???Everyone agrees that the moral features of things supervene on their natural features??? , 22). Everyone is wrong, or so I will argue. In the first section, I explain the version of moral supervenience that Smith and others argue everyone should accept. In the second section, I argue that the mere conceptual possibility of a divine command theory of morality is sufficient to refute the version of moral supervenience under consideration. Lastly, I consider and respond to two objections, showing, among (...) other things, that while DCT is sufficient to refute this version of moral supervenience it is not necessary. (shrink)

This paper reviews the actual and potential use of social media in emergency, disaster and crisis situations. This is a field that has generated intense interest. It is characterised by a burgeoning but small and very recent literature. In the emergencies field, social media (blogs, messaging, sites such as Facebook, wikis and so on) are used in seven different ways: listening to public debate, monitoring situations, extending emergency response and management, crowd-sourcing and collaborative development, creating social cohesion, furthering causes (including (...) charitable donation) and enhancing research. Appreciation of the positive side of social media is balanced by their potential for negative developments, such as disseminating rumours, undermining authority and promoting terrorist acts. This leads to an examination of the ethics of social media usage in crisis situations. Despite some clearly identifiable risks, for example regarding the violation of privacy, it appears that public consensus on ethics will tend to override unscrupulous attempts to subvert the media. Moreover, social media are a robust means of exposing corruption and malpractice. In synthesis, the widespread adoption and use of social media by members of the public throughout the world heralds a new age in which it is imperative that emergency managers adapt their working practices to the challenge and potential of this development. At the same time, they must heed the ethical warnings and ensure that social media are not abused or misused when crises and emergencies occur. (shrink)

Contrary to what many philosophers believe, Calvinism neither makes the problem of evil worse nor is it obviously refuted by the presence of evil and suffering in our world. Or so most of the authors in this book claim. While Calvinism has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years amongst theologians and laypersons, many philosophers have yet to follow suit. The reason seems fairly clear: Calvinism, many think, cannot handle the problem of evil with the same kind of plausibility as other (...) more popular views of the nature of God and the nature of God's relationship with His creation. This book seeks to challenge that untested assumption. With clarity and rigor, this collection of essays seeks to fill a significant hole in the literature on the problem of evil. (shrink)

'Everyone agrees that the moral features of things supervene on their natural features' (Smith (1994), 22). Everyone is wrong, or so I will argue. In the first section, I explain the version of moral supervenience that Smith and others argue everyone should accept. In the second section, I argue that the mere conceptual possibility of a divine command theory of morality (DCT) is sufficient to refute the version of moral supervenience under consideration. Lastly, I consider and respond to two objections, (...) showing, among other things, that while DCT is sufficient to refute this version of moral supervenience it is not necessary. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

Ideology and science Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9535-3 Authors David E. Packham, Materials Research Centre, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Significant associations have been found between specific human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and organ transplant rejection, autoimmune disease development, and the response to infection. Traditional searches for disease associations have conventionally measured risk associated with the presence of individual HLA alleles. However, given the high level of HLA polymorphism, the pattern of amino acid variability, and the fact that most of the HLA variation occurs at functionally important sites, it may be that a combination of variable amino acid sites shared (...) by several alleles (shared epitopes) are better descriptors of the actual causative genetic variants. Here we describe a novel approach to genetic association analysis in which genes/proteins are broken down into smaller sequence features and then variant types defined for each feature, allowing for independent analysis of disease association with each sequence feature variant type. We have used this approach to analyze a cohort of systemic sclerosis patients and show that a sequence feature composed of specific amino acid residues in peptide binding pockets 4 and 7 of HLA-DRB1 explains much of the molecular determinant of risk for systemic sclerosis. (shrink)

