'This is a powerful piece of advocacy. I'd pick Ewing and Gearty for my counsels any day.' -Bernard Porter, LRBThis book is an account of the struggle for civil liberties against the State in which groups such as the anti-war protestors, the Irish nationalists, the Communist party, trade unionists, and the unemployed workers' movement found themselves involved in the first half of the twentieth century. All had to fight for their civil liberties in the face of strong opposition from (...) the State, including the judges whose attitude to civil liberties was often deeply hostile, and at odds with their supposed role as defenders of freedom. (shrink)

First published in Great Britain in 1948, this book examines the definition of goodness as being distinct from the question of What things are good? Although less immediately and obviously practical, Dr. Ewing argues that the former question is more fundamental since it raises the issue of whether ethics is explicable wholly in terms of something else, for example, human psychology. Ewing states in his preface that the definition of goodness needs to be confirmed before one decides on (...) the place value is to occupy in our conception of reality or on the ultimate characteristics which make one action right and another wrong. This book discusses these issues. (shrink)

In this impressive second edition of Theory of Knowledge, Keith Lehrer introduces students to the major traditional and contemporary accounts of knowing. Beginning with the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Lehrer explores the truth, belief, and justification conditions on the way to a thorough examination of foundation theories of knowledge,the work of Platinga, externalism and naturalized epistemologies, internalism and modern coherence theories, contextualism, and recent reliabilist and causal theories. Lehrer gives all views careful examination and concludes (...) that external factors must be matched by appropriate internal factors to yield knowledge. This match of internal and external factors follows from Lehrer’s new coherence theory of undefeated justification. In addition to doing justice to the living epistemological traditions, the text smoothly integrates several new lines that will interest scholars. Also, a feature of special interest is Lehrer’s concept of a justification game.This second edition of Theory of Knowledge is a thoroughly revised and updated version that contains several completely new chapters. Written by a well-known scholar and contributor to modern epistemology, this text is distinguished by clarity of structure, accessible writing, and an elegant mix of traditional material, contemporary ideas, and well-motivated innovation. (shrink)

First published in 1934, this book evaluates the characteristic doctrines of the idealism which dominated philosophy during the last century. It seeks to combine realism, as to epistemology and physical objects, with a greater appreciation of views which emphasize the unity and rationality of the universe. This work is not a history and does not try to compete with any histories of idealism but it instead reaches an independent conclusion on certain philosophical problems by criticising what others have said. The (...) book considers differing arguments in order to determine their validity. (shrink)

This concise volume is at once an excellent introduction to Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonand an original analysis of Kant's ideas.

Leicht verständliche Einführung in Fragestellungen und Probleme der Ethik und Metaethik von dem Antipoden Wittgensteins in dessen Cambridger Zeit. – Ewings Buch erfuhr im englischen Original zehn Auflagen und erscheint hier zum ersten Mal auf Deutsch. - Wenn ein Philosoph (wie in Cambridge in den 1940er-Jahren geschehen) öffentlich bezweifelt, dass sein Universitätskollege überhaupt »einen Geist besitze« und dessen ethische Theoreme mit einer »aus drei Stücken Matsch« geformten Kugel vergleicht, sein Gegner hingegen vor Studenten bekennt, dass er kein Wort von dem (...) verstehe, was der andere vertrete, und dessen Anhänger in eine Reihe mit marxistischen und römisch-katholischen Glaubenseiferern stellt, muss mehr dahinterstecken als eine sorgsam gepflegte Feindschaft. In der Tat grenzte sich Letzterer, der englische Philosoph A.?C. Ewing, scharf von der Position des Ersteren, des zehn Jahre älteren Ludwig Wittgenstein, ab. Ewing, der seine Position selbst als eine Art analytischen Idealismus bezeichnete, führte seine Kritik des Logischen Positivismus und des sprachanalytischen Konventionalismus damals in die akademische Isolation, während Wittgensteins Denken enormen Einfluss gewann. Heute hingegen werden viele Überzeugungen Ewings wieder wie selbstverständlich diskutiert. Ewings Ethik steht in einer über G.?E. Moore und W.?D. Ross bis zu Henry Sidgwick zurückreichenden Tradition britischer Moralphilosophie. Für diese sind moralische Urteile von ganz eigener Art und können objektiv wahr sein. Ihre Rechtfertigung beruht zuletzt auf intuitiver Erkenntnis; unsere normativen Begriffe lassen sich auf wenige Grundbegriffe zurückführen. »Ethik. Eine Einführung« behandelt zahlreiche Grundprobleme der normativen Ethik und Metaethik wie den Konflikt zwischen Konsequentialismus und Deontologie, den Stellenwert moralischer Intuitionen, das Wesen und die Objektivität moralischer Urteile, die Definierbarkeit von »gut« und »sollen«. Als Einführung in die Ethik konzipiert und glänzend geschrieben, erfuhr der Band zahlreiche Auflagen und liegt hier zum ersten Mal in deutscher Übersetzung vor. (shrink)

