bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Semantic Externalism and Epistemic Illusions
Authors: Goldberg Sanford C
Published: November 2023

Potential sources of false belief is a topic that is of some interest in epistemology. The topic is relevant to the theory of justified belief since, whatever else it is, justified belief is belief that is epistemically reasonable—where the relevant notion of reasonableness will have to do with the adequacy of the belief‘s grounds (or the processes through which it was formed) in connection with the twin aims of acquiring (interesting) truths and avoiding falsehoods. And the topic is relevant to the theory of knowledge as well since, whatever else it is, knowledge involves true beliefs whose truth is not a matter of luck—where the relevant notion of luck will reflect the way(s) in which the subject might have gone wrong in coming to believe what she did in the manner that she did.1
Did Socrates Agree to Obey the Laws of Athens?
Authors: Brown Lesley
Published: November 2023

Plato’s Crito contains a justly famous discussion of what has come to be known as the problem of political obligation, of what obligations a citizen has to the government, and what are the grounds of those obligations. To many, the most surprising aspect of the work is that it appears to argue, on many grounds, that a citizen owes absolute obedience to the laws; a position scarcely to be credited to Socrates of all people. But one argument in particular caught the attention of David Hume.
Interpreting Plato’S Early Dialogues
Authors: Wolfsdorf David
Published: November 2023

Interpretation of philosophical texts usually proceeds on the assumption that philosophers have written in order to disseminate their beliefs. Interpreting their texts, therefore, aims to clarify their beliefs on the topics the texts engage, where the texts constitute the evidence for those beliefs. Difficulty tends to lie in determining the author’s meaning or the cogency of the author’s arguments rather than whether the author believes what is written.
The Tree of Life: Agency and Immortality in a Metaphysics Inspired by Quantum Theory
Authors: Forrest Peter
Published: November 2023

Recently several philosophers including Huw Price, Peter Lewis, and David Lewis have argued that on one interpretation of quantum theory (genus Indeterminacy, species No Collapse) death is an illusion.1 Taking Schroedinger’s unhappy cat as the standard example, this interpretation tells us that it is as if the whole universe splits into two copies in one of which the cat survives and in the other there is a corpse. Fission into a living organism on the one hand and a corpse on the other is, most of us agree, a way of surviving.2 So we arrive at the first premise, namely that organisms survive situations like that of SchrÖdinger’s cat.
The Metaphysics of Original Sin
Authors: Rea Michael C
Published: November 2023

Various different doctrines in the history of Christian thought have gone under the label ‘the doctrine of original sin’.
A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine
Authors: Mccabe Anne
Published: November 2023

How were Greek texts on the care and medical treatment of the horse transmitted from antiquity to the present day? Using the evidence of Byzantine manuscripts of the veterinary compilation known as the Hippiatrica, Anne McCabe traces the journey of the texts from the stables to the medieval scriptorium and ultimately to the printed edition. Surviving manuscripts include both magnificent presentation copies and plain ones intended for use in the field. The Hippiatrica is a rich and little-known source of information about horses, medicine, and magic. This book provides a guide to its complex history as well as a host of fascinating details, and includes colour illustrations of a number of manuscript pages.
Serial Verb Constructions in Tariana
Authors: Aikhenvald Alexandra Y
Published: November 2023

Tariana is an endangered North Arawak language spoken in the linguistic area of the Vaupes river basin. This area is known for its institutionalized multilingualism based on the language group exogamy operating between speakers of Tariana and of languages belonging to the East Tucanoan subgroup (with Tucano as its major representative). Long-term interaction between East Tucanoan languages and Tariana has resulted in the rampant diffusion of grammatical and semantic patterns (although not so much of forms) and calquing of categories.
Serial Verb Constructions in Mwotlap
Authors: François Alexandre
Published: November 2023

Mwotlap is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic branch, spoken by about 1,800 speakers on Motalava, a smaIJ island of the Banks group, north of Vanuatu (François 2001, 2003). Contrary to many languages from the same area-for example, Paamese (Crowley 1987), Ambae (Hyslop 2001), Araki (François 2002)-Mwotlap has almost no traces of serialization between verb phrases (of the type I’ll PUSH you you’ll FALL).
Spinoza and Spinozism
Authors: Hampshire Stuart
Published: November 2023

Stuart Hampshire, one of the most eminent British philosophers of the twentieth century, will be perhaps best remembered for his work on the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, all of which is gathered now in this volume. Among the great thinkers of modern times, only Spinoza created a complete system of philosophy that rivals Plato’s, with crucial contributions to every major philosophical topic. Hampshire’s classic 1951 book Spinoza remains the best introduction to this thinker, and it is reprinted here. But what gives particular interest to this new volume is the first publication of Hampshire’s last work “Spinoza and Spinozism,” an extended presentation of a Spinozist philosophical worldview. Hampshire’s influential 1962 essay "Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom" is also included. Spinoza and Spinozism is thus an ideal companion to the study and interpretation of this great philosopher.
Success Semantics
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: November 2023