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

For over half a century there have been concerns about increases in the occurrence of academic misconduct by higher education students and this is now claimed to have reached crisis proportions (e.g. Mostrous & Kenber, 2016a ). This study explores the extent to which multi-national faculty judge the effectiveness of higher education institutions in dealing with such misconduct. A survey of multi-national higher education faculty was conducted to explore the perceived barriers to the implementation of academic integrity processes. It asked (...) faculty how likely some hypothetical scenarios of failures of such processes were to occur in the real world of higher education institutions. 63% of our participants perceived there to be institutional and/or faculty barriers to effectively dealing with academic misconduct. Mostly, they blamed the higher education model for this which, in the interests of mass education, has come to prioritise the need for institutions to focus more on their quantity of output as corporate business enterprises than on the integrity of their output as educators. In discussing participants’ comments, about the relationship of faculty to their employing institutions, Schein and Scheins’ ( 2016 ) theory of three levels of organisational culture was used. Participants’ comments suggested that, at the deepest level of organisational culture i.e. basic underlying taken-for-granted assumptions about beliefs and values, inadequate integrity measures have tended to become normalised. Despite the often considerable, efforts of the institutions, organisational barriers were noted which mitigate against faculty behaving professionally i.e. from doing a ‘good job’ in respect of student academic misconduct. Some blame was also placed on faculty. We argue that apparent institutional inability to effectively manage the integrity process, has potentially significant consequences for wider society. We discuss ways in which this situation might be improved including a recommendation that governments regulate this aspect of the corporate social responsibility of higher education institutions as they do other aspects, requiring that it be managed effectively. (shrink)

Inferential Internalists accept the Principle of Inferential Justification (PIJ), according to which one has justification for believing P on the basis of E only if one has justification for believing that E makes probable P. Richard Fumerton has defended PIJ by appeal to examples, and recently Adam Leite has argued that this principle is supported by considerations regarding the nature of responsible belief. In this paper, I defend a form of externalism against both arguments. This form of externalism recognizes what (...) I call the phenomenon of reflective defeat: if one is justified in not believing that E makes probable P, then this defeats whatever justification one has for believing P upon the basis of E. I argue that this modified version of externalism has the virtue of accommodating the intuitions that motivate internalism, without the cost of the vicious regress that makes internalism so unattractive. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Procrastination refers to voluntarily postponing an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for this delay, and students are considered to be especially negatively affected. According to estimates in the literature, at least half of the students believe procrastination impacts their academic achievements and well-being. As of yet, evidence-based ideas on how to differentiate severe from less severe cases of procrastination in this population do not exist, but are important in order to identify those students in need (...) of support. The current study recruited participants from different universities in Sweden to participate in an anonymous online survey investigating self-rated levels of procrastination, impulsivity, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, stress, and quality of life. Furthermore, diagnostic criteria for pathological delay as well as self-report items and open-ended questions were used to determine the severity of their procrastination and its associated physical and psychological issues. In total, 732 participants completed the survey. A median-split on the Pure Procrastination Scale and the responses to the PDC were used to differentiate two groups; “less severe procrastination”, and “severe procrastination”. For participants in the severe group, 96–97% considered procrastination to a problem, compared to 42–48% in the less severe group. The two groups also differed with regard to considering seeking help for procrastination, 35–38% compared to 5–7%. Participants in the severe group also reported more problems of procrastination in different life domains, greater symptoms of psychological issues, and lower quality of life. A thematic analysis of the responses on what physical issues were related to procrastination revealed that these were characterized by stress and anxiety, e.g., tension, pain, and sleep and rest, while the psychological issues were related to stress and anxiety, but also depression, e.g., self-criticism, remorse, and self-esteem. The current study recommends the PPS to be used as an initial screening tool, while the PDC can more accurately determine the severity level of procrastination for a specific individual. (shrink)

Inferential internalism holds that for one to be inferentially justified in believing P on the basis of E one must be justified in believing that E makes probable P. Inferential internalism has long been accused of generating a vicious regress on inferential justification that has drastic skeptical consequences. However, recently Hookway and Rhoda have defended a more modest form of internalism that avoids this problem. They propose a form of weak inferential internalism according to which internalist conditions are restricted to (...) only certain kinds of inferential justification. In this paper, I clarify and argue against weak internalism. I contend that while weak internalism avoids the vicious regress, it does so at the cost of compromising its internalist credentials. For I show that unless weak internalism makes an arbitrary distinction between individuals who believe for the very same reasons, the view collapses into externalism. (shrink)

