The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, published in two volumes in 1963, were well received by critics and scholars alike. The publication of these four volumes of later letters completes this edition of Mill's personal correspondence. These volumes contain over 1,800 letters, most never before published, and some sixty earlier letters that have come to light since the publication of the first two volumes of correspondence. The letters have been assembled from widely dispersed collections in the libraries of fifty-eight (...) institutions and of some thirty private collections in Britain and in other countries of the Commonwealth, Europe, and North America. In addition, many personal letters of which no originals sirvived have been located in contemporary periodicals or biographies of Mill's correspondence. (shrink)

This essay considers Newman’s basic epistemology in terms of two of his most important, and often overlooked, sources: Aristotle and the Church Fathers. Inparticular, Newman’s reliance upon Aristotle’s ethical and rhetorical thought on the one hand, and upon the patristic concept of oikonomia on the other, guided him in crafting the well-known account of faith and reason in his thirteenth University Sermon.

Truth and correspondence, by G.J. Warnock.--Some exercises in epistemic logic, by A.N. Prior.--Symposium: Meaning and speech acts, by J.R. Searle.--Comments, by Zeno Vendler.--Comments, by Paul Benacerraf.--Rejoinders, by J.R. Searle.--Symposium: Wittgenstein on criteria, by Newton Garver.--Commments, by Carl Ginet.--Comments by F.A. Siegler.--Comments, by Paul Ziff.--Rejoinders, by Newton Garver.--Symposium: The private-language argument, by H-N. Castañeda.--Comments, by V.C. Chappell.--Comments, by J.F. Thomson.--Rejoinders, by H-N. Castañeda.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1962, given by Arthur N. Prior (1914-1969).

The Lindley Lecture, in which Brandt argues against the view that the proper business of moral philosophy is chiefly the descriptive analysis of everyday uses of ethical terms.—N. S. C.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1968, given by Jose Ferrater Mora, a South African philosopher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

The article revisits the large n problem as it relates to the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox to compare the frequentist, Bayesian, and likelihoodist approaches to inference and evidence. It is argued that what is fallacious is to interpret a rejection of as providing the same evidence for a particular alternative, irrespective of n; this is an example of the fallacy of rejection. Moreover, the Bayesian and likelihoodist approaches are shown to be susceptible to the fallacy of acceptance. The key difference is (...) that in frequentist testing the severity evaluation circumvents both fallacies but no such principled remedy exists for the other approaches. (shrink)

The Jeffreys–Lindley paradox exposes a rift between Bayesian and frequentist hypothesis testing that strikes at the heart of statistical inference. Contrary to what most current literature suggests, the paradox was central to the Bayesian testing methodology developed by Sir Harold Jeffreys in the late 1930s. Jeffreys showed that the evidence for a point-null hypothesis $${\mathcal {H}}_0$$ H 0 scales with $$\sqrt{n}$$ n and repeatedly argued that it would, therefore, be mistaken to set a threshold for rejecting $${\mathcal {H}}_0$$ H (...) 0 at a constant multiple of the standard error. Here, we summarize Jeffreys’s early work on the paradox and clarify his reasons for including the $$\sqrt{n}$$ n term. The prior distribution is seen to play a crucial role; by implicitly correcting for selection, small parameter values are identified as relatively surprising under $${\mathcal {H}}_1$$ H 1. We highlight the general nature of the paradox by presenting both a fully frequentist and a fully Bayesian version. We also demonstrate that the paradox does not depend on assigning prior mass to a point hypothesis, as is commonly believed. (shrink)

Philosophers of science typically associate the causal‐mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon’s account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex‐systems approach avoids certain (...) objections to Salmon’s account of causal‐mechanical explanation. I conclude by discussing how mechanistic explanations can provide understanding by unification. (shrink)

Discovery proceeds in stages of construction, evaluation, and revision. Each of these stages is constrained by what is known or conjectured about what is being discovered. A new characterization of mechanism aids in specifying what is to be discovered when a mechanism is sought. Guidance in discovering mechanisms may be provided by the reasoning strategies of schema instantiation, modular subassembly, and forward/backward chaining. Examples are found in mechanisms in molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology, and evolutionary biology.

This innovative book focuses on the development of the gene theory as a case study in scientific creativity.

This set contains Murray's renowned _English Grammar_, and his textbooks. The unique study of Murray's life and work, by Colin Eaton West is here updated with new notes by David A. Reibel.

Reasoning in Biological Discoveries brings together a series of essays, which focus on one of the most heavily debated topics of scientific discovery. Collected together and richly illustrated, Darden's essays represent a groundbreaking foray into one of the major problems facing scientists and philosophers of science. Divided into three sections, the essays focus on broad themes, notably historical and philosophical issues at play in discussions of biological mechanism; and the problem of developing and refining reasoning strategies, including interfield relations and (...) anomaly resolution. Darden summarizes the philosophy of discovery and elaborates on the role that mechanisms play in biological discovery. Throughout the book, she uses historical case studies to extract advisory reasoning strategies for discovery. Examples in genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology reveal the process of discovery in action. (shrink)

Models of cultural evolution need to address not only the organizational aspects of human societies, but also the complexity and structure of cultural idea systems that frame their systems of organization. These cultural idea systems determine a framework within which behaviors take place and provide mutually understood meanings for behavior from the perspective of both agent and recipient that are critical for the coherence of human systems of social organization.

Listening to the neglected voices of Christians marginalized by race and gender produces an enlarged understanding of the degree to which the prophetic commitments characteristic of social Christianity penetrated the Christian community. The writings and the social activism of Vida Scudder, Reverdy Ransom, and Nannie Helen Burroughs display the consistency with which Christians in dramatically contrasting social contexts invoked the imperatives and vision of the Christian gospel in their struggle against social and structural sin. Examination of the dialectic of the (...) spiritual and the ethical in these three lives also sharpens our understanding of Christian praxis as living faith. (shrink)

The term “deep history” refers to historical accounts framed temporally not by the advent of a written record but by evolutionary events (Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011). The presumption of deep history is that the events of today have a history that traces back beyond written history to events in the evolutionary past. For human kinship, though, even forming a history of kinship, let alone a deep history, remains problematic, given limited, relevant data (Trautman et al. 2011). With regard (...) to a deep history, one conjecture is that human kinship evolved from primate social systems in a gradual, more-or-less continuous manner (see Chapais 2008); another conjecture is that kinship, in accordance with the incest account of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) or the fanciful, tetradic account of Nicholas J. Allen (1986), “comes into existence with a leap” (Trautman et al. 2011: 176); and yet another, the account to be developed in this paper, is that kinship, as it is understood and lived by culture bearers today, is the consequence of a profound and qualitative evolutionary transformation going from an ancestral primate-like social system predicated on extensive face-to-face interaction to the relation-based social systems that characterize human societies (Read 2012). (shrink)

This paper analyzes the generation and function of hitherto ignored or misrepresented interfield theories , theories which bridge two fields of science. Interfield theories are likely to be generated when two fields share an interest in explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon and when background knowledge already exists relating the two fields. The interfield theory functions to provide a solution to a characteristic type of theoretical problem: how are the relations between fields to be explained? In solving this problem (...) the interfield theory may provide answers to questions which arise in one field but cannot be answered within it alone, may focus attention on domain items not previously considered important, and may predict new domain items for one or both fields. Implications of this analysis for the problems of reduction and the unity and progress of science are mentioned. (shrink)