bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Occasionalism and the mind-body problem
Authors: nadler Steven 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the more popular myths in the traditional account of the development of metaphysics in the seventeenth century regards the genesis and historico¬ philosophical significance of the doctrine of occasionalism, or the theory that God alone is a true causal agent, in whose operations qua causa are included all the phenomena of nature. According to the story usually told, some early modern thinkers, committed to Descartes’s philosophy, and to mind-body dualism in particular, were unable to explain how two substances so radically different in essence could interact. Since unextended thought and matter as pure extension have absolutely nothing in common (either essentially or in regard to the kinds of properties of which each is capable), and thus no means by which they might be able to ‘‘engage” one another, it becomes inexplicable, and even inconceivable, how a body can be the cause of mental events (thoughts, sensations) and how a mind can cause motions in the body with which it is united. When confronted with such a problem, the story runs, Cartesians asserted that no such interaction really takes place and retreated to a deus ex machina. What appears to be true causal interaction is really God’s constant activity in producing thoughts on the occasion of certain bodily motions (especially in the brain) and motions in the body on the occasion of certain volitions in the mind, all in accordance with general laws established beforehand. On this reading, occasionalism is first and foremost an ad hoc response to the mind-body problem as it is faced by Cartesian dualism.
Pierre bayle, libertine?
Authors: wootton David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Since Man after his Fall was unable to obey the exact dictates of Reason, there was nothing more necessary than to introduce Love into the World; for it cannot be conceived how Mankind could have subsisted without it. The Passions, with respect to the natural benefits of Society, are the same thing as Repentance in celestial concerns, a Plank after Shipwreck; and since Reason was to become so feeble, we could not have had recourse to a better shift than that of the Passions, of which Love is without dispute the principal one, and in some manner the Soul of the World. (‘Eve’ [F])1 Pierre Bayle was born in 1647, the son of a Huguenot minister in the south of France. At the age of twenty-one he converted briefly to Catholicism; when he reconverted to Protestantism, he was obliged to flee the country to escape the legal penalties faced by relapsed heretics, and went to complete his education in Geneva.2 He worked first as a tutor in Switzerland and in France, under an assumed identity, and then as a professor in the Protestant college in Sedan. When that was closed in 1681 by the government, he moved to Rotterdam, where he taught and, for a time, edited a journal, Nouvelles de la republique des lettres. In 1693 he was dismissed from his teaching position: he had increasingly come into conflict with Pierre Jurieu, a prominent Huguenot theologian and a former protector.
‘Music Has No Meaning to Speak of’: On the Politics of Musical Interpretation
Authors: Goehr Lydia 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
‘The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, ... may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony.’ So James Gibbons Huneker remarked in 1898—to which Robert Schumann, had he still been alive, might have responded: ‘I am more interested in judging whether the symphony is beautiful than in determining whether it has an extra-musical programme.’2 Schumann believed that the musical (audible) content of a symphony is the primary determinant of its meaning. He may even have believed that it is its sole determinant and that music has no extra-musical meaning to speak of at all. ‘The best way to talk about music’, he once wrote, ‘is to be quiet about it.’3 But if silence has satisfied those, like Schumann, of ‘purist’ tendencies, it has worried others who suspect that there is more to music than meets the ear—especially those who have held, as Huneker did, that a symphony can sometimes be blasphemous.
Indian Philosophy: Between Tradition and Modernity
Authors: Mohanty Jitendra Nath 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Anyone who asks ‘What is Indian philosophy? What is “Indian” about it?’ has already situated himself outside the tradition that we call Indian. None of the philosophers who shaped that tradition, and with whose writings we are acquainted, ever asked such a question. They lived and thought within that tradition which today, by the very questions we are asking, we are categorizing. Through this act of categorization, a rupture occurred. Or, rather, it is only such a rupture that could make such categorization possible.
Is the Doctrine of the Atonement a Mistake?
Authors: Hick John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One can wish to honour a thinker because one agrees with his work or because one disagrees with it but nevertheless sees it as important and therefore as needing to be discussed. My own motivation in contributing to the present volume in honour of Richard Swinburne is the latter. He is a major figure in the philosophy of religion today, exercising his powerfully logical mind with immense energy, and is now producing in a series of volumes what will amount to a new summa of Christian dogma. My own view is that this new summa, produced at the end of the twentieth century, is a vast anachronism, representing the thought-forms out of which Christianity is developing rather than the kind of new thinking that is needed as we approach the twenty-first century. But Swinburne’s growing summa is nevertheless a very considerable intellectual achievement, and those who see this as misapplied should present reasons for so thinking. The present chapter attempts to do this on one particular topic.