We give a novel approach to proving soundness and completeness for a logic (henceforth: the object-logic) that bypasses truth-in-a-model to work directly with validity. Instead of working with specific worlds in specific models, we reason with eigenworlds (i.e., generic representatives of worlds) in an arbitrary model. This reasoning is captured by a sequent calculus for a _meta_-logic (in this case, first-order classical logic) expressive enough to capture the semantics of the object-logic. Essentially, one has a calculus of validity for the (...) object-logic. The method proceeds through the perspective of reductive logic (as opposed to the more traditional paradigm of deductive logic), using the space of reductions as a medium for showing the behavioural equivalence of reduction in the sequent calculus for the object-logic and in the validity calculus. Rather than study the technique in general, we illustrate it for the logic of Bunched Implications (BI), thus IPL and MILL (without negation) are also treated. Intuitively, BI is the free combination of intuitionistic propositional logic and multiplicative intuitionistic linear logic, which renders its meta-theory is quite complex. The literature on BI contains many similar, but ultimately different, algebraic structures and satisfaction relations that either capture only fragments of the logic (albeit large ones) or have complex clauses for certain connectives (e.g., Beth’s clause for disjunction instead of Kripke’s). It is this complexity that motivates us to use BI as a case-study for this approach to semantics. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

David Émile Durkheim, life and times -- Moral solidarity and the new social science: Durkheim's study of the individual in society and society in the individual -- Morality, law, the state, and politics -- Establishing a social science -- Education as social science and cultural politics -- The "revelation" of religion -- Odds and ends: Durkheim's unfinished works on morality and the family and his war writings -- Further readings.

This collection introduces readers to some of the most respected Pre-Socratic scholarship of the twentieth century. It includes translations of important works from European scholars that were previously unavailable in English and incorporates the major topics and approaches of contemporary scholarship. Here is an essential book for students and scholars alike. "Students of the Pre-Socratics must be grateful to Mourelatos and his publishers for making these essays available to a wider public."--T. H. Irwin, American Journal of Philology "Mourelatos is a (...) superb editor, and teaching Pre-Socratics in the future with this collection on the reading list will not only be easier but also better."--Jorgen Mejer, The Classical World "The editor has done his work judiciously. It would be difficult to devise a better balance between different parts of the subject."--Edward Hussey, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences "[This book] will undoubtedly become an indispensable aid for beginning and advanced students of the Pre-Socratics."--David E. Hahm, Isis. (shrink)

This thesis examines the alethic modal concepts of possibility and necessity. It is argued that one cannot do justice to all our modal talk without possible worlds, i.e., complete ways that a cosmos might have been. I argue that not all of the proposed applications of possible worlds succeed but enough remain to give one good theoretical reason to posit them. The two central problems now are: What feature of reality makes correct alethic modal claims true and What are possible (...) worlds? ;David Lewis makes possible worlds be concretely existing universes. Unfortunately, I show Lewis's account involves set-theoretic, ethical, inductive and probabilistic paradoxes, and commits Lewis to an objectionable form of primitive modality that governs the choice of the counterpart relation. The most promising contemporary alternatives to Lewis's theory have been the worlds of Adams and Plantinga constructed out of Platonic entities such as maximal collections of consistent propositions. However, these approaches fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of what makes true modal claims true. I also criticize some alternative accounts. ;Finally, I discuss and combine two historical approaches. The first is an Aristotelian approach that says a non-actual event is possible is to say that some actual substances could have initiated a causal chain that could lead up to the event in question. However, it can be shown that some plausible global possibility claims can be made true on this account only if there is a necessarily existent first cause capable of initiating very different universes. On the other hand, Leibniz made possible worlds be ideas in the mind of an omniscient necessarily existent deity. Leibniz fails to explain what it is that makes these possible worlds possible, but if we were willing to combine his story with the conclusion drawn from the Aristotelian one, we could get the following story: Possible worlds are ideas in the mind of an omniscient deity and what makes them possible is that this deity has the Aristotelian capability of initiating causal chains that can lead to them being actualized. (shrink)