How come we are so successful, unless we are hooked up right to the world? A good question, and one that suggests a way of thinking of our hook-up to the world. Success semantics is the result of that suggestion. It is the view that a theory of success in action is a possible basis for a theory of representation, or a theory of content or intentionality (throughout this chapter I shall use these interchangeably). At its most simple we can think of representation in terms of disquotation, as in the famous ‘Fido’–Fido relationship.
Ramsey Sentences and Avoiding the Sui Generis
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: November 2023

Many philosophers say that the history of conceptual analysis is a history of failure. This is an exaggeration. The foundations of logic and mathematics contain many successful analyses. But you can understand why they say what they say. There have been many attempts to analyse knowledge since Gettier (1963) disturbed the ‘justified true belief’ conventional wisdom and we are still arguing the toss. And this is not an isolated example. The following seems a fair statement of the situation we find ourselves in.
The Cartesianism of Desgabets and Arnauld and the Problem of the Eternal Truths
Authors: Faye Emmanuel
Published: November 2023

It is a well-known fact that those whom we today consider the ‘major’ post—Cartesians-Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz—all resolutely rejected the Cartesian thesis of the creation of the eternal truths. From this one can draw a general argument to the effect that Descartes’s position was a solitary and completely aporetic one, while conceding in a footnote that only some ‘minor’ Cartesians—such as Cally, Desgabets, Regis, or Poiret—’followed’ their mentor’s thesis. It seems that this account, however, needs to be questioned, and in two ways: first, through a reconsideration of the position of a figure as important as Arnauld, who occupies an exceptional position in the century, since he was, in turn, one of Descartes’s objectors, the principal opponent of Malebranche, and the interlocutor sought by Leibniz when he was composing the Discourse on Metaphysics; second, through a closer examination of why and how the above-mentioned ‘Cartesians’ adopted the orthodox Cartesian thesis.
Moral Virtue And Assimilation To God In Plato’S Timaeus
Authors: Mahoney Timothy A
Published: November 2023

So begins David Sedley’s ‘The Ideal of Godlikeness’,1 an article that is a significant step towards remedying the modern neglect of this important Platonic theme. None the less, I shall dispute one of Sedley’s central claims: the Timaeus suggests that Plato’s ideal ‘leaves moral virtue behind and focuses instead on purely intellectual development’ (CB, 335 Fine, 324). I hope both to demonstrate that Sedley’s arguments are flawed and to show how and why this ideal in the Timaeus includes moral virtue as an essential component.
Ethics And Politics In Plato’S Laws
Authors: Brisson Luc
Published: November 2023

The present article has its origin in a critical discussion of Christo pher Bobonich’s book Plato’s Utopia Recast.1 The main question raised by this work is the following: did Plato radically change his mind on the subject of ethics and politics between the Republic and the Laws? I shall first present a summary of Bobonich’s thesis, then develop three series of criticisms concerning the doctrine of the Laws on the questions of economic, social, and political autonomy. My contention will be the following. Like the Republic, the Laws is a radical critique of Athenian democracy as known to Plato. This critique was to lead to the construction of another kind of city, most of whose features are in the Laws akin to those of the Republic.
How Good People Do Bad Things: Aristotle On The Misdeeds Of The Virtuous
Authors: Curzer Howard
Published: November 2023

Some people take the project of sketching the ideal character to be central to virtue ethics. Some interpreters of Aristotle take him to be engaged in this project. They take his virtuous person to be morally perfect, to act and feel exactly right in every situation. Of course, the flip side of this thesis is that anyone who acts and feels otherwise must be less than virtuous. Aristotle does make remarks that suggest this idealization interpretation. He says, for example, [A] The sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions ... and the good man will never voluntarily do bad actions.
Introduction
Authors: Kalderon Mark Eli
Published: November 2023

Modern fictionalism emerged in 1980 with the publication of Hartry Field’s Science Without Numbers and Bas van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image. Field maintained that mathematics does not have to be true to be good, and van Fraassen maintained that the aim of science is not truth but empirical adequacy. The suggestion common to each is that the aim of inquiry need not be truth, and that the acceptance of a mathematical or scientific theory need not involve belief in its content.
The Myth of the Seven
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2023

Mathematics has been called the one area of inquiry that would retain its point even were the physical world to disappear entirely. This might be heard as an argument for platonism: the view that mathematics describes a special abstract department of reality lying far above the physical fray. The necessary truth of mathematics would be due to the fact that the mathematical department of reality had its properties unchangingly and essentially.
Quasi-Realism no Fictionalism
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: November 2023