Grammar on Aristotle‘s Terms
Authors: Barnes Jonathan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
According to Frege, ‘the fundamental logical relation is that of an object falling under a concept’.The fundamental relation finds its canonical expression in singular sentences of the form ‘F (a)’. Such sentences consist of two parts: there is a designating expression, which Frege calls an Eigenname;and there is a descriptive expression, which Frege calls a Begriffswort. Grammatically speaking, the simplest sentences of this sort contain two words and show the structure ‘E + B’. More generally, and a little more rigorously: in Fregean grammar, (1F) primary sentences have two significant parts; (2F) these two parts belong to different and mutually exclusive grammatical categories: no Eigenname may hold the place of a Begriffswort and no Begriffswort may hold the place of an Eigenname; and (3F) in virtue of their heterogeneity, the two elements in a primary sentence bind together into a syntactic unity the Eigenname ‘completes’ or ‘saturates’ the Begriffswort, which is itself essentially incomplete or unsaturated.
Epilogismos: an Appraisal
Authors: Schofield Malcolm 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Readers of Epicurus and other Epicurean authors frequently meet the expressions epilogizesthai, epilogismos, etc. Sometimes at least these words seem to have something like the status of technical terms. It is plausible to construe the decision to use them, rather than other expressions for thinking and its species, as designed to indicate something distinctive in Epicurean epistemology or in the Epicurean conception of what is and is not proper philosophical method. No Epicurean definition of epilogismos etc. is preserved. This is hardly surprising, in view of their general theory of language and well-known aversion to definition (see LS 19, esp. F-H1). Examination of Greek and specifically Epicurean usage is therefore the only way in which we can achieve an understanding of the terms as they occur in the texts which interest us. But despite various attempts by recent scholarship to do just this, notably in valuable studies by Arrighetti and Sedley which survey all the Epicurean evidence, the literature contains no wholly compelling story on the subject. Arrighetti illuminates very well the variety of uses to which the epilog-vocabulary is put, but his idea that epilogismos of the goal of living is a sort of comprehensive appreciation of the main truths of Epicurean ethics has not found much favour.
Descartes’s Compatibilism
Authors: Chappell Vere 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Compatibilism is the doctrine that determinism is logically consistent with libertarianism. Determinism is the doctrine that every being and event is brought about by causes other than itself. Libertarianism is the doctrine that some human actions are free. Was Descartes a compatibilist? There is no doubt that he was a libertarian: his works are full of professions of freedom, human as well as divine. And, though he held that God has no cause other than himself, Descartes thought that everything apart from God is externally caused: he was a determinist with respect to the created universe. So it appears, assuming him consistent with himself, that Descartes must have been a compatibilist. And, indeed, there are passages in his writings in which he appears explicitly to affirm that he is. Since both Descartes’s libertarianism and his determinism are complex doctrines, however, his view of the relation between them is complex as well.
Necessity
Authors: Hughes Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity) goes back at least as far as Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, and flourished in the high Middle Ages. After the demise of scholasticism the subject received comparatively little attention, especially from empiricist philosophers. But the first half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in modal logic, arising at least in part from interest in the nature of implication.
Identity, Worlds, and Times
Authors: Hughes Christopher 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At ‘Naming and Necessity’, 266, Kripke notes that some philosophers have found the notion of identity across worlds problematic, on the grounds that we cannot legitimately make judgements of identity across worlds unless we have a criterion for trans-world identity. If, for example, we judge that someone in an alternative world is the same person as Nixon, then, they have thought, we need a criterion saying, in non-trivial terms, under what conditions a person Pin a world His the same person as a person P’ in a (different) world H’ (in other words, a criterion that provides us with non-trivial necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of person Pin world H with person P’ in world H’). But-these philosophers have maintained-it is very difficult to provide a criterion of identity across worlds for persons, or material objects, or the like.
Classifications of Psychological Concepts
Authors: Schulte Joachim 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In his manuscript book 134, a volume which appears particularly discontinuous, Wittgenstein notes down the following comment: ‘The genealogical tree of psychological phenomena: It is not exactness which I am striving for, but a perspicuous way of looking at things [Übersichtlichkeit].’ But the way of dealing with his subject-matter does not become more perspicuous after this remark. The number of daily entries decreases; after a short time only sporadic remarks are to be found, and these are often unconnected with the philosophy of psychology.
