ABSTRACT In recent debates about conceptual engineering, it appears that the internalist has an explanatory advantage when it comes to accounting for meaning change and conceptual change. In this paper, I argue against this impression. I show how two different varieties of externalism, originalism and anti-individualism, can coherently explain various cases of meaning change, irrespective of whether they involve proper names or kind terms; and also irrespective of whether they occur in everyday, legal, or scientific contexts. I point out which (...) mechanisms and interpretational strategies the originalist and anti-individualist can invoke, relative to their respective background assumptions about the nature of concepts. Furthermore, I offer an argument in favour of the claim that externalism as such has no implications concerning whether concepts can undergo change. I establish this by showing that originalism allows for conceptual change while anti-individualism insists on conceptual stability. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

In this volume, Baumstark deals with the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy into Syriac and Arabic. Syriac texts with German translations are included, alongside a detailed study of their textual interrelationships.

An influential objection to the view that intentions are non-derivatively relevant to the moral permissibility of actions states that if intentions were relevant to permissibility in such a way, one would have to take them into account in decision making, which would be odd (in some morally relevant sense of ‘oddness’). The paper outlines and assesses three candidates for the oddness: that considering intentions in decision making is an unordinary practice, that it is impossible or conceptually confused, and that it (...) assigns intentions the weight as moral considerations that they intuitively do not have. The paper rejects the first two and shows that the third is probably what motivates most critics of the relevance of intentions who raise this objection. If this is correct, the objection is a non-starter as it assumes what it has to prove. Towards the end, it is argued that the objection does not serve as a plausible error theory either. (shrink)

Pannekoek, Lenin, and the future of Marxist philosophy -- Note on the text -- Introduction -- Marxism -- Middle class materialism -- Dietzgen -- Mach -- Avenarius -- Lenin -- The criticism -- Natural science -- Materialism -- Plekhanov's views -- The Russian revolution -- The proletarian revolution.

This paper aims to examine why language teaching holds a prominent position within the Swedish school system. This statement applies to foreign languages as well as to home languages and Swedish as a second language for immigrant children and adults. The Swedish educational system is here conceived as incorporating some specific constituent features that have led to the implementation of a generous language policy. This assumption turns out to be particularly obvious in the case of immigrant education. In fact, the (...) analysis of the Swedish educational system illuminates different stakes at several levels - commercial/economic, social, political/ ideological, historical, linguistic, educational and cultural - for language teaching as a whole. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)