Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

The youth of Bentham (1776-1789).--The evolution of the utilitarian doctrine from 1789 to 1815.--Philosophic radicalism.

Scientists and engineers seek to understand how real-world systems work and could work better. Any modeling method devised for such purposes must simplify reality. Ideally, however, the modeling method should be flexible as well as logically rigorous; it should permit model simplifications to be appropriately tailored for the specific purpose at hand. Flexibility and logical rigor have been the two key goals motivating the development of Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), a completely agent-based modeling method characterized by seven specific modeling principles. (...) This perspective provides an overview of ACE, a brief history of its development, and its role within a broader spectrum of experiment-based modeling methods. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of John Stuart Mill's theory of higher and lower pleasures in his Utilitarianism. I argue that the quality of pleasure is best understood as the density of pleasure per unit of delivery. Mill is illustrated with numerous beer examples.

" L'allure du temps a tout à fait changé, disait déjà Michelet en 1872. Il a doublé le pas d'une manière étrange. Dans une simple vie d'homme, j'ai vu deux grandes révolutions, qui autrefois auraient peut-être mis entre elles deux mille ans d'intervalle. " Daniel Halévy, historien, philosophe, biographe, avait vu beaucoup plus de choses encore, et plus extraordinaires, et en beaucoup moins de temps, quand il écrivit ce livre au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L'Histoire va-t-elle plus vite? (...) Etudiant le rythme des grands courants qui ont animé les empires et les peuples, l'auteur croit discerner dans son déroulement une allure constamment plus rapide. Cette thèse, qui soulève bien des interrogations et des objections, eut à l'époque un grand retentissement. Elle n'a rien perdu de son actualité. Le progrès technique en est-il la cause? Fait-il courir à l'humanité autant de dangers qu'il lui apporte de satisfactions? Ce court essai, un des plus denses et des plus riches qui aient été écrits sur la question, contient aussi un panorama fulgurant et passionné de l'Histoire universelle. On pourra lire à la suite quelques-uns des commentaires et des débats auxquels il a donné lieu, notamment une discussion avec Albert Bayet, le père Daniélou, et Raymond Aron, ainsi qu'une réflexion de Daniel Halévy sur Leibniz, le philosophe auquel il a consacré le plus d'attention. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics_ is comprised of sixty original essays, which focus on how ethical questions intersect with real and pressing policy issues. Rather than overviewing abstract conceptual categories, the authors focus on specific controversies involving the environment. Clearly written contributions on Fossil Fuels, Urban Sustainability, Novel Ecosystems, and many other subjects make accessible these issues‘ empirical and political dimensions as well as their theoretical underpinnings. Written to be accessible for undergraduates and general readers, but comprehensive enough to (...) be a useful reference work for researchers in a variety of related fields, it promises to be an invaluable resource for better understanding the ethical landscape of our environmental world. (shrink)

The Buddhist jhanas--successive states of deep focus or meditative absorbtion--demystified. A very practical guidebook for meditators for navigating their way through these states of bliss and concentration. One of the elements of the Eightfold Path the Buddha taught is Right Concentration: the one-pointedness of mind that, together with ethics, livelihood, meditation, and so forth, leads to the ultimate freedom from suffering. The Jhanas are the method the Buddha himself taught for achieving Right Concentration. They are a series of eight successive (...) states, beginning with bliss and moving on toward radically nonconceptual states. The fact that they can usually be achieved only during prolonged meditation retreat tends to keep them shrouded in mystery. Leigh Brasington is here to unshroud them. He takes away the mystique and gives instructions for them in plain, accessible language, noting the various pitfalls to avoid along the way, and then providing a wealth of material on the theory of jhana practice--all geared toward the practitioner rather than the scholar. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

The papers in this collection on Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics by Charles, Rowe, McCabe, Whiting, and Buddensiek, offer new readings of Aristotle on the voluntary, friendship, and good fortune in the EE, by treating the EE on its own terms.

Central to the teachings of Christianity is a puzzle: on the one hand, sin seems something that humans do not do freely and so cannot be not responsible for, since it is unavoidable; on the other hand, sin seems something that we must be responsible for and so do freely, since we are enjoined to repent of it, and since it makes us liable to divine condemnation and forgiveness. After laying out the puzzle in more depth, this Element considers three (...) possible responses—libertarian, soft determinist, and free-will skeptic—and weighs the costs and benefits of each. (shrink)

On the neo-Fregean approach to the foundations of mathematics, elementary arithmetic is analytic in the sense that the addition of a principle wliich may be held to IMJ explanatory of the concept of cardinal number to a suitable second-order logical basis suffices for the derivation of its basic laws. This principle, now commonly called Hume's principle, is an example of a Fregean abstraction principle. In this paper, I assume the correctness of the neo-Fregean position on elementary aritlunetic and seek to (...) explain one way in which it may be extended to encompass the theory of real numbers, introducing the reals, by means of suitable further abstraction principles, as ratios of quantities. (shrink)