Alex has written an excellent thesis in the area of computable model theory. The latter is a subject that nicely combines model-theoretic ideas with delicate recursiontheoretic constructions. The results demand good knowledge of both fields. In his thesis, Alex begins by reviewing the essential model-theoretic facts, especially the Baldwin-Lachlan result about uncountably categorical theories. This he follows with a brief discussion of recursion theory, including mention of the priority method. The deepest part of the thesis concerns the study of the (...) recursive spectrum of an uncountably categorical theory, i.e. the set of n ≤ ! such that the n-th model of the theory (in the Baldwin-Lachlan sense) has a computable presentation. This is a deep and very active area of conteporary research in computable model theory which Alex discusses in considerable detail. The exposition is very good and therefore the thesis makes a nice introduction to the subject for a wide community of logicians. (Sy-David Friedman, Professor of Mathematical Logic, Director of the Kurt Godel Research Center for Mathematical Logic, University of Vienna). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy by Trevor PearceAlexander KleinTrevor Pearce. Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 384. Paperback, $35.00.Pragmatist pioneers were young lions in the days of Darwin. Evolutionary-biological thinking infused this philosophical movement from the start. And yet the last time a major monograph appeared on classic pragmatism and evolutionary biology—Philip Wiener's Evolution and (...) the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949)—the author could personally thank Ralph Barton Perry, William James's junior colleague and eventual biographer. John Dewey himself wrote the foreword.Almost seventy-five years later, we have Trevor Pearce's painstakingly researched Pragmatism's Evolution. The author has graduate training in both biology and philosophy and is a former student of William Wimsatt and Robert Richards's (343). The book offers an intricate portrait of how debates about evolutionary biology informed the thinking of a loose-knit group of pragmatists between the years 1860 and 1910. While a remarkable variety of figures are discussed, ten pragmatists command the most attention: Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, John Fiske, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, G. H. Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois (18). Call them "the American Ten."Without downplaying Darwin, an overarching theme is the special significance of Herbert Spencer. Despite many specific disagreements with him (see e.g. 74, 207–8, 253–54, 281), the American Ten all accepted something more fundamental from Spencer: an intellectual framework that explains mind and morality in terms of functional relationships between organism and environment.After an introduction outlining what Pearce identifies as four chronological "cohorts" of pragmatists (more on this concept below), he examines the 1860s and 1870s reception of Darwin (chapter 1) and Spencer (chapter 2), showing how senior pragmatists like Wright, Peirce, and James defended evolution during this period. In chapter 2, we meet the Metaphysical Club's arch Spencerian, John Fiske, and we get a reading of James's critique of Spencer's psychology and sociology. Chapter 3 gives a highly detailed, reference-work-like portrait of the second cohort's training in evolutionary biology during the 1880s—chiefly Royce, Dewey, Addams, Mead, and Du Bois. In chapter 4, we learn that in the 1880s and 1890s, idealists like Edward Caird, Samuel Alexander, David George Ritchie, and Josiah Royce all co-opted ideas from evolutionary biology, which they apparently thought compatible with Hegelian dialectics. Chapter 5 shows that central planks of Peirce's metaphysics and Dewey's ethics are responsive to an 1890s dispute over the causes of the biological variation upon which selection acts (the so-called "factors" debate). The final two chapters show how pragmatist ethics (chapter 6) and epistemology (chapter 7) were infused with substantive ideas about evolution and about scientific experiment more generally.The depth and use of historical scholarship on offer here are both remarkable. On depth, Pearce draws from nineteen special collections and archives housed at institutions from California to Manchester, UK. The reference list (published on Pearce's website) runs [End Page 160] to 118 pages and was apparently too long for inclusion in the book. Archival research and lengthy bibliographies are to be expected in today's history of philosophy. But the sheer range of sources Pearce draws from is, by any measure, impressive.The use to which he puts those sources is provocative. Close reading, and in particular argument reconstruction, is usually the stock in trade for historians of philosophy. Pearce takes a different approach (7), seeking interpretive insight through a kind of philosophical network analysis. The nodes are mainly philosophers, scientists, and social critics. Unlike digital network analyses, Pearce connects his nodes by hand, via a great multiplicity of social, educational, and intellectual relations. We learn who studied evolution where, with whom, and when; what specific texts were assigned in classes taken, in classes taught; who attacked whom, who sided with whom; and so on.The resulting networks are rich, though they can be difficult to track due to their complexity. At its best, the book uses networks to produce genuine insights that... (shrink)

