bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Chalmers: Wise Incomprehension
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It is very hard to devise a theory of consciousness that is not open to decisive objection. This is not because consciousness is so amorphously ill defined that anything goes and we find it impossible to choose among a plethora of options. Rather, no matter what theory we come up with, it always seems to run into some shattering difficulty. The problem of consciousness is like a chess game in which a series of forced moves always ends in checkmate, more or less humiliating. Sometimes it seems that the best we can hope for is some teetering ad hoc contrivance that just manages to evade outright refutationforthemoment at least. Philosophy is like that, we know; but with consciousness the constraints are especially tight.
Chomsky: Rules and Representations
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Chomsky’s new book restates, and somewhat amplifies, the contentions about language for which he is renowned. Its six chapters record (with modifications) sundry lectures given by Chomsky over the last five years. Perhaps inevitably, given their provenance, the chapters are exceedingly repetitious, and it is doubtful whether a lesser figure could have got away with this degree of underediting. Nevertheless, there is much interesting material here, and repetition has a way of sinking in. Besides, Chomsky might offer the excuse that some people never learn. My own opinion is that on some issues Chomsky clearly has the better of his critics, but there are others on which there are deeper and subtler worries behind objections whose typical formulation allows Chomsky’s untroubled dismissals. Matters are philosophically and methodologically less clear-cut than he acknowledges. I shall divide my remarks into two parts, the first logically prior to the second, trying to spell out the deeper worries alluded to.
Chomsky repeatedly insists that linguistic theories, in particular generative grammars, be accorded the same realist significance as is standardly ascribed to theories of natural science; he opposes what he calls “the bifurcation thesis” as between cognitive psychology and (say) physics.
Stroud: Not Knowing What We Know
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I cannot know that I am not dreaming now, because I could have experiences just like these in dreaming sleep and suppose myself to be awake. If I cannot know that I am not dreaming now, then I cannot know that I am now seated before a fire writing. Therefore I cannot know that I am now seated before a fire writing. So Descartes famously argued, thus raising the general problem of scepticism about the external world. The argument is apt to strike one as both preposterous and compelling. What is the source of its power? Where, if anywhere, does it go wrong? And what does it show about epistemology and philosophy in general?
Ayer: Significantly Senseless
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Outside the profession, Wittgenstein’s fame as a twentieth-century philosopher is surpassed only by Russell’s. Hardly a week goes by without our encountering Wittgenstein’s name in one or other of the more popular organs of communication. There is some irony in this. For, unlike Russell, Wittgenstein maintained a ferocious aversion to publicity and wrote works of the utmost esotericism. Perhaps his present cult status in the extraphilosophical world stems, at least in part, precisely from this inaccessibility, thus doubling the irony. At any rate, a market surely exists for an exoteric study of Wittgenstein’s notoriously recondite ideas.
It is this market for which A. J. Ayer’s book is intended to cater: his avowed aim is to present Wittgenstein to interested readers who lack the benefit of a “considerable training in philosophy.” If he succeeds in this laudable aim it will not be at the cost of vulgarization: though Ayer keeps his pills digestibly small, he does not stoop to sweeten them. In other words, the nonphilosopher will find it pretty tough going, despite the clarity of Ayer’s style and his simplifications of Wittgenstein’s doctrines. But it is not clear that a better job could have been done.
Foot: Good Things
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Suppose I perform an action certified by morality as good-say, giving money to charity. I then do something good because it is good. We might say that this action had the moral property goodness and that in acknowledging this to be so I had a reason to perform it. Anyone else has an equal reason to perform the same action, which is good no matter who performs it. Thus, generalizing: morality is aptly seen as a set of principles that ascribe values to states of affairs and thereby provide reasons for bringing those states of affairs about. Morality says what we ought to do and insofar as we grasp its dictates we have the reasons it specifies: we know what we ought to do, and that we ought to do it is a reason for doing it.
This commonsense picture makes many philosophers squirm, and not because they are avowed moral nihilists. There are two main reasons. The first is that it seems to presuppose moral “cognitivism”: the agent recognizes goodness as an objective property that may be instantiated by his actions. By ascribing it to an action, he comes to know an objective truth-that his action is (or will be) good. This makes some philosophers nervous, because it suggests a metaphysics they don’t like the look of, whereby goodness becomes a “queer” property of things.
