In this chapter I shall reply to a pair of articles in which the main contention of my “Why truthmakers” – namely, that an important class of synthetic true propositions have entities as truth-makers – is rejected. In §§1–5 I reply to Jennifer Hornsby’s “Truth without Truthmaking Entities” (2005) and in §§6–7 I reply to Julian Dodd’s “Negative Truths and Truthmaker Principles” (2007).

This is a short postscript to the Public Health Ethics special issue on the legal determinants of health. We reflect briefly on emerging responses to COVID-19, and raise important questions of ethics and law that must be addressed; including through the lens of legal determinants, and with critical attention to what it means to protect health with justice.

John Kleinig; Postscript 1, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 177–178, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1973.tb00479.

John Kleinig; Postscript 1, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 177–178, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1973.tb00479.

The reasoning in this anthology shows how hard it is to form acceptable theories in cases that involve different numbers of people. That's highly important. And it gives us ground for worry about our appeal to particular theories in the other two kinds of case: those which involve the same numbers, in the different outcomes, though these are not all the same people, and those which do involve all and only the same people. But there is still a clear distinction (...) between these three kinds of case. And there may be some hope of 'quarantining' the impossibility, and the resulting scepticism, to Different Number Choices. Her's a partial analogy, which may be worth mentioning. It's very difficult to formulate acceptable welfarist theories that could apply to cases that involve infinite quantities of such things as suffering and happiness. That's a worry, but it doesn't undermine our confidence in the theories that can handle cases with only finite quantities. (shrink)

R S Peters; Postscript 2, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 179–180, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1973.tb00480.x.

One puzzling feature of the response to "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality" has contributed to the direction of my current research on evolution. I was initially dumfounded by the willingness of philosophers simply to dismiss or ignore--as too radical to be taken seriously, apparently--my suggestion that we are survival machines for our genes, as Dawkins has put it. This surprised me, for in point of fact the biology on which I based my philosophical extrapolations is not even controversial. It is uncontested (...) that human bodies, like the bodies of all other creatures, are products of a design process that tracks, in the first instance, the "interests" of the genes whose phenotypic expressions those bodies are. There are substantive controversies about the importance of this fact, but not the fact itself. (shrink)

The first part of this essay was read at a Symposium on “Hegel and Schelling” at the Conference of the Canadian Philosophical Association at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba in June 1985. The text was then discussed as a whole by George di Giovanni and Michael Vater. Since their commentaries are here published with it, I have allowed the mistakes which they identified to remain clearly visible. The few revisions of substance that I have made are clearly indicated in (...) the footnotes; and the justification of my final position is given in this Postscript. (shrink)

The Postscript to The Concept of Law contains Herbert Hart's only sustained and considered response to the objections pressed against his views by his distinguished critic, Ronald Dworkin. In this extraordinary collection, many of the leading legal philosophers in the world evaluate the success of Hart's responses to Dworkin on several of these counts. Notable contributors include Joseph Raz of Oxford University and Jules L. Coleman of the Yale Law School.

Besides serving us at the growing edge of science and beyond, metaphor figures even in our first learning of language; or, if not quite metaphor, something akin to it. We hear a word or phrase on some occasion, or by chance we babble a fair approximate ourselves on what happens to be a pat occasion and are applauded for it. On a later occasion, then, one that resembles the first occasion by our lights, we repeat the expression. Resemblance of occasions (...) is what matters, here as in metaphor. We generalize our application of the expression by degrees of subjective resemblance of occasions, until we discover from other people's behavior that we have pushed analogy too far and exceeded the established usage. If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application of that early word of phrase. These primitive metaphors differ from the deliberate and sophisticated ones, however, in that they accrete directly to our growing store of standard usage. They are metaphors stillborn. It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor, or something like it, governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it. What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse itself, at its most dryly literal. The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing tropes away. W. V. Quine is the Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. His many influential works include Methods of Logic, Word and Object, and The Roots of Reference. "On the Nature of Moral Values," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1979 issue. (shrink)