To study the influence of divinity on cosmos, Alexander uses the notions of ‘fate’ and ‘providence,’ which were common in the philosophy of his time. In this way, he provides an Aristotelian interpretation of the problems related to such concepts. In the context of this discussion, he offers a description of ‘nature’ different from the one that he usually regards as the standard Aristotelian notion of nature, i.e. the intrinsic principle of motion and rest. The new coined concept is (...) a ‘cosmic’ nature that can be identified with both ‘fate’ and ‘divine power,’ which are the immediate effect of providence upon the world. In the paper it is exposed how the conception of providence defended by Alexander means a rejection of the divine care of the particulars, since the divinities are only provident for species. Several texts belonging to the Middle Platonic philosophers will convince us that such thinkers (and not directly Aristotle) are the origin of the thesis that will be understood as the conventional Aristotelian position, namely that divinity only orders species but not individuals. (shrink)

Nel contesto della discussione medievale sulla scientificità della teologia, uno dei temi particolarmente studiati dall’epistemologia teologica è quello della qualità speculativa o pratica della teologia. Su questo aspetto, la tradizione francescana ha sviluppato la tendenza ad assegnare alla teologia un carattere, se non assolutamente pratico, quantomeno intermedio tra speculativo e pratico, ma certamente caratterizzato da un’indole affettiva. L’iniziatore di questa specificazione pratica dell’abito teologico quale «scientia movens affectionem ad bonitatem» può essere certamente identificato in Alessandro di Hales. Il mio intento (...) consiste qui nel documentare tale attribuzione in una delle sue forme, accostando i testi di uno tra i più autorevoli maestri francescani del xiv secolo: Pietro Aureolo. Ne sarà esaminata la proposta studiando i passaggi relativi al tema rintracciabili nello Scriptum e nella Reportatio. In the Medieval debate on the scientificity of Theology, one of the themes particularly studied by theological Epistemology is its speculative or practical quality. On this issue the Franciscan Tradition has developed an aptitude to give Theology a character, if not absolutely practical, at least intermediate between speculative and practical, but certainly marked by an affective peculiarity. Of course the author who started this practical specification of the theological habit as «scientia movens affectionem ad bonitatem» can be identified as Alexander of Hales. My purpose here is to document a model of this attribution approaching some texts of one of the most influential Franciscan Masters of the Fourteenth Century: Pietro Aureolo. I am going to examine his proposal by studying excerpts related to the theme in the Scriptum and Reportatio. (shrink)

In this paper I compare Alexander of Aphrodisias’ and Proclus’ conceptions of dialectic by discussing a passage from Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle’s Topics and texts from Proclus’ Platonic Theology and commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. I show how Alexander takes up Aristotle’s view of dialectic as an argumentative technique that has no specific object but can be put in the service of philosophy e. g. to establish first principles. In a key passage, Alexander quotes some lines from (...) the Parmenides to emphasize that this was also Plato’s view on dialectic. By contrast, Proclus uses the Parmenides as a crucial source for his conception of dialectic as the crowning glory of philosophy, and fiercely criticizes such interpretations of the Parmenides as that of Alexander, which reduce it to the illustration of a logical method. I argue that the difference in their conceptions of dialectic lies in Alexander’s positive and Proclus’ negative view on doxa and on its role in knowledge. (shrink)