Supervenience, Composition, and Physicalism
Authors: Charles David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Physical reality is fundamental and all genuine mental states and properties are grounded in physical states and properties. The mental is dependent on the physical, but the physical is not dependent on the mental. In this way, the physical determines the mental. These ideas are a commonplace in a central contemporary tradition in the philosophy of mind. They express (at least part of) the ‘physicalist’ preference for the physical as (in some sense) more basic than the mental. For physicalists, the major difficulty has been to make this set of ideas precise without undermining their initial plausibility. In the recent past, philosophers beginning from this starting-point have been led to propose accounts of mental phenomena which have proved difficult to defend in detail. One such account is the type identity thesis of the mental and the physical; another is analytical functionalism.
Reductionism and First-Person Thinking
Authors: Cassam Quassim 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
According to Derek Parfit, the existence of a person just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of an interrelated series of mental and physical events. Parfit calls his view ‘reductionism’, but there is more to this view than is suggested by the initial formulation. What distinguishes ‘reductionism’ from other non-Cartesian conceptions of the self is its commitment to the idea that the life of a subject can be described in an impersonal way. As Parfit puts it, ‘We could describe what, at different times, was thought and felt and observed and done, and how these various events were interrelated. Persons would be mentioned here only in the descriptions of the contents of many thoughts, desires, memories and so on. Persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of any of these thoughts.’ In other words, what is possible is a description which abstracts from the ownership of mental states or events by a subject.
Living among Mysteries
Authors: Clark Stephen R L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Allegorizing identification of Hermes and the Divine logos, which achieved its fullest expression in the Hermetic Corpus, is a reminder that God’s messages, characteristically, are obscure. Hermes is the angel of travellers by night or twilight. At such a time ‘everything teases the traveller, puts on a familiar face and the next moment is utterly strange, suddenly terrifies with awful gestures and immediately resumes a familiar and harmless posture’ (Otto 1954: 119). We cannot always trust our own perceptions, even if they are cleared of desire and preconception. So far from creating our own worlds, we are constantly reminded that even our fantasies are not wholly ours to command. Hermes, the god of charm and trickery, is also an angel of death, leading us into the Unseen, Hades, and stealing from us all our little certainties and our more grandiose hopes. Teilhard, meditating on the human future during the First World War, fantasized of the Great Monad, humankind united in what he later called the noosphere, rising from the earth to the skies. In that fantasy the face of the moon served him as a memento mori: ‘what awaits you, you and your works,’ he imagines it to say, ‘is the frozen immobility of my rigid shell’ ( 15 January 1918: Lubac 1967: 50).
The Vacuum on Null Planes
Authors: Fleming Gordon N 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In 1949 Dirac published a comparison of three distinct approaches that one could take to describing the initial conditions and dynamical evolution of Lorentz covariant quantum theory (Dirac 1949, 1950). One motivation for presenting the comparison was Dirac’s recognition that, in the two approaches that were not used at the time, the description of dynamical evolution had simpler properties, in some respects, than those in the conventional approach. The conventional approach was called by Dirac the Instant Form of quantum dynamics, and the two alternatives were called the Front Form and the Point Form.
Theory of Vacuum
Authors: Finkelstein David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Today the vacuum is recognized as a rich physical medium, subject to phase transitions, its symmetry broken by non-vanishing vacuum values for several important fields akin to the permanent magnetization of a ferromagnet, and supporting the emission, propagation, and absorption of particles. A general theory of the vacuum is thus a theory of everything, a universal theory. It would be appropriate to call the vacuum ‘ether’ once again, as long as we remember its local Lorentz invariance. The most workable theories of the vacuum today are quantum field theories. In these the vacuum serves as the law of nature, as reviewed below. The structure of the vacuum is the central problem of physics today; the fusion of the theories of gravity and the quantum is a subproblem. Here I develop a quantum–space–time description of the vacuum. Einstein considered such a programme in the 1930s:
Is Kant’s Rechtslehre a ‘Comprehensive Liberalism’?
Authors: Pogge Thomas W 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Beginning in 1985,John Rawls has repeatedly emphasized that modern, pluralistic societies should be structured in accordance with a political conception of justice. In doing so, he has insisted that his own liberalism should be understood as political, in contrast to the comprehensive liberalisms of Kant and Mill. While this refinement in Rawls’s position has been discussed by many, his characterization of Kant’s liberalism as comprehensive has not been critically explored in the literature. My interest in beginning such an exploration here is entirely focused on Kant. My guiding thought is that we can gain a better understanding of Kant’s RL by confronting it with the distinction Rawls developed two centuries later.
