By building upon Raz's analysis of the spectrum of voluntary obligations, the author produces a typology of agreements, and then assesses the extent to which these different kinds of agreements underpin the common law of contract. While recognizing that the law of contract purports to deal with a broad range of voluntarily undertaken obligations, the typology of agreements suggests that the present law is primarily suited to dealing only with bargains. This suggests that there are situations in which agreements should (...) be legally recognized, but which should not be dealt with by all of the conceptual tools of contract law, for these agreements and voluntary undertakings serve the interests of those undertaking them in significantly different ways than do bargains. (shrink)

While it is often taken for granted that the concepts of property and of distributive justice are capable of working together to generate norms which can enhance positive social and political relations, in particular the value of community, this Article argues otherwise. Relying on critical tools deriving from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s notion of fetishism, the author claims that the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice fetishizes the institution of property, and claims to "distribute" participation in society amongst its (...) members as if this amounted to a distribution of so many objects. Taken in this way, the concept of distributive justice has no respectable content. What social justice requires is a means to ensure that people are not "socially excluded," which requires each individual’s participation in the social and cultural enterprise. This sort of participation can no more be "distributed" than can life itself, and the realization of this point undermines the cogency of most discussions of distributive justice. (shrink)

The task of this chapter is to investigate and assess Grossmann’s view of the ontological status of categories. It has two dimensions. Because Grossmann does not offer a full discussion of the ontology of categories, we first need to present an interpretation of his view. Our point of departure is Grossmann’s claim that a category is a fundamental property of being (which implies that he holds view 3 above). Our second task is to assess the adequacy of his view. We (...) do this by raising some problems with Grossmann’s account, offering as an alternative view a version of 4 above, and defending it against what we construe as Grossmann’s possible counter-arguments. We argue that the best way to view categories themselves is as ontologically neutral insofar as this opens the way for particular categories to be linguistic entities, mental acts, or properties of extra-mental things. This requires, in turn, a qualified defense of two views rejected by Grossmann—common natures and modes of being. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 300-312.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

The 2010 Nagoya Protocol is an international framework for access and benefit sharing (ABS) of the use of genetic and biological resources, with particular focus on indigenous communities. This is especially important in Africa, where local communities have a close reliance on environmental resources and ecosystems. However, national legislation and policies commonly lag behind international agreements, and this poses challenges for legal compliance as well as practical applications. This study reviews the academic literature on the Nagoya Protocol and ABS applications, (...) and then considers the implications of this analysis for research in Africa. Results show that there is uneven engagement with the principles of the Nagoya Protocol across different academic disciplines; local communities are sometimes sidelined in these studies; and only 8% of researchers in the literature analysed are located in Africa. Future developments should focus on ensuring national compliance with the Nagoya Protocol, and that researchers and industry work in partnership with local African communities on ABS issues. (shrink)

Music raises many problems for those who would understand it more deeply. It is rooted in time, yet timeless. It is pure form, yet conveys emotion. It is written, but performed, interpreted, improvised, transcribed, recorded, sampled, remixed, revised, rebroadcast, reinterpreted, and more. Music can be studied by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, biologists, computer scientists, neuro-scientists, critics, politicians, promoters, and of course musicians. Moreover, no single perspective seems either sufficient or invalid. This situation is not so different from that of other (...) arts, but perhaps more intense, due to the pervasiveness of pop, the inaccessability of much contemporary classical music, the strong cultural associations of many styles, the infusions of technology, and the combination with lyrics. (shrink)

Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. Topics (...) discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting. (shrink)

What are physical quantities, and in particular, what makes them quantitative? This book presents an original answer to this question through the novel position of substantival structuralism, arguing that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces.

From very early on, Western philosophers have been obsessed with the understanding of a relatively few works of philosophy which have played a ...