This popular book has now been revised to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the growing number of people interested in all the main philosophical ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:73. More Hume autograph marginalia in a first edition of the "Treatise". Two sets of marginalia by Hume in copies of the first edition of A Treatise of Human Nature have been published. One is a copy in the British Library. This has 1 2 been described by Connon and Nidditch and was, no doubt, one, at least, of the copies which Hume kept for himself. The marginalia are (...) so extensive as to suggest that, at the time he made them, he may have been hoping for an opportunity to publish a second edition of the Treatise. The other copy with marginalia, a presentation copy to his kinsman, Henry Home, Lord Karnes, has been described by Wallace Nethery, Librarian of the Hóose Library of Phil3 osophy and by Nidditch. There is a third copy of the Treatise with marginalia in Hume's hand which was a pre4 sentation copy to Pope. The Pope copy is inscribed on the flyleaf of Volume I in Hume's handwriting, "To Alexander* Rope Esq at Twickenham". There are 18 corrections in Volume I and 5 in Volume II. They are as follows, the first word or phrase being the error, the second the correction. The first word is usually scratched out in the text and the correction inserted in the margin but sometimes insertions are simply made within the text. 1st EditionSelby-Bigge 1.12.252.8'the' Our' 1.35.2316.1'of 'or' 1.57.428.18'these* 'those' 1.58.829.6'part' 'parts' 1.111.2860.27'defection' 'dissection' 1.126.569.14'it' deleted 1.154.486.1'worn out' "worn it out' 1.240.7136.9'as' 'when' 1.256.21145.28'evidence' 'testimony' 74. ï. 273. 20155.24'instance' 'instances' 1.280.16159.33'gave it's' 'gave it its' Ï.286.25163.22-23'upon observation' 'upon the observation' 1.287.16164.2'cause' 'case' 1.288.5164.15'results* 'result' 1.293.10167.14'exists' 'exist' 1.343.17196.22'opening I' 'opening it I' 1.402.16231.6'presses' 'press' 1.453.1260.34'what the' 'what is the' 11.108.10 336.24 "affections wheel' 'affections to wheel' II. 120. 4 343.19 'cause' 'causes' 11.228.23404.15 'One' Our' 11.229.19 404.32 'and proceed' 'and practice proceed' 11.271.24428. 20 'considerably' 'sensibly' In addition, someone, perhaps Hume, has marked a printer's error where a letter has slipped. (Vol. I, p. 466. 3). It is not possible to find out the date upon which Hume gave this copy to Pope from the published correspondence of either party. Pope died in 1744 and Hume may have sent him a copy of the Treatise because of the former's literary renown and because the publishers had a large number of unsold copies on their hands. From the fact, among others, that the footnote on Volume II, p. 168 (Selby-Bigge, p. 371) is missing from both the Pope1 and the Karnes copies, it is clear that Volumes I and II were, as one might expect of presentations, in each case early issues or states. It is more than likely that Hume made other presents of the Treatise to friends and people he admired such as Francis Hutcheson and Bishop Butler, and these 75. would probably have included marginalia along the same lines as the Karnes and Pope copies. For what Hume substantially did in giving these copies was to perform an act of courtesy; i.e., to incorporate items from the errata tables into the text. The Pope copy is the least important and interesting of those noticed so far, for it contains only one correction which is not included in the errata tables - the second item listed above in Volume I - and not all of them. The percentage of the changes called for in the errata tables which are made by Hume in the text diminishes markedly as between Volumes I and II. Moreover, there are no marginalia in the third volume, 'Of Morals', and this is perhaps to be explained by Hume's becoming bored with this somewhat superfluous task, even if it was a politeness and the fact... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:73. More Hume autograph marginalia in a first edition of the "Treatise". Two sets of marginalia by Hume in copies of the first edition of A Treatise of Human Nature have been published. One is a copy in the British Library. This has 1 2 been described by Connon and Nidditch and was, no doubt, one, at least, of the copies which Hume kept for himself. The marginalia are (...) so extensive as to suggest that, at the time he made them, he may have been hoping for an opportunity to publish a second edition of the Treatise. The other copy with marginalia, a presentation copy to his kinsman, Henry Home, Lord Karnes, has been described by Wallace Nethery, Librarian of the Hóose Library of Phil3 osophy and by Nidditch. There is a third copy of the Treatise with marginalia in Hume's hand which was a pre4 sentation copy to Pope. The Pope copy is inscribed on the flyleaf of Volume I in Hume's handwriting, "To Alexander* Rope Esq at Twickenham". There are 18 corrections in Volume I and 5 in Volume II. They are as follows, the first word or phrase being the error, the second the correction. The first word is usually scratched out in the text and the correction inserted in the margin but sometimes insertions are simply made within the text. 1st EditionSelby-Bigge 1.12.252.8'the' Our' 1.35.2316.1'of 'or' 1.57.428.18'these* 'those' 1.58.829.6'part' 'parts' 1.111.2860.27'defection' 'dissection' 1.126.569.14'it' deleted 1.154.486.1'worn out' "worn it out' 1.240.7136.9'as' 'when' 1.256.21145.28'evidence' 'testimony' 74. ï. 273. 20155.24'instance' 'instances' 1.280.16159.33'gave it's' 'gave it its' Ï.286.25163.22-23'upon observation' 'upon the observation' 1.287.16164.2'cause' 'case' 1.288.5164.15'results* 'result' 1.293.10167.14'exists' 'exist' 1.343.17196.22'opening I' 'opening it I' 1.402.16231.6'presses' 'press' 1.453.1260.34'what the' 'what is the' 11.108.10 336.24 "affections wheel' 'affections to wheel' II. 120. 4 343.19 'cause' 'causes' 11.228.23404.15 'One' Our' 11.229.19 404.32 'and proceed' 'and practice proceed' 11.271.24428. 20 'considerably' 'sensibly' In addition, someone, perhaps Hume, has marked a printer's error where a letter has slipped. (Vol. I, p. 466. 3). It is not possible to find out the date upon which Hume gave this copy to Pope from the published correspondence of either party. Pope died in 1744 and Hume may have sent him a copy of the Treatise because of the former's literary renown and because the publishers had a large number of unsold copies on their hands. From the fact, among others, that the footnote on Volume II, p. 168 (Selby-Bigge, p. 371) is missing from both the Pope1 and the Karnes copies, it is clear that Volumes I and II were, as one might expect of presentations, in each case early issues or states. It is more than likely that Hume made other presents of the Treatise to friends and people he admired such as Francis Hutcheson and Bishop Butler, and these 75. would probably have included marginalia along the same lines as the Karnes and Pope copies. For what Hume substantially did in giving these copies was to perform an act of courtesy; i.e., to incorporate items from the errata tables into the text. The Pope copy is the least important and interesting of those noticed so far, for it contains only one correction which is not included in the errata tables - the second item listed above in Volume I - and not all of them. The percentage of the changes called for in the errata tables which are made by Hume in the text diminishes markedly as between Volumes I and II. Moreover, there are no marginalia in the third volume, 'Of Morals', and this is perhaps to be explained by Hume's becoming bored with this somewhat superfluous task, even if it was a politeness and the fact... (shrink)

