bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Promising, Expecting, and Utility
Authors: Narveson Jan 
Published: June 2016

In this paper, I shall be concerned to explore the utilitarian account of promising, which for some time has had, in many circles, the status of a dead horse. My aim is not to flog it, however, but to show that perhaps it yet lives. At least, I hope to show that some prominent and apparently powerful objections to this account do not find their mark. In the course of this, several subjects of wider interest will come in for review as well, and it is hoped that some further light on the utilitarian position in general, as well as the concepts of expectation and obligation, may glimmer forth.At the outset, some clarification of the question at issue about promising is essential. Briefly, the question is: why ought we to keep our promises? Less question-beggingly put: why, if at all, should we keep promises, and to what extent?; where by talk of ‘extent’ it is meant that the question of whether we sometimes should not keep them, of its being a matter of attaching a “degree of stringency” to the obligation, is to be kept open.
Ifs and Cans — I
Authors: Pears D. F. 
Published: June 2016

Austin's lecture on this topic contributes little to the problem of freedom of the will, and so in my discussion of his ideas I shall stop short of the difficult part of that problem. His most important positive suggestion is that hypotheticals should be divided into two classes, conditionals and pseudo-conditionals. He claims that neglect of this distinction has been the cause of mistakes in certain forms of the dispositional analysis of the statement that an agent could have acted otherwise, and he then goes on to criticise all forms of that analysis using arguments which do not depend on the difference between the two kinds of hypothetical.This discussion will be in two parts. In the first I shall take up Austin's distinction between conditionals and pseudos and criticise it and develop it at length, because it seems to me to be the most important thing in his lecture. Since I shall not have space for comment on fortuitous errors made by defenders of the dispositional analysis of the claim that an agent could have acted otherwise, I shall concentrate on the essential features of that analysis.
Reference and Spatio-Temporal Coordinates
Authors: Travis Charles S. 
Published: June 2016

John said, “Sam went to the bank”. He meant it as a literal statement to be assessed as true or false. He meant by “bank” ‘financial institution', referring by it to the First National Bank of Muncie. By “Sam” he referred to Sam Jorgensen. Do we need to know any other sorts of facts about John's utterance to know how it is to be understood?It might be argued that we do need to know something else, for suppose john produced an utterance fitting the above description before Sam went to the bank. Then what he said was false. If John produced an utterance fitting the same description after Sam went to the bank, then what he said was true. Whatever John says on any occasion, it surely can't be both true and false. But if what John said before Sam went to the bank equals what john said after Sam went to the bank, equals what john said, then what john said appears to be both true and false. The moral drawn by this argument is that on the two different occasions john said two different things. So full specifications of what John would have said on the two different occasions must be different. These specifications must, then, differ by features not yet mentioned.
Hick, Necessary Being, and the Cosmological Argument
Authors: Duff-Forbes D. R. 
Published: June 2016

The concepts of necessary being, or necessary existence, and contingent being, or contingent existence, continue to occupy a central position in philosophical appraisals of Christian theism. Some philosophers have been concerned of late to emphasize a crucial ambiguity in the terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent', an ambiguity which threatens seriously to bedevil assessment of the claim that God's existence is necessary and not contingent. An important consequence of getting clear on this point, it is suggested, is that certain brisk attempts to demolish the concept of a necessary being may be seen at least to be premature, leaving untouched,, as they do, an apparently viable sense in which God can be said to be a, indeed the, necessary being.This, substantially, is the position advocated by Professor J.H. Hick in recent discussions of this point. Hick maintains that it is of the greatest importance to distinguish two fundamentally different and contrasting notions of necessary being or necessary existence.
Alternative Strategies for the Analysis of Knowledge
Authors: Margolis Joseph 
Published: June 2016

The analysis of the concept of knowledge is understandably regarded as central to the development of an adequate philosophical system. And yet, as is also apparent, no proposal of recent date has succeeded in meeting certain well-known objections, counterinstances, anomalies. It is reasonable, therefore, to step back from these would-be direct contributions to review the principal strategies by which the relevant puzzles may be supposed to be managed.Undoubtedly, it was Roderick Chisholm's recovery and revision of the account of the Theaetetus that encouraged a sustained effort, by various hands, to formulate a definition of knowledge in terms of its necessary and sufficient conditions.
On Sellars’ Linguistic Theory of Conceptual Activity
Authors: Marras Ausonio 
Published: June 2016