There is a second reason why the picture is found rebarbative: it entails that morality affords reasons for action that fail to take into account what the agent may himself desire or what may be in his interest.
Collingwood: Homage to Education
Authors: Mcginn Colin 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Robin Collingwood (1889-1943) was born seventeen years after Bertrand Russell and died twenty-seven years before him. Given the style and content of Collingwood’s philosophical work, this fact ought to seem surprising. For there is no apparent mark of Russell’s influence, hor of those who influenced him, upon Collingwood’s own philosophical corpus. For better or worse, he stands apart-even aloof-from the British analytical tradition exemplified by Russell. Or perhaps for better and worse: better, because he thereby created a distinctive style of philosophy, in which history, not science (or formal logic), was the model and focus of interest; worse, because his own thought lacks some of the clarity and rigor and analytical depth of the “school” he opposed, or ignored. Not for him the dry deductions of Russell’s Principia Mathematica: consciousness in history was what excited his interest.
Yet there exists a certain affinity between the political and social writings of the two men. Both seem to have been drawn to political writing more by extramural convulsions (i.e., wars) than by theoretical inclination, feeling it to be their duty to set the world straight on how it should run itself. Both display the same belief in the civilizing role of dispassionate reason, the importance of education, the dangers of submission to authority.
The Fractured State
Authors: Erkkila Betsy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“I too have at heart Freedom, and the amelioration of the people,” Whit-man wrote to New York Senator William Henry Seward, the outspoken opponent of compromise on the issue of slavery who had appealed to “a higher law than the Constitution” to keep the new territory free. In his letter, dated December 5, 1855, Whitman asked Seward to send him “public documents, your speeches, and any government, congressional or other publications of general interest, especially statistics, census facts &c.”1 He probably intended to use this material as part of his ongoing plan to take his democratic program on the road; more specifically, he used the material in The Eighteenth Presidency!“Where is the real America,” he asked in this political pamphlet, which was probably begun amid the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the early 1850s and completed in the heat of the presidential campaign of 1856. Subtitled “Voice of Walt Whitman to Each Young Man in the Nation, North, South, East, and West,” the pamphlet, which exists in proof but was probably never published, indicates Whitman’s
Democracy and (Homo)Sexual Desire
Authors: Erkkila Betsy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In his first inaugural address of 1861, Abraham Lincoln insisted on the perpetuity of the Union, emphasizing the mystic bonds of memory that united the nation: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave ... will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”1 In the third edition of Leaves of Grass,which was published by the Boston firm Thayer & Eldridge in May 1860, Whitman exhibited a similar concern with touching and arousing the “bonds of affection” and the “chords of memory” that would make the Union whole. Through an increased emphasis on comradeship and love, he sought to resolve his personal crisis and the nation’s political crisis in poems that were at once private expressions of love and incitements to public affection. “We want satisfiers, joiners, lovers,” he wrote in a notebook of the time. “These heated, torn, distracted ages are to be compacted and made whole” (CW,IX, 161). Despite the impulse toward union, fusion, and artistic resolution, however, there is in the 1860 Leaves-evenmore than in the 1856 volume-a disquieting undercurrent that registers the throes of personal and public dissolution.
Burying President Lincoln
Authors: Erkkila Betsy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the event seemed to confirm the universe of “form and union and plan” that Whitman had celebrated in “Song of Myself.” “And could it really be, then?” he said of the Union victory, “Out of all the affairs of this world of woe and failure and disorder, was there really come the confirm’d, unerring sign of plan, like a shaft of pure light-of rightful rule-of God?” (PW,II, 503). This apparent sign of an unerring plan was once again thrown into question when only a few days later on April 14, Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. The assassination negated the prospect of “rightful rule,” suggesting that “woe and failure and disorder” were in-deed the only “confirm’d” plan of the world. In his second inaugural address, delivered a month before his death, Lincoln had urged a spirit of national reconciliation: “With malice to-ward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, -to do all which may achieve and
The Decision to Extend Operational Advice
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Washington on September 17, 1947, the Department of the Army made the decision to send General Stephen J. Chamberlin as special representative of the chief of staff to study the military situation and make recommendations on a course of action. Those in attendance at the meeting—including Chamberlin, Henderson, Norstad, and Schuyler—agreed that the special mission should focus on several issues: the wisdom of arming villagers in areas secured by the army; the role of the gendarmerie; the use of American officers as observers to accompany Greek units in the field; and the desirability of advising the army on operations. On the most sensitive matter—that of providing operational advice—the group recommended that the White House first ask the British Military Mission to assume this responsibility. Should the British refuse, the United States would consider sending another 125 to 200 officers to carry out this task. If British military forces and the mission pulled out of Greece, the United States would explore the possibility of replacing both.