Suppose that Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realist program has succeeded perfectly on its own terms-something I think not unlikely. Given the controversial nature of the program, this much endorsement from a philosopher and logician of Lewis’ stature is pleasant indeed. And for the purpose of this chapter I am going to bask in its light. In other words, I am not going to say very much directly to defend my program, or render it more or less likely to be successful than it is already.
The All-Seeing Eye: A Blind Spot in the History of Ideas
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Don’t be in such a hurry to believe next time— I’ll tell you why— If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn’t recover its right shape for nearly two days.
Consciousness, Reasons, and Moore’s Paradox
Authors: Gallois André
Published: November 2023

On a number of occasions Wittgenstein discusses what he calls Moore’s Paradox. Moore himself discussed the phenomenon Wittgenstein so labels in his paper, ‘Russell’s ‘‘Theory of Descriptions’’ ‘, and in a reply to Charles Stevenson. Moore’s own treatment of the paradox is perfunctory. He clearly thinks of the problem posed by examples of Moore paradoxicality as having minor signiﬁcance with a relatively straightforward solution. Evidently Wittgenstein disagreed.
Moorean Absurdity and Showing What’s Within
Authors: Green Mitchell
Published: November 2023

Moorean absurdity occurs in any utterance or thought in which an agent overtly expresses an intentional state that she also explicitly disavows; it also occurs in any utterance or thought in which an agent overtly expresses an intentional state whose content is incompatible with that of another intentional state that she also explicitly avows.
On Perceiving Conceptual Art
Authors: Lamarque Peter
Published: November 2023

In a recent graduation exhibition at a British art school a work was displayed which consists of a man bearing two full-length sandwich boards on which is printed, in large Times Roman type: ‘This is not “Art” in itself but a means of creating it’. I have not seen the display, only a photograph of it on a flier sent to me by the art school. But it has some paradigmatic features of the kind of conceptual art that I want to consider. It uses language as its central medium; it is a reflection on the status of art; it involves a mildly witty self-referential paradox; it is partially a performance work in that the man carrying the boards is standing outside at the edge of a park; and finally my description captures, I believe, enough to give you a pretty clear idea of the essence of the work itself. In fact the work is not especially original.
Creativity and Conceptual Art
Authors: Boden Margaret A
Published: November 2023

If one has a view about the nature of creativity in general, it should apply to all forms of art (and to science too, though that is not our concern here). In particular, if one believes that there are several different types of creativity, one must say how these map onto various examples of art— whether these are general movements, specific art forms, or individual artworks. With respect to conceptual art, do all examples of this genre spring from the same type of creativity? And if so, what is it?
On Realism about Chance
Authors: Percival Philip
Published: November 2023

‘Chance ‘ is a single-case, temporally relative, objective probability for which a normative principle of direct inference holds. It is single case in so far as it applies to particular events, such as the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle (or, better, to propositions asserting the occurrence of such events); it is temporally relative in so far as it changes over time, as when, seemingly, the chance of the Challenger exploding increased as the temperature dropped; it is objective in so far as claims of the form ‘the chance at t of E is r ‘ purport to be true independently of what anyone thinks; and a normative principle of direct inference holds for it in so far as the chance of an event, or at any rate a cognitive attitude, such as belief, or credence (i.e. partial belief), towards that chance, normatively constrains cognitive attitudes towards the event itself, in the manner, e.g. of a requirement that an agent who believes there to be a one half chance of heads on a certain coin-toss ought, in the absence of direct evidence regarding the outcome, to distribute his credence in heads and tails equally.
The Identity Problem for Realist Structuralism II: A Reply to Shapiro
Authors: Keränen Jukka
Published: November 2023

In his Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology, Stewart Shapiro gave what is perhaps the most comprehensive presentation of realist structuralism to date. In my ‘The Identity Problem for Realist Structuralism’, I argued that any theory with the same general shape as that of Shapiro’s will either fail to present a tenable account of mathematical ontology or else must betray the very motivations from which it stems. While the argument in that paper was intended to criticize realist structuralism in general, Shapiro is right to identify his theory as a primary target and in ‘Structure and Identity’, Chapter 5 in this volume, he comes to its defense. Shapiro’s paper has two parts, the first being a reply to certain criticisms by Jonathan Kastin, the second being a reply to me. In this paper, I will give a detailed reaction to the latter. I will argue that Shapiro has not yet provided a satisfactory solution to the ‘identity problem’ for places in structures. In fact, I will conclude by suggesting that any form of realism is either open to the identity problem or else faces the well-known Benacerrafian problem of ‘multiple reductions’ in a new guise.
The Governance of Identity
Authors: Shapiro Stewart
Published: November 2023

