language text, to answer in natural language questions put to it in language, and to perform similar tasks which, if performed by a human, would be taken as convincing evidence that the human understood the same language. We will call this thesis Empirical Strong AI (SAI-E) to distinguish it from Logical Strong AI (SAI-L), the thesis that Searle refutes, and which asserts that ‘an appropriately programmed digital computer with the right inputs and outputs, one that satisfies the Turing Test, would thereby necessarily have a mind’ (Searle 1999: 115).
Neural Depictions of ‘World’ and ‘Self’: Bringing Computational Understanding to the Chinese Room
Authors: Aleksander Igor
Published: November 2023

Undoubtedly John Searle’s central contribution to the philosophy of both mind and language is his theory of intentionality. This suggests that cognition in all its forms is directed at objects. We attend to objects, we speak of objects, we understand object-laden stories, and we relate to objects both in perception and recall. When programmed computers only represent objects as symbols in relation to other symbols, this leads logically to the conclusion expressed in the ‘Chinese Room’ Argument (CRA (Searle 1980)): symbols are not objects that share properties with what it is that they represent.
Minds, Machines, and Searle 2: What’s Right and Wrong about the Chinese Room Argument
Authors: Harnad Stevan
Published: November 2023

When in 1979 Zenon Pylyshyn, associate editor of The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS, a peer commentary journal which I edit) informed me that he had secured a paper by John Searle (with an unprepossessing title that Zenon, John, and I have all since forgotten!), I cannot say that I was especially impressed; nor did a quick reading of the brief manuscript-which seemed to be yet another tedious ‘Granny Objection’’ about why/how we are not computers do anything to upgrade that impression.
Business Performance in the Retail Sector
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

This book investigates how John Lewis's unique ownership and organizational arrangements have enabled it to become one of the largest and longest-surviving employee-owned firms in the Western world. From its emergence in 1864, the John Lewis Partnership has placed its trust in an explicit set of business principles, emphasizing employee share-ownership, employee motivation, and profit-sharing. This study examines the success of these principles and the lessons to be learned from them for successful retailing strategy and competitiveness in the 1990s.
A Research Strategy
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

To understand a business such as the John Lewis Partnership requires a broader methodological approach than that of neo-classical economics. In this chapter we lay out a research strategy that takes into account a wider range of data. We first consider the range of data available in principle to the researcher and then place this data in the context of an ideal research strategy for fully mapping out the complex range of determinants of organizational success. Next we detail the difficulties in practice of obtaining the data. A more modest and tractable approach (the research strategy adopted for this study) is then outlined. Conclusions follow.
The Post-war Retailing Environment
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

Retailing was affected during the Second World War by the imposition of rationing and of course by the disruption from war damage itself, but some of the effects of the 1939–45 conflict continued well into the late 1940s. Many foodstuffs were still rationed to the end of the period we are considering, even if less severely than before. Cloth rationing formally ended in 1949 but the Utility scheme, which included controls over margins and prices, persisted until 1952. As Evely (1959) shows, manufacturers continued to allocate goods in short supply along the same supply lines as had existed pre-war. Further, outside the severely damaged cities, the building of shops was restricted. Licences were required for the modernization of existing shops where the expenditure exceeded £100: in 1952 this was raised to £500, (see e.g. Jeffreys 1955). The period was one of high rentals and inflated property prices, on top of which commercial buildings, unlike industrial property, did not qualify for taxation allowances in respect of depreciation.
A Comparative Business Analysis: 1970–1989
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

We have described the distinctive features which make the John Lewis Partnership unusual. We have examined the workings of the Partnership and analysed the genesis of its business philosophy. Further, we have used the literature on business performance to understand what an orthodox analyst might expect of such an unusual firm in a commercial market environment. We concluded that because of the absence of capital market discipline on managers, the John Lewis Partnership would be expected to be relatively inefficient, with little incentive to do more than survive. Immediately after the war, we saw the company was not very profitable and appeared to be in poor commercial shape relative to its high street competitors. We now focus on the period since 1970 and analyse the comparative performance of the John Lewis Partnership and its wholly owned subsidiary Waitrose. Using accounting data and standard measures of performance, we construct indices relating to the capital structure, liquidity, profitability, and productivity of the firms as compared to their main competitors in the retail sector. These indices will show whether the 1949–53 period was unrepresentative and, more crucially, allow us to answer the important questions raised by the literature analysis.
Crossing Over into the Human Dimension
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

As the scale of retail concerns grows larger, and the systems and the business decisions of the sector become more sophisticated, the importance of management increases. Graduate recruitment is rising (from very low levels), and retention of key management staff is as much an issue in retailing as in other areas of business. The traditional type of manager in retailing has been something of a generalist, reflecting a wider range of necessary basic skills than in some other businesses. It is a very unforgiving business thinks Richard Weir, Chairman of the Retail Consortium: ‘You cannot be brilliant in one area and be a failure in another. You have to maintain a certain minimum threshold of competence in all areas.’ Such at least is the ideal, but there is a general recognition that the management factor in the business was not always taken very seriously. A change seems to have started in the early 1980s as the expansion and restructuring of a previous rather sleepy sector demanded a higher quality of decision-making. Richard Weir sees a higher quality of management in the last eight years, and notes that the sector has had to develop its own education almost from scratch. That said, management practices before 1980s were clearly not uniform, and Weir stresses the longer established systems used in the more progressive parts of the sector.
Conclusion
Authors: Bradley Keith , Taylor Simon
Published: November 2023

A major theme of this study has been that corporate performance cannot be adequately understood solely in terms of the conventional framework based on neo-classical economics and its derivatives, such as the theory of finance. This chapter takes a closer look at the conventional framework and its limitations. Economics has long been methodologically separated from the other social sciences, a disjunction that has had considerable influence on the orthodox views of business practitioners. Because of the domination of neo-classical economics and its methodological precepts, a very restricted and rigid view of human agency and motivation has prevailed. Thinking in terms of rational actors significantly limits one’s ability to explain human behaviour. The range of human interaction and experience in the sociology of organizations is largely ignored in the economics literature, or treated as a minor issue.
The Prophetic Literature
Authors: Sawyer John F A
Published: November 2023

The literary form in which the prophets’ words have come down to us has been the subject of much debate. At one time it was thought that the identification of distinctive types (Gattungen) of prophetic utterance might assist us in determining what such and such a prophet actually said. This historical optimism was soon found to be misplaced, however (as in the case of the sayings of Jesus), since an individual, to say what he wants to say, may or may not choose to employ a conventional type (priestly oracle, hymn, parable), and he may or may not change it with varying degrees of creativity and originality. Moreover, the authors of our texts or the disciples or the community responsible for transmitting the original words to us may do the same. Whatever the literary form, and however many parallels to it can be quoted from elsewhere in the Bible or the ancient world, there is no way that form criticism on its own can lead us to the actual words of the prophets.