Anscombe guides us through the Tractatus and, thereby, Wittgenstein's early philosophy as a whole. She shows in particular how his arguments developed out of the discussions of Russell and Frege. This reprint is of the fourth, corrected edition.

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

The intentionality of sensation -- The first person -- Substance -- The subjectivity of sensation -- Events in the mind -- Comments on Professor R.L. Gregory's paper on perception -- On sensations of position -- Intention -- Pretending -- On the grammar of "Enjoy" -- The reality of the past -- Memory, "experience," and causation -- Causality and determination -- Times, beginnings, and causes -- Soft determinism -- Causality and extensionality -- Before and after -- Subjunctive conditionals -- "Under a (...) description" -- Analysis competition--tenth problem -- A reply to Mr. C.S. Lewis's argument that "naturalism" is self-refuting. (shrink)

The debate on the foundations of knowledge and meaning has gained particular attention in recent philosophical discourse. A number of commentators, including Richard Rorty, have categorized leading contemporary philosophers such as Wittgenstein as being 'anti-foundationalist". In this comprehensive analysis of Wittgenstein's concept of the form of life and its implications, Professor Conway takes issue with this characterization of Wittgenstein. Instead, the author interprets Wittgenstein as continuing the discussion of foundations, while radically transforming the very understanding of foundations.

-- v. 2. Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

I IT is often declared or evidently assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connexion, or alternatively, that being caused is — non-trivially ...

This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static (...) dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view. (shrink)

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

Cognitive values like simplicity, broad scope, and easy handling are properties of a scientific representation that result from the idealization which is involved in the construction of a representation. These properties may facilitate the application of epistemic values to credibility assessments, which provides a rationale for assigning an auxiliary function to cognitive values. In this paper, I defend a further rationale for cognitive values which consists in the assessment of the usefulness of a representation. Usefulness includes the relevance of a (...) representation regarding the investigation of a given problem and its practicability for the users. This rationale builds on the claim that any evaluation of scientific representations should pursue two aims: providing information about their credibility and providing information about their usefulness. Cognitive values relating to the usefulness of a representation and epistemic values relating to its credibility both perform a first-order function. Cognitive values are abstract, and several values with first-order functions may conflict in their application. Thus, in order for cognitive values to account for the sort of problem that is to be investigated by means of a representation, they need to be appropriately specified and weighed. Comprehensiveness, complexity, high resolution, and easy handling, for instance, may be required in a first-order function for model-based prediction of regional climate impacts but not for explaining how the global climate system works. Specifying and weighing cognitive and epistemic values relative to a given problem is a legitimate second-order function of social values. (shrink)

Meeting appropriate ethical standards for research involving human participants, mean ensuring confidentiality. It is assumed that the research participant will accept the safeguarding protocols necessary to ensure confidentiality. This assumption however oversimplifies the variation of motivations that goes into participants’ decisions to participate in research. Drawing on reflections from my fieldwork experience in Ghana, I answer the questions: Why do research participants reject confidentiality? What ethical position can one take when the researcher and the researched have conflicting perspectives about confidentiality? (...) I contend that participants with personal stake refuse confidentiality when they want to be acknowledged for their data. Rejecting confidentiality is however, embedded in the individual perspective, cultural, and political context of the study area. The ethical concerns of such refusal can be ameliorated if confidentiality is nuanced to include six categorically distinct but mutually non-exclusive stages: research-planning, ongoing-information, writing-up, reality-after-research, differential-disseminations, and no-confidentiality-clause. The paper further argues that whilst maintaining institutional allegiance in this matter is crucial, employing confidentiality should lie at the intersection of participants’ motivation for taking part in the research, the socio-cultural-specific-context of the study location and the nature of the topic being explored. (shrink)

This book brings to the modern age wisdom on the topic of anger by four ancient authors: Seneca, Evagrius Ponticus, Cassian, and Augustine. These authors broadly represent the classic views on anger and focus on how anger inhibits spiritual growth of the soul and its relationship with God.