My exchange with Jukka Keränen exemplifies the long tradition of using the thoughtful objections from opponents as an opportunity to clarify, further articulate, and correct philosophical views. ‘Structure and Identity’, Chapter 5 in this volume, changes and extends aspects of the ante rem structuralism developed inmy (1997). Keränen’s ‘The Identity Problem for Realist Structuralism’ (2001) and ‘The Identity Problem for Realist Structuralism II: A Reply to Shapiro’ Chapter 6 in this volume, constitute an advance in the articulation of his metaphysical views from their public origin in his 1999 APA paper. At some point, he and I may realize that we are talking at cross-purposes, or we may end up with a clash of brute intuitions, and will agree to disagree. But we are not there yet.
Our Knowledge of Mathematical Objects
Authors: Fine Kit
Published: November 2023

I have recently been attempting to provide a new approach to the philosophy of mathematics, which I call ‘proceduralism’ or ‘procedural postulationism’. It shares with traditional forms of postulationism, advocated by Hilbert (1930) and Poincare´ (1952), the belief that the existence of mathematical objects and the truth of mathematical pro- positions are to be seen as the product of postulation. But it takes a very different view of what postulation is. For it takes the postulates from which mathematics is derived to be imperatival, rather than indicative, in form; what are postulated are not propositions true in a given mathematical domain, but procedures for the construction of that domain.
The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions
Authors: MacFarlane John
Published: November 2023

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the semantics of knowledge-attributing sentences, not just among epistemologists but among philosophers of language seeking a general understanding of linguistic context sensitivity. Despite all this critical attention, however, we are as far from consensus as ever. If we have learned anything, it is that each of the standard views—invariantism, contextualism, and sen- sitive invariantism—has its Achilles heel: a residuum of facts about our use of knowledge attributions that it can explain only with special pleading. This is not surprising if, as I will argue, there is a grain of truth in each of these views.
Nietzschean ‘Animal Psychology’ versus Kantian Ethics
Authors: Risse Mathias
Published: November 2023

Characterizing the Genealogy as an exercise in ‘animal psychology’ (GM III, 20), Nietzsche pays tribute to the extraordinary cultural impact of the biological sciences, in particular physiology and evolutionary biology, in the second half of the nineteenth century. While much of his mature thinking applies physiological considerations to traditional philosophical problems, he is especially eager to explain in this manner the development of Christian morality and of what he took to be theories derived from it (Kantian ethics and utilitarianism), as well as the development of the kind of person persuaded by such morality.
Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

In its broad outlines the account of the origin of modern morality that Nietzsche offers in the ﬁrst essay of his Genealogy (GM) is reasonably clear. The account begins with the postulation of two different schemes of value, organized around the pairs of opposites good/bad and good/evil, which are associated respectively with the contrasting personality types of the noble and the slave. Characteristic of the slavish personality structure are the negative affects of hatred and ressentiment, which, deprived of a natural outlet, become pent up and fester within the psyche of the powerless until reaching “monstrous and uncanny proportions” (GM, I.7). The slave revolt begins when these sentiments “become creative and give birth to values” (GM, I.10), initiating an historical process through which the universalistic, Christianized values of good and evil largely come to supplant the aristocratic values of good and bad.
Nietzsche and Moral Objectivity: The Development of Nietzsche’s Metaethics
Authors: Clark Maudemarie , Dudrick David
Published: November 2023

This essay begins from the uncontroversial assumption that Nietzsche holds certain ethical or moral values and expresses them in his work. Its question is whether his philosophy allows him to claim objectivity for these values. Many have thought that his metaethical position prohibits him from doing so, that it entails, in Brian Leiter’s words, a denial that “there is any objective vindication for his [or any other] evaluative position.” As Leiter notes, this is “the most familiar reading outside the secondary literature on Nietzsche,” shared by such thinkers as Max Weber and Alasdair MacIntyre (Leiter 2002: 146). We will reconstruct the development of Nietzsche’s metaethical position in order to show that this widely shared view is mistaken.
Ivory Coast: The Supremacy of French
Authors: Knutsen Anne Moseng
Published: November 2023

The Ivory Coast borders Liberia and Guinea in the west, Mali and Burkina Faso in the north, Ghana in the east, and the North Atlantic Ocean in the south. The country has two main topographical zones: the savannah in the north and the forest zone in the south. According to the latest census (1998), the population is 15 million inhabitants, of which 78 per cent are located in the forest zone of the south. The population is mostly Muslim (39 per cent) or Christian (30 per cent). Although Yamoussoukro is the formal capital, Abidjan is the commercial and administrative centre of the country, with 3 million inhabitants. Other important cities are Bouaké, Korhogo, Daloa, Gagnoa, and San Pedro. The Ivory Coast was a French colony from 1893 to 1960, when it became La République de Côte d’Ivoire. The country is among the world’s largest producers and exporters of coffee and cocoa and by maintaining close ties with France and encouraging foreign investments, the Ivory Coast has developed into one of the most prosperous states in sub-Saharan Africa. However, since the death of the nation’s founder Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993, the country has faced increasingly severe ethno-political problems, which have resulted in a division of the country into a government-held south and a rebel-held north.
Cameroon: Official Bilingualism in a Multilingual State
Authors: Biloa Edmond , Echu George
Published: November 2023