An important aspect of Sellars' philosophy is his attempt to explicate the concept of thought on the "model" of the concept of speech. More specifically, Sellars has argued that the intentionality of "inner" episodes or thoughts is to be understood in terms of the "semantical" characteristics of intelligent ("nonparroting") linguistic behavior, and not the other way around as the "classical tradition" had supposed.To avoid misunderstanding, it is important to realize that Sellars' claim, as he explains, in Aristotelian terminology, is a claim "in the order of conceiving" as contrasted with "the order of being." That is, Sellars accepts, as an integral part of his theory, the classical claim that meaningful speech is the manifestation or overt causal expression of ''inner" thoughts, but argues that our concept of such thoughts is a derivative concept, a concept which, in the order of theoretical reconstruction, is "modelled on," is an analogical extension of, the concept of meaningful linguistic behavior.
Achinstein on Semantic Relevance
Authors: Martin Michael 
Published: June 2016

Crucial to Peter Achinstein's philosophy of science, as presented inConcepts of Science,is the concept of semantic relevance. First, the concept of semantic relevance is central to his analysis of definition and it is presupposed both in his analysis of the concepts of theory and model and in his critique of alternative analyses. Secondly, Achinstein's way of doing philosophy of science rests heavily on his analysis of semantic relevance. Philosophical analysis for Achinstein seems primarily to consist in specifying the use of certain terms. As we shall see, use and semantic relevance are, according to Achinstein, closely connected.Yet, despite the centrality of this concept in Achinstein's philosophy, I will argue that the concept has serious philosophical problems and that the use Achinstein makes of the concept is dubious. First, I will argue that the notion of semantic relevance inherits some of the traditional problems of analyticity as well as having problems of its own. In particular, I will show that given Achinstein's construal of semantic relevance it is extremely difficult if not impossible to determine the semantic relevance of a term. Secondly, I will maintain that given these problems, Achinstein is not in any way justified in using the notion of semantic relevance in his criticism of other philosophers' views and in the construction of his own.
Theoretical Devices for Marking Semantic Anomalies
Authors: Warmbrod Ken 
Published: June 2016

One of the intriguing features of the semantic theories proposed by Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz is that they attempt to provide a criterion for semantic anomaly. Ostensibly, the criterion would enable one to determine when a phrase is semantically absurd or incongruous even in cases where the phrase appears to be grammatically proper. For example, phrases such as ‘spinster insecticide’ and ‘female uncle’ would be marked as anomalous in the semantic theory even though they seem grammatically on a par with ‘gaseous insecticide’ and ‘unemployed uncle’.Recently, however, a number of criticisms have been raised concerning the theoretical devices that Fodor and Katz supply for marking such anomalies. In this essay I want to examine these criticisms and suggest a modification of the theories which would answer the critics on this point and, at the same time, significantly enhance the explanatory power of the theories.
Authority
Authors: Young Gary 
Published: June 2016

Philosophers often contrast personal authority to authority vested in offices. Some such distinction is traditional and sometimes useful. But it does not provide us with an exhaustive classification of the types of authority, for there is a third type of authority that I shall argue is more fundamental than these two. Let us start with the types marked out by the usual distinction.Consider first the sort of authority illustrated by the following sentences:(1)Smith is an authority on physics.(2)Smith has (some) authority as a physicist.(3)Smith's views (utterances) on physics have (some) authority.(4)O.K., I believe you—after all, you're the authority on physics!A person is an authority in virtue of possessing extensive knowledge of a field or subject-matter. There seem to be no limits on what the field or subject-matter can be—for instance, one can be an authority on trivia.
Monotheism's Euthyphro Problem
Authors: Goldstick D. 
Published: June 2016

The object here is to develop a moral argument against theism. By “theism” is meant the worship of a (supposed) omnipotent, all righteous God. An attitude of worship, it may be assumed, would not be an attitude of worship if it did not preclude all doubt as to the worthiness of the object of worship. At any rate, it is only this attitude whose castigation as immoral is meant to be argued for here.There are, of course, as many theisms as there are theistic religions, sects, cults, denominations et cetera. let M be the moral code of one such theism. It is immaterial here whether the moral code M is or is not dogmatically spelled out in the theistic religion in question. The present argument will follow equally well if the believers claim nothing more than an imperfect, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge of M.
Wittgenstein, Universals and Family Resemblances
Authors: Griffin Nicholas 
Published: June 2016

Wittgenstein expounds his notion of a family resemblance in two important passages. The first is from The Blue Book:This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is—(a) The tendency to look for something common to entities which we commonly subsume under a general term. We are inclined to think that there must be something common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas the games form a family the members of which have family likenesses ….(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that a man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term “leaf,” has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves …. This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated with the word.
Campbell's Refutation of Egoism
Authors: Mack Eric 
Published: June 2016