Self-Legislation and Duties to Oneself
Authors: Reath Andrews 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on some of Kant’s ‘foundational’ remarks about duties to oneself and on some of the problems that they raise. I mean what the syntax of this sentence implies in that the problems that interest me lie more in what Kant says to clarify the basis of duties to oneself than in the idea of such duties themselves. I will not be questioning the general coherence of duties to oneself Instead I will be concerned for the most part with what such duties, as well as what Kant says about them, tell us about his general understanding of certain features of duty and obligation.
Why Not Compatibilism?
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, Stevenson, and a host of others have done what can be done, or ought ever to have been needed, to remove the confusions that can make determinism seem to oppose freedom. (Donald Davidson, ‘Freedom to Act’) No serious believer in the claims that (1) libertarian free will exists, or (2) whether it exists or not it is crucially important, can doubt that there are important compatibilist senses of free will. So much is disputed in the free will problem that we need to begin by clarifying this point.
Why Not Libertarian Free Will?
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I describe that sort of thing as ‘depending on us’ of which the opposite too is both possible and depends on us; ... For those choices which have nature or training and habit as their causes are said to depend on us in the sense that they come about through us, but those which come about without a cause and in accordance with not-being, these in this way preserve what is said to depend on us in the strict sense. (Alexander of Aphrodisias, in R. W. Sharples, ‘Responsibility, Chance and Not Being’) In the previous chapter, we saw why compatibilism is both ethically and personally insufficient. This makes the promise of libertarian free will significant. Unfortunately, this hope must be dashed, for the required sort of libertarian free will is impossible. Now, the related questions that make up the free will problem are so complex, and so much work has been done on them, that any discussion that begins ‘at the beginning’ or that attempts to take up all free will-related matters will not get far.
The Fundamental Dualism
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Chapter 2, we saw that the Core Conception is the basis for our thinking about the free will problem, so that the question of control is of central ethical importance. Chapter 3 explained why any compatibilist notion of control falls far short of fulfilling the requirements of the Core Conception. But Chapter 4 showed that a libertarian notion of control is not available to us. This pushed us towards hard determinism, but then in Chapter 5 we saw why a simplistic hard determinism is also inadequate, and we must go back and recover the partial but true insights of compatibilism. Hence, we are inextricably drawn towards a Fundamental Dualism, incorporating both compatibilism and hard determinism, as a theoretical framework for making sense of moral and personal life in a world without libertarian free will. Since most people are intuitively inclined one way or the other on the Compatibility Question, we need to try out various approaches in showing that we indeed have an inescapable dualism, and to apply these approaches in different contexts.
Positive Importance of Illusion
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At various stages of previous discussion, lacunas have been revealed which ‘demand’ something like illusion. Perhaps the idea that illusion may need to play a central role in our self-understanding and social order in the free will context is by now expected. In this, the central chapter of the book, we set out to chart the illusionistic situation. We shall see how illusion is useful because of the absence of libertarian free will and because of the contrariety of the partial insights of compatibilism and hard ““““’““’ we shall see that illusion is present, and why it would not be a good thing if it were dissipated. We are fortunate in being imbued with illusion because, I claim, we cannot function well with a complete realization of the truth on the free will issue. Both the nature of this truth and pragmatic considerations following from human weaknesses will be seen to contribute to this conclusion. Illusion helps maintain, and in part even creates, crucial aspects of our moral and personal reality.
Explorations in the Land of Illusion
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
If my view about the role of illusion in our lives is tenable, much more needs to be said. I will attempt here a number of further explorations, trying to make sense of where we stand. This should help integrate some previous themes, further our understanding, and pose new questions, some of which will be taken up later.
Some Further Benefits
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The picture of the human condition we have ended up with might be plausible, but it is also distressful. When I go on to speak of ‘opportunities’ created it is thus important to realize that little consolation is offered—the opportunities, if at all fortuitous, are of limited significance relative to the moral and personal weight of the conclusions themselves. Nevertheless, difficult conditions sometimes produce interesting rewards and in this context we should cherish anything helpful that we can get.
Some Additional Problems
Authors: Smilansky Saul 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The difficulties with my position, such as those related to dishonesty or to the political dangers of acknowledging ‘necessary illusions’, are both real and important. They need to be better understood, and certain fears can perhaps be diffused, but there is no simple trick which can make these grave difficulties go away. Hence, the importance attached to them in evaluating the plausibility of the position presented in this book primarily depends on the strength of the case that I have made so far.