Cameroon is a linguistic melting pot and contains over 250 languages from three of the four linguistic phyla attested on the continent. However, none of Cameroon’s many autochthonous languages is spoken by a majority in the country and most of its languages have relatively small populations of speakers. As a result of colonization, English and French are the official languages of Cameroon and a policy of official bilingualism is enshrined in the state constitution. Consequently, English and French are the languages: (a) of the state (that is, all administrative documents have to be written in either French or English, or both), (b) of business, (c) of public and private education, (d) of the print media, (e) of radio and television, (f ) of administration,
Kenya: Language and the Search for a Coherent National Identity
Authors: Githiora Chege
Published: November 2023

Kenya is only forty-three years old as an independent, republican nation-state. It is a plural society that encompasses within its boundaries a diverse population of ethnic nations. Contemporary Kenya, like other nations of Africa, is engaged in a search for cohesion, unity, and a collective identity as a modern nation. This quest shapes its general policy of cultural and linguistic pluralism that recognizes the rights of all languages and cultures of the communities found within state boundaries. In this type of situation, language plays a central role in defining or mediating the ongoing formations and expressions of social identity. Individuals have complex multiple identities, involving region, language, socio-economic class, gender, and political and economic factors as well as religious and ethnic ones. Kenyan ‘national’ identity is necessarily a recent phenomenon because the idea of ‘Kenya’ as a country is a modern construction, invented purely by European imperial and colonial interests. Forged from at least forty-two different ethno-linguistic groups, their members have retained strongly grounded, localized identities which primarily are defined in terms of language, but also through claims to specific physical spaces, external community linkages, economic roles and practices – all within new boundaries and altered ways of life.
Zambia: ‘One Zambia, One Nation, Many Languages’
Authors: Marten Lutz , Kula Nancy C
Published: November 2023

This chapter aims to give the reader an idea of the linguistic situation in Zambia, and how language relates to national identity in the Zambian context. Zambia lies in the heart of central Africa and shares borders with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the north, with Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique in the east, with Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia in the south, and with Angola in the west. Zambia has no direct access to the sea, but the Zambezi, one of Africa’s largest rivers, runs through Zambia for about 1,000 kilometres. Zambia also lies in the centre of the Bantu-speaking area. Historically, Bantu languages became widely spoken in sub-Saharan Africa from around 300 BC, and present-day Zambia’s Bantu languages are the result of several linguistic developments which introduced the languages spoken today through gradual processes of migration, language contact, and language shift over the last two millennia. From the late nineteenth century onwards, different European languages were introduced into what is now Zambia through missionary activities, in particular in education, and through colonial governance as a British colony. As a legacy of this period, English plays an important role in the current language situation, a role which was affirmed after independence in 1964, when English became the official language. After the change from a one-party system to multiparty democracy in 1991, emphasis has shifted towards the promotion of Zambia’s seven national languages, Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi, Lunda, Luvale, and Kaonde, and contemporary Zambia is an explicit example of a multilingual country.
Instrumental Rationality versus Practical Reason: Desires, Ends, and Commitment
Authors: Pauer-Studer Herlinde
Published: November 2023

Amartya Sen has repeatedly criticized the standard interpretation of the “rational economic man.” His criticism is directed especially against the assumptions that the only goal of a rational person is to maximize his or her own welfare (understood in a self-centered sense) and that the reasons for the choices a person makes are merely dependent on the person’s own goals, more precisely: her self-centered goals.
Theories of Team Agency
Authors: Gold Natalie , Sugden Robert
Published: November 2023

In decision theory, it is almost universally presupposed that agency is invested in individuals: each person acts on her own preferences and beliefs. A person’s preferences may take account of the effects of her actions on other people; she may, for example, be altruistic or have an aversion to inequality. Still, these are her preferences, and she chooses what she most prefers. Opposing this orthodoxy is a small body of literature which allows teams of individuals to count as agents, and which seeks to identify distinctive modes of team reasoning that are used by individuals as members of teams.
Rational Choice: Discipline, Brand Name, and Substance
Authors: Sen Amartya
Published: November 2023