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as (...) the most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an (...) outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer's desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer's ideal of freshness. (shrink)

This book provides the first intellectual history of cosmopolitan ideas in the early modern age. The roots of modern cosmopolitanism can be traced back to as early as the 1500s when a meta-narrative and awareness of the cosmopolitan idea came into existence. Unearthing occurrences of cosmopolitan language in popular media and analysing the writings of leading thinkers, Leigh T.I. Penman illustrates how cosmopolitanism was not, as previously thought, purely secular and inclusive but could be sacred and exclusive too. And, (...) significantly, this book reveals the extent to which these contesting ideas of cosmopolitanism influenced the modern concept of the cosmopolitan. (shrink)

Theological Determinism Theological determinism is the view that God determines every event that occurs in the history of the world. While there is much debate about which prominent historical figures were theological determinists, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Gottfried Leibniz all seemed to espouse the view at least at certain points in their … Continue reading Theological Determinism →.

Kit Fine’s book is a study of abstraction in a quite precise sense which derives from Frege. In his Grundlagen, Frege contemplates defining the concept of number by means of what has come to be called Hume’s principle—the principle that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs. Frege’s discussion is largely conducted in terms of another, similar but in some respects simpler, (...) proposal—to define the concept of direction by laying down the principle that the direction of a line a is the same as that of line b if and only if lines a and b are parallel. Such principles have come to be known as abstraction principles. More generally, abstraction principles are ones of the shape: ∀α∀β ↔ α ≈ β), where ≈ is an equivalence relation on entities of the type over which α and β vary and, if the principle is acceptable, § is a function from entities of that type to objects. Since ‘the direction of’ is intended to stand for a function from objects of a certain sort to other objects, the Direction Equivalence is a first-order, or in Fine’s terminology objectual, abstraction; since ‘the number of’ is intended to stand for a function from concepts to objects, Hume’s principle is a higher-order, or as Fine says conceptual, abstraction. As is well-known, Frege himself abandoned the idea of defining number implicitly or contextually by means of Hume’s principle—adopting instead an explicit definition of the number of Fs as the extension of the concept concept equinumerous to the concept F— because he thought that an adequate definition should settle the question whether Julius Caesar, for example, is or is not the number of some concept, but that the proposed implicit definition cannot do so. But interest in abstraction principles has revived in the last couple of decades, largely as a result of Crispin Wright’s attempt to show that in spite of the many difficulties confronting it—including the notorious Julius Caesar problem— Hume’s principle can after all serve as a foundation for arithmetic. (shrink)

I argue that Monique Wittig's view that lesbians are not women neglects the complexities involved in the composition of the category "woman." I develop an articulation of the concept "woman" in the contemporary United States, with thirteen distinct defining characteristics, none of which are necessary nor sufficient. I argue that Wittig's emphasis on the material production of "woman" through the political regime of heterosexuality, however, is enormously fruitful for feminist and queer strategizing.

In this paper I argue for the superiority of a critical realist understanding of interdisciplinarity over a mainstream understanding of it. I begin by exploring the reasons for the failure of mainstream researchers to achieve interdisciplinarity. My main argument is that mainstream interdisciplinary researchers tend to hypostatize facts, fetishize constant conjunctions of events and apply to open systems an epistemology designed for closed systems. I also explain how mainstream interdisciplinarity supports oppression and gross inequality. I argue that mainstream interdisciplinarity is (...) not true interdisciplinarity and refer to it accordingly as ‘condisciplinarity’. By way of example, I examine the condisciplinarity of the World Health Organization’s ecological model applied to the issue of men’s violence against women. Specifically, I argue that critical realist interdisciplinarity is preferable because it acknowledges inter alia the empirical, actual and real layers of reality, which allows it to develop depth-explanations of phenomena. In practice, this means that critical realist interdisciplinarity can potentially provide explanations that, compared to condisciplinarity, are broader (include more of the human and non-human context) and deeper (include for example individuals’ conscious and unconscious psychological motivations). In the World Health Organization’s example of the causes of men’s violence against women, condisciplinarity resulted in the absence of historical, global and unconscious aspects of the problem. It is also restricted the analysis to reductive, constant-conjunction based theories of the causes of the problem, specifically ‘risk factors’, thereby providing a relatively shallow explanation for the problem. (shrink)

This article argues that teachers of environmental ethics must more aggressively entertain questions of private property in their work and in their teaching. To make this case, it first introduces the three primary positions on property: occupation arguments, labor theory of value arguments, and efficiency arguments. It then contextualizes these arguments in light of the contemporary U.S. wise-use movement, in an attempt to make sense of the concerns that motivate wise-use activists, and also to demonstrate how intrinsic value arguments miss (...) the mark. Finally, it offers some suggestions about further directions for environmental ethics, reasoning that there is a good deal of headway to be gained for environmental ethics by accepting that nature can be owned as property, but nevertheless engaging the idea of private property critically. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 3, June 2019, Page 221-238.