The eminent philosopher Keith Lehrer offers an original and distinctively personal view of central aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. He argues that what is uniquely human is our capacity for evaluating our own mental states (such as beliefs and desires), and suggests that we have a system for such evaluation which allows the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict. The keystone in this system is self-trust, on which reason, knowledge, (...) and wisdom are grounded. (shrink)

First Published in 1951, this outline work on the theory of knowledge and metaphysics is intended both for university students who have recently started on the subject and for any who, without having the advantage of studying it at ...

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gansta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black (...) Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender. (shrink)

Several social metaphysicians have argued that groups are constituted by, but not identical to, their members. While the constitution view is promising, there are significant difficulties with existing versions of that view. Fortunately, lessons may be extracted from more traditional metaphysics and applied to the case of group agents. Drawing on such lessons, I present a novel account of the constitution relation holding between individuals and group agents. According to the resulting structural-constitution view, when individuals constitute a group of a (...) certain kind, they do so in virtue of exhibiting the structure characteristic of groups of that kind. (shrink)

First published in 1924, this book examines one of the main philosophical debates of the period. Focusing on Kant’s proof of causality, A.C. Ewing promotes its validity not only for the physical but also for the "psychological" sphere. The subject is of importance, for the problem of causality for Kant constituted the crucial test of his philosophy, the most significant of the Kantian categories. The author believes that Kant’s statement of his proof, while too much bound up with other (...) parts of his particular system of philosophy, may be restated "in a form which it can stand by itself and make a good claim for acceptance on all schools of thought". (shrink)

Quassim Cassam has argued that psychological and epistemological analyses of conspiracy theories threaten to overlook the political nature of such theories. According to Cassam, conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. I develop a limited critique of Cassam's analysis.This paper advances two core theses. First, acceptance of conspiracy theories requires a rejection of epistemic authority that renders conspiracy theorists susceptible to co-option by certain political programs while insulating such programs from criticism. I argue that the contrarian nature of conspiracy (...) theories partially accounts for the prominence of such theories in populist movements.Second, the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for their attractiveness, especially among those to whom populism already appeals. I argue that for those who resent what appears from their perspective as the shaping of the epistemic landscape by alien perspectives, conspiracy theorizing may facilitate the reassertion of epistemic autonomy. (shrink)

Nobody interested in philosophy need be deterred by Kant's reputation for difficulty from familiarizing himself with his ethics. While the Critique of Pure Reason and his other non-ethical works are very hard to follow, the first two chapters of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals at least are clear and straightforward and presuppose little previous acquaintance with philosophy. The third chapter is not about ethics as such but about the metaphysical problem of freedom and should be omitted by (...) anyone who is not familiar with Kant's general philosophy, but the first two. (shrink)

Although there is a large literature on referentiality, going back to at least the nineteenth and early twentieth century, much of this early work is based on constructed data and most of it is on English. The chapters in this volume contribute to a growing body of work that examines referentiality through naturalistic data in context. Taking an interactional approach to (non)referentiality, contributors to this volume ask how participants talk in real time about persons and things as individuals or as (...) categories, and what distinguishes 'referential' from 'nonreferential', 'specific' from 'nonspecific', and 'generic' from 'nongeneric'. Crucially, we ask whether these distinctions even matter to participants in conversation, and if they do, what the evidence for that would be. Contributors investigate these issues using data from conversational interaction in a variety of social contexts - from close friends and family to more casual acquaintances, in service encounters, and between adults and children - and in a range of languages: English, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin. Collectively, the chapters develop insights showing that reference is often fluid, dynamic, and indeterminate, that referential indeterminacy is typically unproblematic for participants, that shifts in referentiality tend to be tied to specific social goals, and that reference and referentiality emerge dialogically and interactionally. (shrink)