Based on a framework that distinguishes several types, roles and functions of values in science, we discuss legitimate applications of values in the validation of computer simulations. We argue that, first, epistemic values, such as empirical accuracy and coherence with background knowledge, have the role to assess the credibility of simulation results, whereas, second, cognitive values, such as comprehensiveness of a conceptual model or easy handling of a numerical model, have the role to assess the usefulness of a model for (...) investigating a hypothesis. In both roles, values perform what we call first-order functions. In addition, cogni¬tive values may also serve an auxiliary function by facilitating the assessment of credibility. As for a third type of values, i.e. social values, their legitimate role consists in specifying and weighing epistemic and cognitive values with respect to practical uses of a simulation, which is considered a second-order function. Rational intersubjective agreement on how to specify and weigh the different values is supposed to ensure objectivity in simulation validation. (shrink)

Parmenides, mystery and contradiction -- The early theory of forms -- The new theory of forms -- Understanding proofs : Meno, 85d₉-86c₂, continued -- Aristotle and the sea battle -- The principle of individuation -- Thought and action in Aristotle -- Necessity and truth -- Hume and Julius Caesar -- "Whatever has a beginning of existence must have a cause" : Hume's argument exposed -- Will and emotion -- Retraction -- The question of linguistic idealism.

Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Lebens in all ihrer Lückenhaftigkeit läßt doch schon ersehen, wie sich der Intellekt kraft ununterbrochenen Fortschritts in aufsteigender Linie, über die Reihe der Wirbeltiere hin bis zum Menschen, herausgebildet hat. Sie zeigt uns in der Fähigkeit des Verstehens einen Ausläufer der Fähigkeit des Handelns, eine immer schärfere, immer mehrgliedrigere, immer geschmeidigere Anpassung des Lebewesens an die gegebenen Existenzbedingungen. Woraus zu folgern wäre, daß unser Intellekt im engeren Sinn des Worts dazu bestimmt sei, die vollkommene Verwebung unseres Körpers (...) in seine Umgebung zu sichern, die Beziehungen der äußeren Dinge aufeinander vorzustellen, kurz: dazu, die Materie zu denken. Und tatsächlich wird dies einer der Schlüsse unserer Arbeit sein. (shrink)

While concerns of the mental being causally excluded by the physical have persistently plagued non-reductive physicalism, such concerns are standardly taken to pose no problem for reductive type physicalism. Type physicalists have the obvious advantage of being able to countenance the reduction of mental properties to their physical base properties by way of type identity, thereby avoiding any causal competition between instances of mental properties and their physical bases. Here, I challenge this widely accepted advantage of type physicalism over non-reductive (...) physicalism in avoiding the causal exclusion of the mental. In particular, I focus on Jaegwon Kim’s influential version of the causal exclusion argument, namely, his supervenience argument. I argue that type physicalism’s advantage is undermined by the following two things: (1) the generalizability of the supervenience argument, and (2) type physicalism’s incompatibility with mental properties at the fundamental level. This involves evaluating the generalization objection to the supervenience argument, probing the metaphysics of physicalism, and showing how (1) and (2) combine in a way that appears underappreciated given the general confidence in type physicalism’s advantage. (shrink)

Neuron diagrams are heavily employed in academic discussions of causation. Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, however, offer an alternative approach employing vector diagrams, which this paper attempts to develop further. I identify three ways in which dispositionalists have taken the activities of powers to be related: stimulation, mutual manifestation, and contribution combination. While Mumford and Anjum do provide resources for representing contribution combination, which might be sufficient for their particular brand of dispositionalism, I argue that those resources are not (...) flexible enough to further accommodate either stimulation or mutual manifestation. Representational tools are provided to address these limitations, improving the general value of the vector model for dispositionalist approaches to causation. (shrink)

Die Autorin analysiert und kritisiert in diesem Buch den Status quo der Men-schenwürde und plädiert auf eine Neubesinnung und Neubestimmung. Die als Moderne begriffene funktional differenzierte Weltgesellschaft - ihrem Selbstverständnis nach antitotalitär - verliert eben dieses Profil mit einem Menschenbild, das die Differenz von Verfügbarem und Unverfügbarem aufgehoben und durch den "Diskurs" ersetzt hat. Wenn alles verfügbar wird, verschwindet die Unverfügbarkeit zum Beispiel der Menschenwürde - damit besteht beispielsweise die Gefahr, dass der Mensch zu Ersatzteillager werden kann. Erst die Diskussion (...) über den Menschen auf der Grundlage einer erkenntnistheoretisch reflektierten Systemtheorie kann ver-hindern, dass der unvermeidliche Paradigmen-wechsel ein Un-ver-fügbares durch ein Verfügbares ablöst. (shrink)

One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics, society, and religion–from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the (...) wisdom and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment, she argues, that created a moral and social philosophy–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more so than in Europe. This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas. (shrink)