The Greek Children
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In early 1948 the war seemed to reach a new level of atrocity as the Truman administration began receiving reports that the guerrillas were evacuating thousands of children from Greece and relocating them in Yugoslavia and other neighboring communist states. The Greek government accused the guerrillas of kidnapping its youths and preparing to convert them to communism. The episode quickly took on the appearance of a calculated effort to destroy Greece as a nation as leaders in Athens charged the guerrillas with genocide and appealed to the UN and then directly to the United States for help. This seemingly new communist threat, which the Greeks called paedomazoma or “stealing of the children,” aroused nationwide indignation by its violations of family sanctity and basic humanitarian principles. But broader considerations were also involved.
Grammos and Vitsi
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In June 1948 the Greek army was ready to launch the Grammo offensive (“Operation Crown”) into the border area of northwest Greece, followed by the attack on Vitsi, which stretched along the Greek-Albanian-Yugoslav frontier. Many more guerrillas would soon join the 8,000 already in Grammos, a 225-square-mile area that the Joint U.S. Military Advisory and Planning Group called the “main bandit stronghold in Greece” and the “principal center of resistance and main entrance” into the country. The battle would not be easy. Markos’s forces held the rugged, mountainous terrain with well-fortified positions surrounded by numerous minefields. If the army broke the resistance and forced the guerrillas to evacuate, it would still have to spend months in searching out stragglers and supplies before turning over the area to the gendarmerie.
The communists’ Peace offensive
Authors: Jones Howard 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
By early 1949 the chances for a collapse of the Greek government seemed remote, but the military situation remained threatening. Although Van Fleet predicted certain victory, he prepared a special operations plan in the event of a communist takeover. News correspondents on the scene were not optimistic. Homer Bigart claimed that the United States had become “inextricably involved” in a stalemated war, and Time correspondent Robert Low reported that “wherever the Greek army is not, the guerrillas are—if not physically, then in influence and authority.” Anne O’Hare McCormick declared: “Everywhere the atmosphere was heavy with suspense. In such fearful quiet must the early settlers in the West have waited the descent of the Indians.” According to a member of the American mission in Athens, many villagers sat out long nights, protected only by barbed wire.
Introduction
Authors: Vailati Ezio 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke (1715-16), in which they pitted their views against each other through the mediation of Caroline, Princess of Wales, was probably the most famous and influential philosophical exchange of the eighteenth century. It covered many central metaphysical and theological topics, such as divine immensity and eternity, the relation of God to the world, the soul and its relation to the body, free will, space and time, and the nature of miracles.
The Soul
Authors: Vailati Ezio 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
On the topic of the soul, Clarke and Leibniz shared several important views. Both firmly held that the belief in an immaterial and hence naturally immortal substance is necessary to religion and morality. Both thought that this belief was under a concerted attack and at tempted to defend it against Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and their followers. However, they also disagreed on two important issues. Clarke believed that the soul is extended while Leibniz denied it.
Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion
Authors: Marissen Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Bach’s St. John Passion is surely one of the monuments of Western music, yet performances are inevitably controversial. In large part, this is because of the combination of the powerful and highly emotional music and a text that includes passages from a gospel marked by vehement anti-Judaic sentiments. What did this masterpiece mean in Bach’s day and what does it mean today? Although bibliographies on Bach and Judaism have grown enormously since World War II, there has been very little work on the relationship between the two areas. This is hardly surprising; Judaica scholars and culture critics focusing on issues of anti-Semitism commonly lack musical training and are, in any event, quite reasonably interested in even more pressing social and political issues. Bach scholars, on the other hand, have mostly concentrated on narrowly defined musical topics. Strangely, therefore, almost no scholarly attention has been given to relationships between Lutheranism and the religion of Judaism as they affect Bach’s most controversial work, the St. John Passion. Through a reappraisal of Bach’s work and its contexts, Marissen confronts Bach and Judaism directly, providing interpretive commentary that could serve as a basis for a more informed and sensitive discussion of this troubling work. Consisting of a long interpretive essay, followed by an annotated literal translation of the libretto, a guide to recorded examples, and a detailed bibliography, this concise text provides the reader with the tools to assess the work on its own terms and in the appropriate context.