This paper argues that the central philosophical movement in the complex history of Buddhism that originated with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha and carried on by Nāgārjuna (among other later Buddhist philosophers) shares some common themes with the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. These themes are the rejection of traditional metaphysics as definitive of philosophy, a return to the correct understanding of the nature of experience, and a particular view about the conduct and nature of philosophy. Dewey is used to illuminate (...) such controversial problems in the Buddhist tradition as why the Buddha is silent about metaphysical questions, what it means to say that everything is anitya, and how we are to understand Nāgārjuna's key concepts of prattyasamutpāda and únyatá. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna contends that the doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination), properly understood, constitutes the philosophical basis for the rejection and avoidance of all metaphysical theories and concepts (including causation). The companion doctrine of "śūnyatā" constitutes the denial of metaphysical realism (or "essentialism") but does not imply an anti-realist, conventionalist view of reality (as Jay Garfield maintains). "Pratītyasamutpāda," the true doctrine or, literally, "the exact or real nature of the case," is really two-sided: it is (1) a "causal" principle explaining the origin (...) of all that exists, and (2) a semantic principle concerning the mutual dependency of concepts and beliefs in both the systematic and historically contingent sense. The latter implies a pragmatic approach to meaning. (shrink)

This paper brings together two positions that for the most part have been developed and defended independently of one another: contextualism about knowledge attributions and the knowledge account of assertion.

This paper describes the ways in which trolls and bots impede the acquisition of knowledge online. I distinguish between three ways in which trolls and bots can impede knowledge acquisition, namely, by deceiving, by encouraging misplaced skepticism, and by interfering with the acquisition of warrant concerning persons and content encountered online. I argue that these threats are difficult to resist simultaneously. I argue, further, that the threat that trolls and bots pose to knowledge acquisition goes beyond the mere threat of (...) online misinformation, or the more familiar threat posed by liars offline. Trolls and bots are, in effect, fake persons. Consequently, trolls and bots can systemically interfere with knowledge acquisition by manipulating the signals whereby individuals acquire knowledge from one another online. I conclude with a brief discussion of some possible remedies for the problem of fake persons. (shrink)

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

Recently, new life has been breathed into the ancient philosophical topic of skepticism. The subject of some of the best and most provocative work in contemporary philosophy, skepticism has been addressed not only by top epistemologists but also by several of the world's finest philosophers who are most known for their work in other areas of the discipline. Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader brings together the most important recent contributions to the discussion of skepticism. Covering major approaches to the skeptical problem, (...) it features essays by Anthony Brueckner, Keith DeRose, Fred Dretske, Graeme Forbes, Christopher Hill, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Ernest Sosa, Gail Stine, Barry Stroud, Peter Unger, and Ted Warfield. The book opens with a thorough introduction that outlines the skeptical problem, explains the dominant responses to skepticism, and discusses the strengths, weaknesses, and unresolved issues of each response, providing undergraduate students and nonphilosophers with the background and context necessary to understand the essays. Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader serves as an ideal text for courses in epistemology and skepticism and will also appeal to professional philosophers and interested general readers. (shrink)

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of inter-disciplinary research in the history of science. This volume of original essays surveys foundational, theoretical, and (...) philosophical issues across the discipline, and introduces the foundations of cognitive science, the principal areas of research, and the major research programs. With a focus on broad philosophical themes rather than detailed technical issues, the volume will be valuable not only to cognitive scientists and philosophers of cognitive science, but also to those in other disciplines looking for an authoritative and up-to-date introduction to the field. (shrink)

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...) two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience. (shrink)

problems in psychology The three themes of this book are the relation of the brain's structure to psychological function, the problem of how people perceive ...

Chapter Beginning an account of linguistic meaning: speaker, hearer, context, and utterance Pity the poor analyst, who has to do the best he can with ...

