Critical Legal Theory has conventionally been traced to the social, political, and philosophical movements of the 1960s and, before that, to the early-twentieth-century ‘realist’ critique of modern jurisprudence. In truth, however, its origins go back to classical and pre-modern thought, and to their acknowledgement of the centrality of law in attempts to conceive of the good life, or the just polity—a centrality that is, moreover, also discernible in the recent gravitation of a number of contemporary philosophers and theorists towards law. (...) Against the ‘restricted’ and ‘conservative’ character of modern jurisprudence, Critical Legal Theory constitutes a return to this more general interest in law and legality. Exceeding the limits of jurisprudence, it has, moreover, drawn upon the most ancient and most contemporary traditions of critical thought in order to pursue new ways of understanding, living, and imagining the law. Critical Legal Theory is now an established—if heterogeneous and controversial—field of study, represented by numerous international journals, regional organizations, and global conferences. As the field continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Law, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. Indeed, it is a landmark collection of Critical Legal Theory’s principal sources, orientations, movements, and themes. The first volume in the collection illuminates the foundations of Critical Legal Theory in contemporary continental thought, as well as providing an account of its institutional history. Volume II, meanwhile, examines the ways in which Critical Legal Theory has addressed and problematized conventional jurisprudential ideas about law, drawing upon the insights of philosophy, as well as other disciplines. Volume III assembles the best and most influential research to provide an overview of the movements that characterize the field. The scholarship assembled in the final volume brings together the key work to explore a range of substantial themes with which Critical Legal Theorists have engaged. Supplemented with a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which situate the collected material in the context of more general theoretical traditions, as well as in critical relation to jurisprudence, _Critical Legal Theory_ is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital resource. (shrink)

In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the (...) differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists. (shrink)

Humean arguments from evil maintain that the good and evil we know about constitutes powerful evidence against Theism. Unlike other arguments from evil, Humean arguments are abductive arguments, maintaining that some rival to Theism better explains the good and evil we know about than Theism. This article surveys Humean arguments from evil. After explaining Philo’s original argument in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, it exposits a modern, prototypical Humean argument inspired by the work of Paul Draper. This article explores the (...) distinctive features of Humean arguments; how these arguments can be strengthened; and some common criticisms of these arguments. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to arguments from evil. One important member of that family is Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA-based criticism of William Rowe’s arguments from evil. A cornerstone of Wykstra’s approach is his CORNEA principle. However, a number of authors have criticized CORNEA on various grounds, including that it has odd results, it cannot do the work it was meant to, and it problematically conflicts with the so-called common sense epistemology. In this paper, I explicate and defend a (...) CORNEA principle. After sketching a brief argument for it, I show how it can be acquitted of these recent charges. (shrink)

Humean arguments from evil are some of the most powerful arguments against Theism. They take as their data what we know about good and evil. And they argue that some rival to Theism better explains, or otherwise predicts, that data than Theism. However, this paper argues that there are many problems with various methods for defending Humean arguments. I consider Philo’s original strategy; modern strategies in terms of epistemic probability; phenomenological strategies; and strategies that appeal to scientific and metaphysical explanations. (...) None of these methods have been sufficiently developed to provide a clear and distinctive defense of Humean arguments. Defenders of Humean arguments need to spend more time on the underlying methodology of their arguments. (shrink)

Epistemic Value Monism is the view that there is only one kind of thing of basic, final epistemic value. Perhaps the most plausible version of Epistemic Value Monism is Truth Value Monism, the view that only true beliefs are of basic, final epistemic value. Several authors—notably Jonathan Kvanvig and Michael DePaul—have criticized Truth Value Monism by appealing to the epistemic value of things other than knowledge. Such arguments, if successful, would establish Epistemic Value Pluralism is true and Epistemic Value Monism (...) is false. This paper critically examines those arguments, finding them wanting. However, I develop an argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism that succeeds which turns on general reflection on the nature of value. (shrink)

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Truthmaker theorists hold that there is a metaphysically explanatory relation that holds between true claims and what exists. While some critics try to provide counterexamples to truthmaker theory, that response quickly leads to a dialectical standoff. The aim of this paper is to move beyond that standoff by attempting to undermine some standard arguments for truthmaker theory. Using realism about truth and a more pragmatic account of explanation, I show how some of those arguments can be undermined.