Moral Appraisability
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This book explores a central question of moral philosophy, addressing whether we are morally responsible for certain kinds of actions, intentional omissions, and the consequences deriving therefrom. Haji distinguishes between moral responsibility and a more restrictive category, moral appraisability. To say that a person is appraisable for an action is to say that he or she is deserving either of praise or blame for that action. One of Haji’s principal aims is to uncover conditions sufficient for appraisability of actions. He begins with a number of puzzles that serve to structure and organize the issues, each one of which motivates a condition required for appraisability. The core of Haji’s analysis involves his examination of three primary types of conditions. According to a control condition, a person must control the action in an appropriate way in order to be appraisable. An autonomy condition permits moral appraisability for an action only if it ultimately derives from a person’s authentic evaluative scheme. On Haji’s epistemic requirement, moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness demands belief on the part of the agent in the rightness or wrongness of an action. Haji concludes this portion of his argument by incorporating these conditions into a general principle which outlines sufficient conditions for appraisability. Haji offers a fascinating discussion of the implications of his analysis. He demonstrates that his appraisability concept is applicable to a variety of non-moral kinds of appraisal, such as those involving legal, prudential and etiquette considerations. He looks at crosscultural attributions of blameworthiness and argues that such attributions are frequently mistaken. He considers the case of addicts and suggests that they may not be morally responsible for actions their addictions are said to cause. He even takes up the intriguing question of whether we can be blamed for the thoughts of our dream selves. Engaging with a central metaphysical question in his conclusion, Haji argues that the conditions of moral responsibility he defends are neither undermined by determinism nor threatened by certain varieties of incompatibilism. Addressing a range of little-discussed topics and forging crucial connections between moral theory and moral responsibility, Moral Appraisability is vital reading for students and scholars of moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of law.
Prologue
Authors: Cuellar Jose Tomas De , Carson Margaret , Glantz Margo 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
What lantern is this?” the typesetter asked me upon receiving the first pages of this work. “Who and what will be illuminated by this lantern, and why? Is the title-which would be a good name for a general store—no more than a flashy notice announcing a lot of claptrap, or does the book contain something beneficial for the reader?”
Liberalism and Affirmative Obligation
Authors: Smith Patricia 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The scope of affirmative obligation is a point of contention among liberals. Some see affirmative obligations required by social justice as incompatible with a strong commitment to individual freedom. The task before the moderate liberal is then to consider what a consistently liberal view of affirmative obligation would have to be in order to accommodate liberal commitments to freedom and justice and also account for long-standing institutions that are central to liberal democratic society. In this book, Patricia Smith argues that this can be achieved by reconstructing the liberal doctrine of positive and negative duty. She offers a careful consideration of these elements of liberal principles as they relate to affirmative obligation. Through an innovative analysis of the institutions of family and contract, Smith develops the idea of duties of membership as preferable to natural duties (to explain family obligation) and as needed to supplement contractual duties (to explain professional obligation). This idea is then applied to the problem of justifying political obligation. She argues that membership obligations, implied in cooperative endeavor, must supplement obligations of consent that are central to liberal theory. This is deftly illustrated through a state of nature theory that includes community membership, eliminating atomistic individualism while maintaining consonance with what Smith calls cooperative individualism. The resulting view of liberal individualism is consistent, complete, and capable of handling long-standing liberal institutions, while taking seriously the demands of affirmative obligations. Smiths clear articulation of a liberal view of affirmative obligation finds a middle ground on this polarized topic, with compelling and reasoned implications for liberal political philosophy. Her discussion will interest students and scholars of legal and political philosophy and political science.
Introduction
Authors: Mayerfeld Jamie 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE DUTY TO relieve suffering. It asks what the content of this duty is, and what it implies for how we should live our lives. Most people underestimate the strength of this duty. There are different reasons for this, some of which are discussed later. But one reason is that most people aren’t very clear what the duty to relieve suffering is. There is widespread confusion about the meaning and measurement of suffering, which in turn breeds confusion about its moral relevance. I hope to clear away some of this confusion. Understanding the content of the duty to relieve suffering is the first step toward grasping its importance.