If sociology is about society must it not also be about morality? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the identification between sociology and morality was clear cut; Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Spencer, and Veblen all dealt with moral issues and one might argue that they saw themselves as engaged in a moral vocation. Now, one might argue that the connections between sociology and moral currents have become more tenuous. Moral Culture examines what it means to be moral in contemporary social (...) and cultural life. Author Keith Tester takes the highly original and revealing step of exploring how violence today, and throughout history, affects the relatively safe and secure people who live in the west and who tend to know horror only through television and cinema screens. The book raises questions about the meaning and significance of massacres in the Balkans, Rwanda and, rather more historically, the Holocaust, and the slaughter of Vietnamese peasants by American soldiers in My Lai. It also discusses how Adolf Eichmann and the men of Charlie Company might be different from or similar to us. It answers questions about whether this is a time of moral decay or more seriously, the collapse of moral Civilization. Sociologists often claim that they make a virtue of being relevant and objective, but few have attacked these issues with the urgency and originality that Keith Tester displays in this work. Each chapter provides a historically aware account of a moral problem making it especially relevant reading for students of cultural studies, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of software maintenance in light of software’s ontological status. A realist view of software need not commit us to the otiose position that software maintenance is impossible. Many philosophers and computer scientists have been concerned with drawing attention to software’s dual nature, its being both symbolic and physical, abstract and concrete. There are strong connections to be found between this topic and recent investigations in the philosophy of linguistics, particularly the metaphysics of words. It is (...) shown, contra Irmak, that software can be best understood through a realist type-token distinction employing an ontology of composite objects that was put forward by Katz. This approach employs both non-spatiotemporal abstract types and tokens of those types. Further developing Katz’s realist approach can help to make better sense of the dual nature of computational artefacts and their maintenance than the alternatives outlined. Young claims that a prevalent imbalanced view of maintenance as solely conservative is due to a misunderstanding of the nature of artefacts as being realisations of their producers’ intentions. This is a problem for theories of artefacts that employ intentions, such as the one involved with the realist view of software and software maintenance. Software maintenance on this view is not solely conservative but also adaptive and enhancive, constituting a source of counterexamples to Young’s claim. An alternative explanation of the imbalanced view is provided, based on observations by software engineers, especially Sommerville. (shrink)

This introductory text is written for students faced with the question "what is history?

There are hints that the connectivity of space-time in quantum gravity could emerge from entanglement, and it has further been proposed that any two entangled particles may be connected by a quantum wormhole. One way to test this proposal is by probing the electric field of an entangled charged particle to determine whether its electric field leaks through the putative wormhole. In addition, if such a wormhole is traversable, then it could be possible for the collapse of the wave function (...) to occur in a causal manner, with information about the collapse travelling through the wormhole at the speed of light, rather than the wave function collapse being a global and instantaneous event. (shrink)

Chad Hansen is one of the strongest proponents of the view that the important second chapter of Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters (The Qi Wu Lun) reveals Zhuangzi to be a relativistic sceptidst. Hansen argues that Zhuangzi is a sceptic because he is first and foremost a relativist. Hansen's argument is essentially that Zhuangzi's perspectivism, his belief that one's linguistic and conceptual perspective determines what one claims to know, makes him a thorough going relativist and sceptic. I agree that Zhuangzi is a (...) perspectivist, but disagree with Hansen's portrayal of him as a relativistic sceptic. I first show that there is an important ambiguity in Hansen's argument. I then proceed to argue that important passages in the Qi Wu Lun (in particular the butterfly dream passage,) reveal serious problems with Hansen's interpretation of Zhuangzi's philosophical stance, I maintain that Zhuangzi is neither a sceptic nor a perspectival relativist. He is rather a perspectival realist. (shrink)

A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment, that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences. This view stands in contrast to the long-standing and wide-spread view amongst philosophers and scientists that colours don't really exist - or at any rate, that if they do exist, then they are radically different from the way that they appear. It is argued that a naive realist theory of colour best (...) explains how colours appear to perceiving subjects, and that this view is not undermined either by reflecting on variations in colour perception between perceivers and across perceptual conditions, or by our modern scientific understanding of the world. A Naive Realist Theory of Colour also illustrates how our understanding of what colours are has far-reaching implications for wider questions about the nature of perceptual experience, the relationship between mind and world, the problem of consciousness, the apparent tension between common sense and scientific representations of the world, and even the very nature and possibility of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

