Originally published in 1940, this book contains an expanded English translation of Books 8 and 9 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. These two books are devoted to a discussion on the nature of friendship and the role it played in Greek life, and Percival supplies an introduction with a background to the subject of ancient friendship prior to Aristotle's formulation. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient friendship or the philosophy of Aristotle.

Are historians storytellers? Is it possible to tell true stories about the past? These are just a couple of the questions raised in this comprehensive collection of texts about philosophy, theory, and methodology of writing history. Drawing together seminal texts from philosophers and historians, this volume presents the great debate over the narrative character of history from the 1960s onwards. The History and Narrative Reader combines theory with practice to offer a unique overview of this debate and illuminates the practical (...) implications of these philosophical debates for the writing of history. The editor's introduction offers a succinct survey of the subject to support the readings, which explore the role of narrative in everything from historical understanding and human action to linguistics and the practice of history. Including the work of F. R. Ankersmit, David Carr, Hayden White, W. H. Dray, and Frederick Olafson; a detailed bibliography; and a glossary of key concepts, this collection will prove an invaluable resource for students of historical theory and methodology. (shrink)

The present work is a systematic study of five frameworks or perspectives articulating mathematical structuralism, whose core idea is that mathematics is concerned primarily with interrelations in abstraction from the nature of objects. The first two, set-theoretic and category-theoretic, arose within mathematics itself. After exposing a number of problems, the book considers three further perspectives formulated by logicians and philosophers of mathematics: sui generis, treating structures as abstract universals, modal, eliminating structures as objects in favor of freely entertained logical possibilities, (...) and finally, modal-set-theoretic, a sort of synthesis of the set-theoretic and modal perspectives. (shrink)

Locke is famed for his caution in speculative matters: “Men, extending their enquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing; ‘tis no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes”. And he is skeptical about the pretensions of natural philosophy, which he says is “not capable of being made a science”. And yet Locke is confident that “Our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, (...) that there is an eternal, most powerful and most knowing being; which whether anyone will please to call God it matters not”. His certainty about the existence and attributes of God, I will argue, led him to surprisingly strong convictions about a deep and disputed problem at the intersection of seventeenth century metaphysics and natural philosophy: the absolute reality of space and time. Specifically, he based his absolutist conceptions of space and time on God’s literal omnipresence and eternity. Leibniz probably had Locke in mind when he inveighed in 1716 against “real absolute space, the idol of some modern Englishmen”. And Leibniz was right a decade earlier to voice through his mouthpiece Theophilus the suspicion that, despite Locke’s claim to know nothing about the substance of void space, “there are grounds for thinking you know more about it than you say or believe that you do. Some people have thought that God is the place of objects”. (shrink)

In this carefully researched, thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Hughes examines the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life.

Although many researchers theorize that primitive numerosity processing abilities may lay the foundation for whole number concepts, other classes of numbers, like fractions, are sometimes assumed to be inaccessible to primitive architectures. This research presents evidence that the automatic processing of nonsymbolic magnitudes affects processing of symbolic fractions. Participants completed modified Stroop tasks in which they selected the larger of two symbolic fractions while the ratios of the fonts in which the fractions were printed and the overall sizes of the (...) compared fractions were manipulated as irrelevant dimensions. Participants were slower and less accurate when nonsymbolic dimensions of printed fractions were incongruent with the symbolic comparison decision. Results indicated a robust basic sensitivity to nonsymbolic ratios that exceeds prior conceptions about the accessibility of fraction values. Results also indicated a congruity effect for overall fraction size, contrary to findings of prior research. These findings have implications for extending theory about the nature of human number sense and mathematical cognition more generally. (shrink)

Richard Dawkins tries to establish an analogy between computer viruses and theistic belief systems, analyzing the latter in terms of his concept of the meme. The underlying thrust of Dawkins' argument is to downplay the role of truth and logic in the survival of theories and to emphasize humankind's helpless liability to incurable infection by doctrines that Dawkins regards as absurd. Dawkins supplies a list of "symptoms” of mind-infection. However, on closer investigation these characteristics are found to be either rather (...) weak protection against criticism or quite virtuous. Dawkins relies on a crude justificationism that could just as well be called a mind-virus. Applying Dawkins’ own selection of the general characteristics of a good meme protector and propagator leads to the conclusion that his particular theistic examples would actually impair copyability. -/- Scientific theories are better examples of memes with high longevity, fecundity, and fidelity. A Darwinian analysis of wishful and fearful thinking as useful to hypotheses-testing and goal-seeking organisms undermines Dawkins' attribution of absolute irrational stubbornness to theists. To counterbalance Dawkins' emphasis on the propagation of the absurd, I rehabilitate the Socratic emphasis on the importance of truth and logic in rhetoric, interpreted broadly as the theory of the successful propagation of a message. I use Popper's notion of situational analysis, and an evolutionary perspective to argue that rational standards of a message enhance its copyability. I further apply Popper’s notions of World 3, 2, and 1 to memes; this helps us see the perpetuation of a doctrine as a logical task. (shrink)