In the mid-eighteenth century David Hume argued that successful prediction tells us nothing about the truth of the predicting theory. But physical theory routinely predicts the values of observable magnitudes within very small ranges of error. The chance of this sort of predictive success without a true theory suggests that Hume's argument is flawed. However, Colin Howson argues that there is no flaw and examines the implications of this disturbing conclusion; he also offers a solution to one of the (...) central problems of Western philosophy, the problem of induction. (shrink)

There’s a growing sense among philosophers of religion that Humean arguments from evil are some of the most formidable arguments against theism, and skeptical theism fails to undermine those arguments because they fail to make the inferences skeptical theists criticize. In line with this trend, Wes Morriston has recently formulated a Humean argument from evil, and his chief defense of it is that skeptical theism is irrelevant to it. Here I argue that skeptical theism is relevant to Humean arguments. To (...) do this, I reveal the common structure of skeptical theism’s critiques. Seeing the common structure reveals why some versions of skeptical theism are irrelevant to Humean arguments from evil. It also points the way forward to formulating a relevant version. By combining skeptical theism with a plausible principle concerning reasonable belief, I formulate a version of skeptical theism that undermines Morriston’s argument that is also immune from his objections. (shrink)

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not.

According to a common view, animals have moral status. Further, a standard defense of this view is the Argument from Consciousness: animals have moral status because they are conscious and can experience pain and it would be bad were they to experience pain. In a series of papers :277–291, 2015a, J Agric Environ Ethics 28:11270–1138, 2015b, J Agric Environ Ethics 30:37–54, 2017), Timothy Hsiao claims that animals do not have moral status and criticizes the Argument from Consciousness. This short paper (...) defends the Argument from Consciousness by providing two simple responses to Hsiao’s criticism. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

What we call “the evidential argument from evil” is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra’s early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe’s evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil—in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical (...) theism more responsive to the type abductive atheology pioneered by Draper. In particular, we suggest a moderate form of skeptical theism may be able to resist Draper’s abductive atheology. (shrink)

This paper describes a pair of dietary practices I label default vegetarianism and default veganism. The basic idea is that one adopts a default of adhering to vegetarian and vegan diets, with periodic exceptions. While I do not exhaustively defend either of these dietary practices as morally required, I do suggest that they are more promising than other dietary practices that are normally discussed like strict veganism and vegetarianism. For they may do a better job of striking a balance between (...) normative concerns about contemporary farming practices and competing considerations of life. Additionally, I argue that framing discussions in terms of defaults is useful for various reasons: it helps organize agreements and disagreements, it more accurately reflects the way people conceptualize their dietary practices, and it presents a more dialectically effective view. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, (...) and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities related to their information privacy when using information technology. Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in situations involving (...) the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

English summary: Heidegger allowed us to better hear metaphysics by passionately listening to it. In this volume we seek to better understand Heidegger by patiently listening to another metaphysician: Descartes. The meaning of Descartess thought in creating an onto-theology of the causa and cogitatio, also taken up in the work of Heidegger, faithfully reveals Heideggers directions. French description: En se mettant passionnement a son ecoute, Heidegger nous a permis d'entendre la metaphysique d'une maniere inouie. Par un juste retour des choses, (...) dans un geste inedit, il s'agira ici de mieux entendre Heidegger en se mettant patiemment a l'ecoute d'un metaphysicien precis: Descartes, ou plutot a l'ecoute de ce qu'il nous en dit. Car loin d'etre anecdotiques, les significations que la pensee de Descartes a - la premiere faisant d'elle une onto-theologie de la causa, la seconde une onto-theologie de la cogitatio - et prend dans l'oeuvre de Heidegger - la premiere etant de la provoquer, la deuxieme de l'aiguiller, la troisieme de l'instruire - revelent fidelement les orientations de celui-ci, en et hors metaphysique. Comme il sied en hermeneutique, il sera donc question de sens, celui que l'on prend n'etant pas moins indifferent a celui que l'on donne que celui que l'on donne n'est innocent de celui que l'on prend. (shrink)

This advanced introductory text offers a synoptic view of philosophical inquiry, discussing such topics as consciousness, the self, meaning, free will, the a ..

In this study of the nature of philosophy, Colin McGinn shows us how philosophy can maintain its connection to the past while looking forward to a bright future.