It is a testament to the progress of empirical inquiry into mass incarceration that it has already yielded and transcended a “standard story.” By contrast, mass incarceration is only just beginning to emerge as a particular problem for the philosophy of punishment. In this chapter, Ewing offers a critical review of recent work by criminal law theorists, arguing that traditional justifications of punishment are ill-equipped to explain the distinctive injustice of mass incarceration. He then argues that the problem of (...) mass incarceration should force us to reconsider neglected distributive dimensions of criminal justice. And he begins to reflect on what appears unjust about mass incarceration when criminal justice is reconceived as the problem of how to produce and fairly allocate security against crime and punishment. (shrink)

This volume offers a general introduction to the field of semantics and provides coverage of the main perspectives.

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling (...) assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case. (shrink)

P EM Manifestos for History /EM is a thought-provoking and controversial text that, through a star studded collection of essays, presents a wide ranging ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Doctrine of PratītyasamutpādaEwing ChinnIt seems fitting that the very last verse of Nāgārjuna's challenging work, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way), would present the reader with what seems to be a riddle: "I prostrate to Gautama, who through compassion, taught the true doctrine, which leads to the relinquishing of all views" (27 :30). This should be read with an earlier verse (13 : 8): "The victorious (...) ones have said that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views. For whomever emptiness is a view, that one will accomplish nothing."1 Since the last chapter deals with questions about the self and the world, it is understandable that so many commentators would assume that the "true doctrine" of which Nāgārjuna speaks is the doctrine of śūnyatā, but that gives a paradoxical character to these verses. Gautama recommends to us a doctrine that all this (we and all that we experience of the world) is śūnya, that is, empty of essence and thus of inherent, independent existence. And does this anti-realist, anti-essentialist view of things (as some would interpret śūnyatā) make possible and even constitute the relinquishing of all views, including his own? It cannot simply be the trivial and disingenuous claim that to accept the truth of śūnyatā is to relinquish all other wrong views. So is Nāgārjuna mysteriously refuting himself? Or is he uttering a paradox?I will argue that there is no paradox or problem of self-refutation, because the true doctrine that Nāgārjuna refers to is not śūnyatā but the doctrine of pratītyasa-mutpāda (dependent arising or origination). And what the verses assert is that if we understand and accept this doctrine, we will no longer have the need or inclination to hold any view about the nature of things, including the inclination to construct a view out of the declaration that "all this is śūnya." How this is possible, how accepting the doctrine makes possible the "relinquishing of all views," certainly depends on what kind of doctrine this is and how it is to be distinguished from a "view." Part of my argument, of course, is that neither pratītyasamutpāda nor the assertion that "all this is śūnya" should be taken as even implying any metaphysical views—either nihilism, absolutism, or anti-realism (the most common metaphysical interpretations). There is no doubt that a major target of Nāgārjuna's philosophical criticism is metaphysical realism. But this does not mean that the critic must hold some alternative metaphysical view.The logical place to begin is chapter 1, "Examination of Conditions," where the subject of discussion is the concept of pratītyasamutpāda, but it is not clear at all what Nāgārjuna is trying to establish about this concept. Jay Garfield, in his recent translation of and commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā titled The Fundamental Wisdom of the MiddleWay, offers a unique interpretation of the point of this chapter, [End Page 54] and I will follow him to some extent in his analysis of the text.2 However, we will part ways at a crucial point in the chapter with regard to what Nāgārjuna is about.On the Nature and Significance of PratītyasamutpādaIn this first chapter, Garfield notes that "Nāgārjuna distinguishes two possible views of dependent origination or the causal process—one according to which causes bring about their effects in virtue of causal powers and one according to which causal relations simply amount to explanatorily useful regularities—and defends the latter."3 That is to say, according to Garfield, Nāgārjuna defends pratītyasamutpāda as a regularity or Humean theory of causation against an essentialist or realist interpretation. The latter contends that while we may cite one or more factors or events as the causal condition of some effect, it is the force or power in these conditions that is actually the cause of the effect. Nāgārjuna's basic criticism of this realist view is summarized in the fourth verse:Power to act does not have conditions. There... (shrink)