Subtle-body practices are found particularly in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but have become increasingly familiar in Western societies, especially through the various healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. This book explores subtle-body practices from a variety of perspectives, and includes both studies of these practices in Asian and Western contexts. The book discusses how subtle-body practices assume a quasi-material level of human existence that is intermediate between conventional concepts of body and mind. Often, this level (...) is conceived of in terms of an invisible structure of channels, associated with the human body, through which flows of quasi-material substance take place. Contributors look at how subtle-body concepts form the basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These include forms of healing, modes of exercise and martial arts as well as religious practices aimed at the refinement and transformation of the human mindbody complex. By highlighting how subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced into Western societies in recent years, the book explores the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Religion and Philosophy. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Descartes believed that causation is intelligible only if the cause and effect are similar, since it is impossible to understand how the reality of an effect can owe anything to the reality of its cause if the two have nothing in common. I argue first that Descartes has a coherent and reasonably strong metaphysical justification for his condition of causal similarity. Second, I defend Descartes from the charge that his conception of similarity renders the condition trivial by making practically everything (...) similar to everything else. Third, I discuss the familiar objection that if the similarity condition is not trivial, then it is incompatible with Cartesian mind–body interaction. I argue that the condition is consistent with, and indeed explains, Descartes's late view of interaction. (shrink)

After some metatheoretic preliminaries on questions of justification and rational reconstruction, we lay out some key desiderata for foundational frameworks for mathematics, some of which reflect recent discussions of pluralism and structuralism. Next we draw out some implications (pro and con) bearing on set theory and category and topos therory. Finally, we sketch a variant of a modal-structural core system, incorporating elements of predicativism and the systems of reverse mathematics, and consider how it fares with respect to the desiderata highlighted (...) earlier. Overall, we are making a case for "foundations with modest, welltempered foundationalism". (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Two kinds of theoretical framework for syntax are encountered in current linguistics. One emerged from the mathematization of proof theory, and is referred to here as generative-enumerative syntax (GES). A less explored alternative stems from the semantic side of logic, and is here called model-theoretic syntax (MTS). I sketch the outlines of each, and give a capsule summary of some mathematical results pertaining to the latter. I then briefly survey some diverse types of evidence suggesting that in some ways MTS (...) seems better suited to theorizing about the relevant linguistic phenomena. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further questions (...) to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

matter of knowing that -- that injustice is wrong, courage is valuable, and care is As a result, what I'll be doing is primarily defending in general -- and due. Such knowledge is embodied in a range of capacities, abilities, and skills..

Words like you, here, and tomorrow are different from other expressions in two ways. First, and by definition, they have different kinds of meanings, which are context-dependent in ways that the meanings of names and descriptions are not. Second, their meanings play a different kind of role in the interpretations of the utterances that contain them. For example, the meaning of you can be paraphrased by a description like "the addressee of the utterance." But an utterance of (1) doesn't say (...) the same thing as an utterance of (2). (shrink)

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined (...) views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms. (shrink)

Chomsky’s highly influential Syntactic Structures ( SS ) has been much praised its originality, explicitness, and relevance for subsequent cognitive science. Such claims are greatly overstated. SS contains no proof that English is beyond the power of finite state description (it is not clear that Chomsky ever gave a sound mathematical argument for that claim). The approach advocated by SS springs directly out of the work of the mathematical logician Emil Post on formalizing proof, but few linguists are aware of (...) this, because Post’s papers are not cited. Chomsky’s extensions to Post’s systems are not clearly defined, and the arguments for their necessity are weak. Linguists have also overlooked Post’s proofs of the first two theorems about effects of rule format restrictions on generative capacity, published more than ten years before SS was published. (shrink)

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of knowledge in conversation. These authors claim that the analytic framework Heritage developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and rejects standard methods of conversation analysis ; that and are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the (...) specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what's happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging (...) struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful.In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies. (shrink)

Geoffrey Leech stresses the contribution of semantics to the understanding of practical problems of communication and concept-manipulation in modern society.

We examine an argument for the non-context-freeness of English that has received virtually no discussion in the literature. It is based on adjuncts of the form 'X or no X', where X is a nominal. The construction has been held to exemplify unbounded syntactic reduplication. We argue that although the argument can be made in a mathematically valid form, its empirical basis is not secure. First, the claimed unbounded syntactic identity between nominals does not always hold in attested cases, and (...) second, an understanding of the semantics of the construction removes the necessity of making reference to any syntactic reduplication. (shrink)

This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases." Truly original, this dual and dueling (...) text opens new dimensions in Derrida's thought and work. "Bennington is a shrewd and well-informed commentator whose book should do something to convince the skeptics... that Jacques Derrida's work merits serious attention."—Christopher Norris, _New Statesman & Society_ "Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida have presented a fascinating example of what might be called post-structuralist autobiography."—Laurie Volpe, _French Review_ "Bennington's account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects—more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious—than any other I have read."—Richard Rorty, _Contemporary Literature_. (shrink)

It is critically important for emerging professionals in education to be sensitised to the ethical and moral responsibilities of their practice throughout their training and beyond. There is a wide disparity in contemporary practice in this regard, which points to a need for greater clarity and consistency in our thinking about ethics within education. Ethics in Education attempts to meet this need, and will be a valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers in education, health and social sciences. Most significantly, (...) the increasing awareness of the importance of ethics, diversity and social pedagogy in the teacher education curriculum will ensure that this book becomes essential reading or recommended reading for initial teacher education and CPD courses in education. The Editors have gathered together an exciting and dynamic group of contributors across many fields of English education, and asked them to help rethink the role of ethics in education in the 21st century. The types of questions that we address include: Do we have a shared view of ethical practice? What are the values that underpin ethical practice? What are our ethical responsibilities as pedagogues? (shrink)