It is wonderful to read this collection of engaging essays. I am most grateful to Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmid for stewarding this book. They led the project right from the pioneering idea of an interchange of this kind to this happy moment when the collective work is all done and the book is about to be published. They planned the program of research, selected authors and topics, arranged a lively workshop on this subject at St Gallen in May 2004, placed a subset of papers from this collection for publication in the journal Economics and Philosophy , edited the volume, and wrote an elegant and helpful introduction to it.
The English Renaissance Stage
Authors: Turner Henry S
Published: November 2023

Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 examines the history of English dramatic form and its relationship to the mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought during the Renaissance period. The book demonstrates how practical modes of thinking that were typical of the sixteenth century resulted in new genres of plays and a new vocabulary for problems of poetic representation. In the epistemological moment the book recovers, we find new ideas about form and language that would become central to Renaissance literary discourse; in this same moment, too, we find new ways of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice that are typical of modernity, new attitudes towards spatial representation, and a new interest in both poetics and mathematics as distinctive ways of producing knowledge about the world. By emphasizing the importance of theatrical performance, the book engages with continuing debates over the cultural function of the early modern stage and with scholarship on the status of modern authorship. When we consider playwrights in relation to the theatre rather than the printed book, they appear less as 'authors' than as figures whose social position and epistemological presuppositions were very similar to the craftsmen, surveyors, and engineers who began to flourish during the sixteenth century and whose mathematical knowledge made them increasingly sought after by men of wealth and power.
Empedocles on Colour and Colour Vision
Authors: Ierodiakonou Katerina
Published: November 2023

Empedocles is among the first ancient philosophers, if not the very first, not only to use colour terms as adjectives characterizing the way things present themselves to us, such as ‘white’ of white milk (31 B 33 DK: λáλá λευκóν),, but also to refer to colours as items whose explanation forms a crucial part of a proper explanation of the world of experience. One basic fact which one cannot overlook about the objects of experience is that they are coloured, and another crucial fact is that they conspicuously differ from each other in particular in the way they are coloured. The surviving textual evidence about earlier philosophers who seem to have concerned themselves with colours is unfortunately so meagre that it proves extremely difficult to get a clear sense of what they think about this topic. But since Empedocles in many instances already seems to have relied on earlier thought about the matter, we shall occasionally have the chance, while trying to reconstruct his colour theory, also to comment on the little information available about the first recorded views on colour.
Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus
Authors: Hutchinson D S , Johnson Monte Ransome
Published: November 2023

During the gold rush of the 1860s, scholars went prospecting for fragments of the lost works of Aristotle, and in 1869 a crucial discovery was announced: Iamblichus of Chalcis, it seems, had quoted from Aristotle’s Protrepticus, using it and other books as sources when compiling his own Protrepticus. Scholars rushed in to mine that later text.
Virtue, Reason, and Principle
Authors: Wallace R Jay
Published: November 2023

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity (rational activity of soul), and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well.¹ The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or end which they enable people to attain (human flourishing, rational perfection, participation in practices, ‘narrative unity’ in a life).
Paradoxes of Irrationality
Authors: Lepore Ernie , Ludwig Kirk
Published: November 2023

The idea of an irrational action, belief, intention, inference, or emotion is paradoxical. For the irrational is not merely the non-rational, which lies outside the ambit of the rational; irrationality is a failure within the house of reason. When Hobbes says only man has ‘the privilege of absurdity’ he suggests that only a rational creature can be irrational. Irrationality is a mental process or state-a rational process or state-gone wrong. How can this be? The paradox of irrationality is not as simple as the seeming paradox in the concept of an unsuccessful joke, or of a bad piece of art.
Rashi’s View of the Open Future: Indeterminateness and Bivalence
Authors: Hirsch Eli
Published: November 2023

The notion of indeterminateness has figured in three familiar contexts: the open future, vagueness, and quantum physics. Typical philosophical treatments of indeterminateness involve denying some principles of straight logic. In this chapter I explore a position of Rashi in which a belief in indeterminateness is combined with adherence to all of straight logic, including the principle of bivalence.
General Facts, Physical Necessity, and the Metaphysics of Time
Authors: Forrest Peter
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I assume that we accept, perhaps reluctantly, general facts, that is states of affairs corresponding to universal generalizations. I then argue that, without any addition, this ontology provides us with physical necessities, and moreover with various grades of physical necessity, including the strongest grade, which I call absolute physical necessity. In addition there are consequences for our understanding of time. For this account, which I call the Mortmain Theory, provides a defence of No Futurism against an otherwise serious objection due to David Armstrong. In addition the Mortmain theory enables me to argue against the ‘‘Parmenidean’’ or Block Universe position that future and past are both real.
The Relation between General and Particular: Entailment vs. Supervenience
Authors: Bricker Phillip
Published: November 2023