The paper starts by reflecting on what senior engineering students don't know how to do when they confront a real-world project in an industrially sponsored senior design project. Seven, largely qualitatively, skills are found to be lacking: questioning, labeling, qualitatively modeling, decomposing, measuring, ideating, and communicating. These skills, some of the most important critical and creative thinking skills in the arsenal of modern civilization, are termed "the missing basics" and contrasted with what engineering faculty usually call "the basics." The paper (...) critically examines the term "the basics" and other terms that are conceptual hurdles to fundamental reassessment of engineering education at this time. The paper concludes that the engineering academy is stuck in a Kuhnian paradigm born in the cold war, that the reflexive belief in the superiority of math, science, and engineering science to the exclusion of other topics is not itself scientific, and that the use of tired code words is not an argument or a rational defense of a paradigm that may have outlived its usefulness. The paper concludes by highlighting the role philosophy can play in clearing away the conceptual confusion, thereby permitting a more reasoned conversation on the needs of engineering education in our times. (shrink)

This collection of Habermas's recent essays on philosophical topics continues the analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In a short introductory essay, he outlines the sources of twentieth-century philosophizing, its major themes, and the range of current debates. The remainder of the essays can be seen as his contribution to these debates.Habermas's essay on George Herbert Mead is a focal point of the book. In it he sketches a postmetaphysical, intersubjective approach to questions of individuation and subjectivity. In (...) other essays, he develops his distinctive, communications-theoretic approach to questions of meaning and validity. The book as a whole expands on his earlier efforts to define a middle ground between nostalgic revivals of metaphysical conceptions of reason and radical deconstructions of reason. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt.The Essays: The Horizon of Modernity is Shifting. Metaphysics after Kant. Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking. Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning. Peirce and Communication. The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead's Theory of Subjectivity. Philosophy and Science as Literature? (shrink)