It may seem strange, in view of the spate of recent literature on the subject, that yet another article should be forthcoming on what is certainly the most familiar, as well as the most vexed, of all Platonic passages. But it is precisely this spate of literature that has impelled me to write. The time seems to have come for an article which, rather than seeking desperately for something new, sets out instead to reaffirm those facts and conclusions that even (...) the most resolutely original of scholars could hardly venture to dispute. This article will therefore be based, not on any of the numerous modern interpretations, but on what Plato himself actually wrote. It will contain a number of tentative suggestions which, to the best of my knowledge, have not been made before. They can, and probably will, be rejected. But its primary purpose remains to restate, whenever possible in Plato's own words, a number of important facts that are at once so simple and so obvious that they seem repeatedly, and especially in recent years, to have been quite forgotten. (shrink)

This book is an anthology of Plato's writings, connected with sections of commentary.

In a well-known quotation from Speusippus in the Theologumena Arithmeticae , said to have been derived from Pythagorean sources, especially Philolaus, occur the following sentences: And again a little later: Similarly Sextus Empiricus , drawing evidently on a relatively early Pythagorean source, writes as follows: And Aristotle himself writes of the Pythagoreans : There were, in fact, certain Pythagoreans who equated the number 2 with the line because they regarded the line as ‘length without breadth extended between two points’; and (...) likewise the number 3 was equated with the plane and 4 with the solid. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-BadJ. Clerk ShawNaomi Reshotko. Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-Bad. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 204. Cloth, $68.00.In this engaging and provocative book, Naomi Reshotko advances a naturalistic interpretation of Socratic philosophy, i.e., of those views expressed by Plato’s Socrates that best comport with Aristotle’s descriptions of Socrates. She contrasts her reading with those that (...) project foreign commitments onto the text, including: (i) moralism, or the separation of ethics from empirical science; (ii) two-dimensional semantics, or theories of meaning that distinguish the semantic contribution to a psychological state made by its subject’s conception of its objects from that made by its actual objects; and (iii) privileged access, or psychological theories that grant human beings incorrigibility concerning some aspect of their own psyches.Part I reviews and synthesizes views that the author shares with Terry Penner: that all desire is for one’s own real (not apparent) good, so that an agent’s belief about what is overall best for her invariably guides her actions; that all human virtue is identical to wisdom; and that virtue, so understood, guarantees the greatest possible satisfaction of the desire for one’s own real good, and so makes one live as well as possible.Part II places the distinction among the good, the bad, and the neither-good-nor-bad (NGNB) at the center of Socratic ethics. On Reshotko’s reading, the only goods are virtue and happiness, and the only bads vice and misery. She does not adequately explain why all actions are NGNB (16, 173), even though actions are individuated by their actual consequences (34–36), so that every action is either good or bad (98). Virtue’s goodness is due to its stable nomological (not conceptual or logical) connection to happiness. This makes virtue the only unconditional, other-generated good, while happiness is the only unconditional, self-generated good—its goodness does not depend on any nomological relation it enters into.Part III provides more detail about virtue and happiness. First, Reshotko explains that virtue is wisdom because it is the science of human happiness, and that this science is identical to every other science. Strictly speaking, nobody knows anything without knowing everything, although some people do grasp “some parts of knowledge” (160). Reshotko advocates this view as a solution to the closing puzzles of the Charmides. Socrates and Critias cannot figure out how temperance benefits, first because they assume that it is knowledge [End Page 132] of all things except good and bad, and then because they assume that it is knowledge of good and bad in isolation from other sciences (173a–175a). But if Socratic wisdom is the structured grasp of everything, then their puzzle is resolved. Second, Reshotko claims that happiness is a life maximally composed of pleasures. While she is sympathetic with the view that happiness is composed of modal pleasures (see G. Rudebusch, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value, Oxford 1999), she concludes that sensate pleasures can also be parts of happiness (185n7).The book’s major flaw is its limited engagement with textual evidence that seems to tell against the author’s readings and its limited coverage of alternative interpretations from the secondary literature. I mention three striking examples here.First, Reshotko argues that harming others is inconsistent with self-benefit because of the likelihood of reciprocal harm (65–71). She then notes passages where Socrates speaks as though harming others harms one’s soul simply by making it more unjust, which makes vice sound like a self-generated bad. Gorgias 472c–481b is particularly problematic in this respect, since Socrates claims there that doing injustice is less painful (but worse) than suffering it. Reshotko tries to make such passages conform with her initial explanation: harming others tends to entrench false beliefs that harming others is consistent with self-benefit, which leads to more harm of others and so more reciprocal harm (71–72, 174). This may be workable, but absent more extensive argument, it seems like an ad hoc maneuver.Second, Reshotko wants to avoid giving... (shrink)