In “A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Richmond Campbell purports to refute “the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what benefits him the most in a given situation.” This is the theory which is “sometimes called impersonal ethical egoism (IEE)” [249). Campbell takes the following proposition as fundamental to his refutation of IEE.I. If an agent ought to do something in a given situation and another agent ought to do something in the same situation, then it is not logically impossible for them to do these things in that situation [250].Granted proposition I, Campbell's refutation would require only:II. There is a situation S where an agent M would benefit most from doing X and another agent N would benefit most from doing what would prevent M from doing X [251].
Essence Without Universals
Authors: Schwyzer Hubert 
Published: June 2016

One might want to say that the difference between an apple and the colour red is a greater difference than that between an apple and a pear, between red and blue. In the same vein, one might want to say that the philosopher's question “What, really, is a piece of wax?” has greater generality than the more ordinary question “What distinguishes a piece of wax from a piece of soap?” I think Wittgenstein would say that to talk in this way (and it is the same way in each case) is to make the difference at issue seem too slight, so that we fail to see what the difference really amounts to.I should like to suggest that the following thesis is pervasive and fundamental in Wittgenstein's later teaching.
The Causal Principle
Authors: Bradley Raymond D. 
Published: June 2016

Philosophical theses are sometimes assailed from so many sides that, even if they have not been refuted, it becomes difficult for them to gain a fair hearing. A case in point seems to be the thesis that the sentence ‘Every event has a cause' (commonly known as the Causal Principle) may on occasion be used to assert something which, as a matter of contingent fact, is either true or false. In the interests of logical chivalry, I want to take up its defence.My aim, it should be noted, is not to defend the truth of the Causal Principle, to claim that our world is one in which every event is causally determined by another event or set of events. So I shall have nothing to say about the arguments of those who—like the quantum physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born—claim to have shown that the Causal Principle is false; claim, that is, that our world is fundamentally indeterministic. My concern is only to establish the right of determinists and indeterminists alike to take seriously the question whether our world is in fact one in which every event has a cause.
The Right and Duty to Will to Believe
Authors: Kauber Peter , Hare Peter H. 
Published: June 2016

Rights and duties to will to believe have too long been considered an embarrassing indulgence by philosophers who pride themselves on their methodological rigor. A fresh look at William James's work will show how a more robust, though no less analytically rigorous, ethics of belief is possible.The history of James's ethics of belief is a stormy one, filled with mainly hostile criticisms on the part of others, with seminal suggestions, gropings, and retractions on the part of James himself. At various points in the development of this ethics of belief, one encounters such expressions as “duty to believe,” “will to believe,” and “right to believe,” the last gaining prominence (and the others dropping out of sight) as James grew older.
Hartshorne's Presupposition
Authors: Lenhardt Wayne A. 
Published: June 2016

We wish to examine Hartshorne's ontological argument, as formulated in his discussion entitled “The Irreducibly Modal Structure of the Argument.“ The argument is as follows.We wish to show that, if the above argument is to work, “q” (A perfect being exists“) must be analytic. If it is analytic, Hartshorne is saddled with a contradiction. Furthermore, if “q” is analytic, the argument is irrelevant. (One could take Baier's position on analyticity and argue that “q” is analytic, but tells us nothing about what, in fact, exists, but now the “proof” would not prove that a perfect being exists.)
Comments on Professor Schouls' Paper
Authors: Yolton J. W. 
Published: June 2016

There are many echoes of Descartes and of other Cartesians (especially Arnauld) in Locke's Essay. There is one particularly curious passage in the Essay which is clearly taken from the Regulae. This passage may be the one clear instance of the method of analysis and synthesis in Locke. Before I cite that passage, I want to raise a few questions about some of the claims in Professor Schouls’ paper.(1) Professor Schouls is right to call attention to the need for some careful analysis of the concept of experience in Locke. He concentrates upon the form experience takes initially (p. 583): lf“he means temporally first, as with infants (p. 595 speaks of “our initial sentient state“), the examples he cites do not fit this concept. The quotes he gives on p. 583 all refer to adult, sophisticated experience, not to the learning experience of children (Cf. p. 586). There is a rudimentary genetic psychology in Locke's Essay and in his Education. He does list some brief order in the acquisition of ideas by children, in the very earliest stages of experience, e.g., with the foetus, “some faint ideas of hunger, and thirst, and warmth, and some pains” are acquired (1.4.2).
Paradigmatic Immorality
Authors: Leiber Justin 
Published: June 2016