A beer-lovers' book which playfully examines a myriad of philosophical concerns related to beer consumption. Effectively demonstrates how real philosophical issues exist just below the surface of our everyday activities Divided into four sections: The Art of the Beer; The Ethics of Beer: Pleasures, Freedom, and Character; The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Beer; and Beer in the History of Philosophy Uses the context of beer to expose George Berkeley’s views on fermented beverages as a medical cure; to inspect Immanuel Kant’s (...) transcendental idealism through beer goggles, and to sort out Friedrich Nietzsche’s simultaneous praise and condemnation of intoxication Written for beer-lovers who want to think while they drink. (shrink)

Economies are complicated systems encompassing micro behaviors, interaction patterns, and global regularities. Whether partial or general in scope, studies of economic systems must consider how to handle difficult real-world aspects such as asymmetric information, imperfect competition, strategic interaction, collective learning, and the possibility of multiple equilibria. Recent advances in analytical and computational tools are permitting new approaches to the quantitative study of these aspects. One such approach is Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE), the computational study of economic processes modeled as dynamic (...) systems of interacting agents. This chapter explores the potential advantages and disadvantages of ACE for the study of economic systems. General points are concretely illustrated using an ACE model of a two-sector decentralized market economy. Six issues are highlighted: Constructive understanding of production, pricing, and trade processes; the essential primacy of survival; strategic rivalry and market power; behavioral uncertainty and learning; the role of conventions and organizations; and the complex interactions among structural attributes, institutional arrangements, and behavioral dispositions. (shrink)

Am I pretty? A simple question that epitomises both beauty and vulgarity in its monstrous representation of feminine embodiment. In this work, I look at the 2007 Japanese Horror film Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman directed by Koji Shiraishi and its relation to the way in which it the monster Kuchisake-Onna presents the idealised role of motherhood in Japan today. Through this critical examination of the film, we see how communities establish social order and gender scripts of the feminine within (...) the media, perpetuating hegemonic normalised roles through the monstrous feminine. This work looks at the Japanese urban legend of Kuchisake-Onna and compares it with the movie monster Carved as it projects forms of femininity and motherhood. By cross-referencing the telling of the legend with popular cinema we can see how media influence takes on a broader context towards the gendering of woman. In both the legend and the film, we see how women seek the approval of self and sovereignty, which is demonised, by revealing herself through sexual autonomy. (shrink)

_Decolonizing Educational Research_ examines the ways through which coloniality manifests in contexts of knowledge and meaning making, specifically within educational research and formal schooling. Purposefully situated beyond popular deconstructionist theory and anthropocentric perspectives, the book investigates the longstanding traditions of oppression, racism, and white supremacy that are systemically reseated and reinforced by learning and social interaction. Through these meaningful explorations into the unfixed and often interrupted narratives of culture, history, place, and identity, a bold, timely, and hopeful vision emerges to (...) conceive of how research in secondary and higher education institutions might break free of colonial genealogies and their widespread complicities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to...

The Internet has drastically changed how people interact, communicate, conduct business, seek jobs, find partners, and shop. Millions of people are using social networking sites to connect with others, and employers are using these sites as a source of background information on job applicants. Employers report making decisions not to hire people based on the information posted on social networking sites. Few employers have policies in place to govern when and how these online character checks should be used and how (...) to ensure that the information viewed is accurate. In this article, we explore how these inexpensive, informal online character checks are harmful to society. Guidance is provided to employers on when and how to use these sites in a socially responsible manner. (shrink)

Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of viciousness cast in terms of contradictions, (...) dependence, failed reductive theories and parsimony. I argue that no one of these accounts adequately captures the conditions under which an infinite regress—any infinite regress—is vicious as opposed to benign. In their place, I suggest an account of viciousness in terms of explanatory failure. If this account is correct, infinite grounding regresses are not necessarily vicious; and we must be much more careful employing such arguments to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental. (shrink)

This volume unites established authors and rising young voices in philosophical theology and philosophy of religion to offer the single most wide-ranging examination of theological determinism-in terms of both authors represented and issues investigated-published to date. Fifteen contributors present discussions about theological determinism, the view that God determines everything that occurs in the world. Some authors provide arguments in favor of this position, while others provide considerations against it. Many contributors investigate the relationship between theological determinism and other philosophical issues, (...) theological doctrines, or moral attitudes and practices. This book is essential reading for all those interested in the relationship between theological determinism and philosophical thought. (shrink)

This Element considers the relationship between the traditional view of God as all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good on the one hand, and the idea of human free will on the other. It focuses on the potential threats to human free will arising from two divine attributes: God's exhaustive foreknowledge and God's providential control of creation.