No pre-Socratic philosopher, perhaps, has caused more disagreement, or been more variously interpreted, than Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. Among recent attempts to reconstruct his system some of the more notable are those of Tannery, Bailey, Cornford, Peck, and Vlastos. Each of these reconstructions, and especially that of Tannery, has its adherents; and since none of them has much in common with any other, a universally acceptable solution to the fundamental problems involved may well by now seem unattainable. It is my belief, (...) however, and it is the object of this paper to try to prove, that all these modern reconstructions have at least one quality in common, namely an undue complication. The actual system of Anaxagoras was, I believe, considerably simpler than any reconstruction yet forthcoming. Unfortunately what I take to be the basis of the whole system, Anaxagoras' reaction to his Eleatic predecessors, is by.no means easy to convey in brief and simple terms. But if I should succeed in conveying it, then it will, I hope, be seen in itself to possess such a simplicity and neatness that my contention will carry with it a fair warrant of its own truth. I shall, for convenience, divide my argument into ten sections, to which I shall append a brief summary of my conclusions. (shrink)

'To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking' In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke sets out his theory of knowledge and how we acquire it. Eschewing doctrines of innate principles and ideas, Locke shows how all our ideas, even the most abstract and complex, are grounded in human experience and attained by sensation of external things or reflection upon our own mental activities. A thorough examination of (...) the communication of ideas through language and the conventions of taking words as signs of ideas paves the way for his penetrating critique of the limitations of ideas and the extent of our knowledge of ourselves, the world, God, and morals. Locke's masterpiece laid the foundation of British empiricism and is of enduring interest to anyone exploring the development of philosophical thought. This sensitive abridgement uses P. H. Nidditch's authoritative text, and together with an illuminating introduction and other features, makes Locke's arguments more accessible. (shrink)

It is standardly assumed that there are three — and only three — ways to solve problem of temporary intrinsics: (a) embrace presentism, (b) relativize property possession to times, or (c) accept the doctrine of temporal parts. The first two solutions are favoured by endurantists, whereas the third is the perdurantist solution of choice. In this paper, I argue that there is a further type of solution available to endurantists, one that not only avoids the usual costs, but is structurally (...) identical to the temporal-parts solution preferred by perdurantists. In addition to providing a general characterization of this new type of solution, I discuss certain of its anticipations in the literature on bundle theory, as well as provide a detailed development of it in terms of my own preferred metaphysics of ordinary objects — namely, a distinctive form of substratum theory tracing to Aristotle. (shrink)

Manuscript Add. 3965, section 13, folios 541r–542r and 545r–546r is in the Portsmouth Collection of manuscripts and housed in the University Library, Cambridge. These drafts contain a careful account, in Newton's hand, of his views on place, time, and God. They are part of a large number of drafts relating to the three official editions of the Principia published in Newton's lifetime.

In a well-known quotation from Speusippus in the Theologumena Arithmeticae, said to have been derived from Pythagorean sources, especially Philolaus, occur the following sentences: And again a little later: Similarly Sextus Empiricus, drawing evidently on a relatively early Pythagorean source, writes as follows: And Aristotle himself writes of the Pythagoreans : There were, in fact, certain Pythagoreans who equated the number 2 with the line because they regarded the line as ‘length without breadth extended between two points’; and likewise the (...) number 3 was equated with the plane and 4 with the solid. (shrink)