The notion of moral philosophy that has been dominant in Anglo-American philosophizing since G.E. Moore is peculiar. Reviewing traditional works such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Mill's Utilitarianism, one is tempted to call this new notion of moral philosophy a different subject; and if one does this, it is less peculiar. However, let us accept that this new sort of moral philosophy does belong to the previous tradition; granted this, I shall explain why I think it peculiar through considering the status of the judgement that Hitler was a bad man.Consider the sentential function ‘x is (was) a bad man’. ‘Hitler’ seems an obviously suitable substitution for ‘x, at least in the most important sense. That is, one wants to say that if it is not proper or true to say that ‘Hitler was a bad man’ or ‘Hitler was bad’, it fs never proper or true to issue a sentence of this form, restricting x to human beings. Hitler seems indeed, in this most important sense, to be a paradigm case. One wants to say: if Hitler was not a bad man, who could be?
Causation, Transparency, and Emphasis
Authors: Achinstein Peter 
Published: June 2016

It is often said that singular causal statements express a relationship between one event and another or between a fact and an event. This is a very strong view, which has the following simple corollary: singular causal statements whose cause-term purports to refer to an event (or a fact) and whose effect-term purports to refer to an event express a relationship between an event (or a fact) and an event.Thus, both Davidson and Kim would claim that the singular causal Statement(1) Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk caused his death expresses a relationship between two events, referred to, respectively, by the expressions “Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk” and “his death.” For Kim, but not for Davidson, an event is analyzable as a thing's having a property at or during a time. The event of Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk consists of Socrates’ at a certain time having the property of drinking hemlock at dusk. I shall not here try to choose between their respective theories of events but will only note that both theorists would say that (1) expresses a relationship between events however the latter are to be construed.
On The Possibility Of Possible Worlds
Authors: Vendler Zeno 
Published: June 2016

The notion of possible worlds — once an abstruse offspring of Leibnizian theology — seems to enjoy a new lease on life in the hands of contemporary modal logicians and semanticists. The phrase “possible world” crops up with increasing frequency, and, as it is the case with many philosophical catchwords, its very familarity creates a presumption of understanding. Yet, although some related problems, particularly the one concerning cross-world identification of individuals, have received some critical scrutiny, the very idea of possible worlds has been borrowed from Leibniz, and its intelligibility taken for granted even without its theological roots.My misgivings about this notion are not due to a prejudice against the concept of the possible itself: far from “passing” away, it remains a fundamental and irreplaceable element of human thought.
The Philosophical Problem Of Truth-Of
Authors: Cummins Robert 
Published: June 2016

There is a certain view abroad in the land concerning the philosophical problems raised by Tarskian semantics. This view has it that a Tarskian theory of truth in a language accomplishes nothing of interest beyond the definition of truth in terms of satisfaction, and, further, that what is missing — the only thing that would yield a solution to the philosophical problem of truth when added to Tarskian semantics — is a reduction of satisfaction to a non-semantic (and ultimately physical) relation. It seems to me that this view either misidentifies the philosophical problem altogether, or encourages a seriously misleading picture of the nature of the problem.The view I have in mind is nowhere more persuasively at work than in a recent paper by Hartry Field.1 In this paper Field argues that a Tarskian theory of truth for a natural language is impossible if we insist on Tarski's case-by-case elimination of ‘satisfies'. More fundamentally, however, he argues that a Tarskian theory could provide nothing of philosophical interest beyond the admittedly interesting reduction of truth to satisfaction, and his ground for this claim is, roughly, that a Tarskian theory does not reduce its primitive semantic relation — satisfaction — to a non-semantic relation.
The Logic of Virtue in the Republic
Authors: Kubara Michael 
Published: June 2016

The overriding concern of theRepublicis the relation between morally (or socially or politically) right (or just) action and happiness (or prudence). To settle the matter Plato says he must first discover the formula for politically just action for individuals, and that it will be easier to do this if we first take justice to be a virtue of a city as a whole. He develops a model of an ideal city, hardly mentioning justice and the other cardinal virtues, and then looks to that model to individuate them.Here I shall first discuss the defense of his portrait of an ideal city. Second, the logic of virtue(arete)is considered, in two steps. It is argued that judgments of virtue are to be split into those of function(ergon)and power(dynamis).Then there is a brief consideration of each half. Third, the implications of this for understanding and threefold classification of goods are drawn. Finally, there is a discussion of the formula for each of the cardinal virtues of a city.