I say (with many others): the world is a thing, the biggest thing, the mereological sum (or aggregate) of all things. Truth is determined by the distribution of fundamental, or perfectly natural, properties and relations over the parts of this biggest thing. For want of a better name, call this the thing theory. Some say instead: the world is a fact, the most inclusive fact, the conjunction (also mereological sum) of all the facts. Truth is determined by (some sort of) correspondence to the facts. Call this, following Armstrong, factualism.
Epistemicism and Semantic Plasticity
Authors: Hawthorne John
Published: November 2023

I shall endeavor in this essay to make vivid a kind of puzzle that arises when Timothy Williamson’s epistemicist machinery is applied to borderline cases of (a) personhood and (b) semantic properties. My aim will be to raise some concerns about his development of the epistemicist view, and then to explore an alternative way of thinking about epistemicism. What follows is very much a progress report on unfinished business, but I hope there is enough progress to warrant the report.
Beautiful Evils
Authors: Hudson Hud
Published: November 2023

Let ‘E’ be a proposition that precisely describes the amount, the intensity, and the distribution of all the so-called ‘natural evil’ consisting in the suffering of non-person animals that has ever occurred in the history of our universe. Let ‘G’ be a proposition that asserts the necessary existence of an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good being.
The Meaning of ‘Public’ in ‘Public Health’
Authors: Dawson Angus , Verweij Marcel
Published: November 2023

‘Public health’ is a contested concept. It is presented and used in a variety of ways by public health practitioners, researchers and commentators. In this chapter we aim to do two things. The first is to outline and review existing definitions of ‘public health’ and offer brief comments on some of these proposed accounts. However, we will not offer and defend an alternative definition. Instead our second aim will be to focus on what might be meant by the term ‘public’ in an account of ‘public health’. We suggest that there are two key elements that can be identified. We will distinguish them, and discuss each in turn.
Living With the Selfish Gene
Authors: Dawkins Marian Stamp
Published: November 2023

I haven’t lived with the author of The Selfish Gene for nearly twenty-five years but I have lived in close and constant contact with the book itself since before it was published. Its words and figures of speech are thrown at me almost daily from student essays. The questions it raises are the driving force behind the most successful tutorials and the sound of pennies dropping as each new generation of students takes in the extraordinary implications of what the book is saying, is as loud now as it ever was. The Selfish Gene seems to occupy a unique place in biological writing. Some books, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, herald a new age and have a huge impact on the way people think at the time but thereafter are read mainly for historical interest.
An Eye on the Core: Dawkins and Sociobiology
Authors: Segerstråle Ullica
Published: November 2023

‘Sociobiology’ is a term that triggers different reactions in different people. For some, sociobiology simply denotes a field devoted to research in animal social behavior, a new integrative discipline that emerged during the second part of the twentieth century. For others, because of its perceived implications for humans, this term is fraught with political connotations: genetic determinism, political conservatism, racism, and sexism. As a result, many researchers, especially those in would-be ‘human sociobiology’ are avoiding the term, calling themselves instead behavioral ecologists, evolutionary psychologists, Darwinian anthropologists, and what have you. For a third, more militant group, sociobiology is indeed a new discipline—a new scientific way of looking at behavior, maybe even a new world view, mobilizable against all kinds of obfuscation.
Why A Lot of People With Selfish Genes are Pretty Nice Except For Their Hatred of The Selfish Gene
Authors: Nesse Randolph M
Published: November 2023

Thirty years ago, Western ideas about human nature bounced off The Selfish Gene and changed direction. Responses and related ideas continue to careen into each other with little diminished fury and successful variations are now creating their own lineages. It is a good time to assess both what The Selfish Gene accomplished and why so many people still hate it with such passion. The answers to these two questions are intimately related, but an analysis of the argument in The Selfish Gene gets nowhere without first acknowledging and seeking the source of its emotional impact.
What the whale wondered: evolution, existentialism, and the search For ‘meaning’
Authors: Barash David P
Published: November 2023

It is not really surprising that Douglas Adams, a great fiction writer, and Richard Dawkins, a great non-fiction writer, were good friends. At one point in Adams’ hilarious A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sperm whale plaintively wonders to itself: ‘Why am I here? What is my purpose in life?’ as it plummets toward the planet Magrathea. This appealing but doomed creature had just been ‘called into existence’ several miles above the planet’s suface because a nuclear missile, directed at our heroes’ spaceship, was inexplicably transformed into a whale via an ‘Infinite Improbability Generator’. As Richard Dawkins has emphasized so effectively, evolution, too, is a kind of improbability generator, although its range of outcomes is considerably more finite.
Saying what we Mean: An Argument against Expressivism
Authors: Cuneo Terence
Published: November 2023