In these pages, we expose the main traits of St. Albert the Great’s doctrine of providence and fate, considered by Palazzo the keystone of his philosophical system. To describe it we examine his systematic works, primarily his Summa of Theology. His discussion follows clearly the guidelines of the Summa of Alexander of Hales, in order to delve into the set of problems faced over the centuries by theological tradition. Albert also restates the reflections of different authors like Boethius or (...) Saint John of Damascus but, in his Summa he incorporates to his reflections also the noteworthy book of Nemesius of Emesa, De natura hominis, which includes some pages on providence. Albert gives his personal solution to the complex questions of providence, destiny and contingency of the world. His conception of providence is developed in the frame of the creative power of the almighty God. God’s knowledge is necessary and inerrant and his providential purposes are infallible, but that does not mean that every event is necessary. He does not communicate His own proprieties to the creatures. In order to understand this problem, Albert recalls the notion of hypothetical necessity coined by Boethius in an Aristotelian framework and the difference between 'necessitas consequentis' and 'necessitas consequentiae' proposed by Alexander of Hales. He also develops his account of providence, closely linked to the topic of fate. However, it would be exaggerated to deem his position deterministic. (shrink)

This Element is on new developments in the psychology of reasoning that raise or address philosophical questions. In traditional studies in the psychology of reasoning, the focus was on inference from arbitrary assumptions and not at all from beliefs, and classical binary logic was presupposed as the only standard for human reasoning. But recently a new Bayesian paradigm has emerged in the discipline. This views ordinary human reasoning as mostly inferring probabilistic conclusions from degrees of beliefs, or from hypothetical premises (...) relevant to a purpose at hand, and as often about revising or updating degrees of belief. This Element also covers new formulations of dual-process theories of the mind, stating that there are two types of mental processing, one rapid and intuitive and shared with other animals, and the other slow and reflective and more characteristic of human beings. The final topic covered is the new developments and rationality. (shrink)

Thomas Merton is one of the most important spiritual voices of the last century. He has never been more relevant as new generations look to him for guidance in addressing some of life's biggest questions: how can we find God, how should we engage with other faiths, and how can we oppose violence and injustice? Looking carefully, one can find, tucked away in Merton's prodigious writings, his response to another timeless question: Why do we suffer? Why does an all-powerful and (...) all loving God permit evil and suffering? By carefully examining all of Merton's work, we find that he repeatedly confronted this question throughout most of his adult life. Intriguingly, Merton's approach to this question changed dramatically a few years before he died in 1968. An examination of all aspects of his life yields evidence that Merton’s immersion in Zen during this time contributed most to that change. (shrink)

First published in 1990, _Existentialism_ is widely regarded as a classic introductory survey of the topic, and has helped to renew interest in existentialist philosophy. The author places existentialism within the great traditions of philosophy, and argues that it deserves as much attention from analytic philosophers as it has always received on the continent.

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising that the question has been so long neglected by modern philosophy. Now at last there is a philosophy of gardens. David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from the (...) appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural. (shrink)

Efforts to conserve endangered species of animal are, in some important respects, at odds with Buddhist ethics. On the one hand, being abstract entities, species cannot suffer, and so cannot be proper objects of compassion or similar moral virtues. On the other, Buddhist commitments to equanimity tend to militate against the idea that the individual members of endangered species have greater value than those of less-threatened ones. This paper suggests that the contribution of Buddhism to the issue of species conservation (...) should not, however, be discounted. It argues, on the contrary, that Buddhist traditions, in reminding us of the moral significance of the suffering of individual animals, add an important dimension to debates concerning the ethical justification of efforts to conserve endangered species. (shrink)

In his quest to solve 'the ever-disquieting riddle of existence', Schopenhauer explored almost every dimension of human existence, developing a darkly compelling worldview that found deep resonance in contemporary literature, music, philosophy, and psychology. This is the first comprehensive biography of Schopenhauer written in English. Placing him in his historical and philosophical contexts, David E. Cartwright tells the story of Schopenhauer's life to convey the full range of his philosophy. He offers a fully documented portrait in which he explores (...) Schopenhauer's fractured family life, his early formative influences, his critical loyalty to Kant, his personal interactions with Fichte and Goethe, his ambivalent relationship with Schelling, his contempt for Hegel, his struggle to make his philosophy known, and his reaction to his late-arriving fame. (shrink)

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns. For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Cooper (...) sets Nietzsche's critique against the background of nineteenth-century German culture, yet is concerned at the same time to emphasize its bearing upon recent educational thought and policy. (shrink)