Some years ago I heard a well-known professor tell an audience that the best response he had witnessed to expressivism was that of a colleague who pointed to an expressivist paraphrase of a moral sentence on a blackboard and exclaimed, while rapping his knuckles on the board, that this paraphrase did not capture what he meant to say when engaging in moral discourse. On that occasion, I recall feeling that this was a simple-minded response to a very subtle position. I think now, however, that this response is in its fundamentals correct, and I shall endeavor in this essay to explain why. The argument I will develop is not a variant of what is now the standard objection to expressivism, namely, that it cannot explain the phenomenon of so-called embedded contexts. Rather, it is one that draws upon contemporary speech act theory and maintains that expressivism is false on account of its being unable to accommodate properly the illocutionary act intentions of agents who engage in ordinary moral discourse. More precisely, the objection hinges on the question of whether, when agents engage in ordinary moral discourse, they intend to assert moral propositions.
Defining the Indefinable
Authors: Bolinger Dwight
Published: November 2023

Picture an overzealous gardener who broadcasts onion seed at the rate of a dozen per square inch, lets the plants grow to a tangled mass, and extracts one to describe. Its central stalk is more or less intact but its roots are torn and the resulting description, while grossly true, will forever stand in need of repair because of those missing tendrils. Lexicography is an unnatural occupation. It consists in tearing words from their mother context and setting them in rows – carrots and onions and beetroot and salsify next to one another – with roots shorn like those of celery to make them fit side by side, in an order determined not by nature but by some obscure Phoenician sailors who traded with Greeks in the long ago.1 Half of the lexicographer’s labor is spent repairing this damage to an infinitude of natural connections that every word in any language contracts with every other word, in a complex neural web knit densely at the center but ever more diffusely as it spreads outward. A bit of context, a synonym, a grammatical category, an etymology for remembrance’s sake, and a cross-reference or two – these are the additives that accomplish the repair. But the fact that it is a repair always shows, and explains why no two dictionaries agree in their patchwork, unless they copy each other. Undamaged definition is impossible because we know our words not as individual bits but as parts of what Pawley and Syder (1983) call lexicalized sentence stems, hundreds of thousands of them, conveniently memorized to repeat – and adapt – as the occasion arises. And also as part of an associative network involving words of similar and opposite meaning, words of similar sound, similar spelling, similar register, and similar affect. A speaker who does not command this array, as Pawley and Syder point out, does not know the language, and there is little that a dictionary can do to promote fluency beyond offering a few hints.
The Sketch Engine
Authors: Kilgarriff Adam , Rychly Pavel , Smrž Pavel , Tugwell David
Published: November 2023

Word sketches are one-page automatic, corpus-based summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. They were first used in the production of the Macmillan English Dictionary (Rundell 2002) and were presented at Euralex 2002 (Kilgarriff and Rundell 2002). Following that presentation, the most-asked question was “Can I have them for my language?” In response, we have now developed the Sketch Engine, a corpus tool which takes as input a corpus of any language (with appropriate linguistic markup), and which then generates, amongst other things, word sketches for the words of that language. Those other things include a corpus-based thesaurus and “sketch differences”, which specify, for two semantically related words, what behaviour they share and how they differ. We anticipate that sketch differences will be particularly useful for lexicographers interested in near-synonym differentiation. In this paper we first provide, by way of background, an account of how corpora have been used in lexicography to date, culminating in a brief description of the word sketches as used in the preparation of the Macmillan dictionary. We then describe the Sketch Engine, including the preprocessing it requires, the approach taken to grammar, the thesaurus, and the sketch differences. We end with a note on our future plans. The second age commenced with the COBUILD project, in the late 1970s (Sinclair et al. 1987). Sinclair and Atkins, its devisers, saw the potential for the computer to do the storing, sorting and searching that was previously the role of readers, filing cabinets and clerks, and at the same time to make it far more objective: human readers would only make a citation for a word if it was rare, or where it was being used in an interesting way, so citations focused on the unusual but gave little evidence of the usual.
Major Linguistic Theories of Modality
Authors: Portner Paul
Published: November 2023

This section will present three semantic theories of modality which have been developed within linguistics. My goal here is to provide a clear, detailed, and accurate understanding of each theory. In order to achieve this goal, we will focus on those linguistic phenomena which have been the most important in developing the theories, even though this focus necessarily means that many important issues of the semantics of modality will be left out. The next chapter will turn around this relationship between theory and research issues: my goal there will be to provide a broad understanding of the nature of modality, using theories of modality as a basis. In short, this chapter is primarily about theories of modality; the next chapter is primarily about modality itself. Of course the ultimate goal of linguistics is to unify the goals of these two chapters, to develop a theory of modality which in itself provides the best possible understanding of the nature of modality. But for the time being, while our theories are still imperfect, it is helpful to look at the topic from two angles separately.