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the context of (...) an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein, as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) related to their information privacy when using information technology (IT). Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in (...) situations involving the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around 1790. (...) He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

Schopenhauer repeatedly claims that suicide is both foolish and futile. But while many commentators have expressed sympathy for his charge of foolishness, most regard his charge of futility as indefensible even within his own system. In this paper, I offer a defense of Schopenhauer’s futility charge, based on metaphysical and psychological considerations. On the metaphysical front, Schopenhauer’s view implies that psychological connections extend beyond death. Drawing on Parfit’s discussion of personal identity, I argue that those connections have personal significance, such (...) that suicide does not allow one, as Hamlet hopes, simply “not to be.” On the psychological front, I argue that a distinction between agents’ intentions and underlying desires makes room for Schopenhauer to claim that paradigmatic suicidal agents ultimately desire the opposite of what suicide accomplishes. I conclude by showing how the resulting account of futility can buttress the charge of foolishness as well. My interpretation still leaves Schopenhauer vulnerable to certain objections, but shows that his account is significantly more defensible than previous commentators have realized. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a psychologically-informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favour of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have (...) so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an overview of John Rawls's four‐stage sequence account of how to apply justice as fairness to institutions. It focuses on the facets of institutional design: (i) How should basic democratic institutions and processes be structured so as to realize the fair value of the basic political liberties? (ii) What kinds of educational and health institutions are needed to secure fair equality of opportunity? (iii) How do principles of justice apply to the family? (iv) What implications does (...) the difference principle have for the structure of a market economy? Rawls's extension of the original position via the four‐stage sequence proceeds against the background of three kinds of pluralism. According to Rawls, occupational choice means that there is a diversity of positions open to all citizens, and no one is forced to hold or pursue specific kinds of employment. (shrink)

Colin Morris traces the origin of the concept of the individual, not to the Renaissance where it is popularly assumed to have been invented, but farther back, ...

In the past two decades, much work on Kant has aimed to delimit and evaluate the bedrock assumptions of Kant's mature Critical philosophy. This volume brings together leading Kant scholars to address this issue in conversation with each other, articulating and interrogating Kant's critical assumptions.

Many weaknesses of game theory are cured by new models that embody simple cognitive principles, while maintaining the formalism and generality that makes game theory useful. Social preference models can generate team reasoning by combining reciprocation and correlated equilibrium. Models of limited iterated thinking explain data better than equilibrium models do; and they self-repair problems of implausibility and multiplicity of equilibria.

Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman exhibit several related dialectical methods relevant to Platonic education: maieutic in Theaetetus, bifurcatory division in Sophist and Statesman, and non-bifurcatory division in Statesman, related to the ‘god-given’ method in Philebus. I consider the nature of each method through the letter or element paradigm, used to reflect on each method. At issue are the element’s appearances in given contexts, its fitness for communing with other elements like it in kind, and its own nature defined through its (...) relations to others. These represent stages of inquiry for the Platonic student inquiring into the sources of knowledge. (shrink)

Henry More argues that materialism cannot account for cases where a single subject or perceiver has multiple perceptions simultaneously. Since we clearly do have multiple perceptions at the same time--for example, when we see, hear, and smell simultaneously--More concludes that we are not wholly material. In response to More's argument, Margaret Cavendish adopts a two-fold strategy. First, she argues that there is no general obstacle to mental unification in her version of materialism. Second, Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational (...) matter--terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses. When the mind integrates perceptions across modalities, the different parts of rational matter share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. Thus, when someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts. (shrink)

In Part I of this book Professor Perrin evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Scheler's pioneering study. Part II provides an explication of the main features of Scheler's ethics and explores their implications in light of more recent studies of moral cognition and development.

The Oxford-educated philosopher serves up his trenchant survey of his academic discipline, offering his commentary on Descartes, Anselm Bertrand Russell, Sartre ...

In 1941 Simone Weil was introduced to Father Jean-Marie Perrin, a priest of the Dominican order whose friendship became one of the most significant influences on her spiritual development. It was for Father Perrin that she wrote her 'spiritual autobiography', contained in Waiting for God, and to him that she later wrote 'Letter to a Priest'. When Weil requested work as a field hand, Perrin sent her to Gustave Thibon, a farmer and Christian philosopher. From 1941-2, Weil (...) stayed with the Thibon family, working in the fields by day while writing by night the notebooks which posthumously became Gravity and Grace and other seminal works. Perrin and Thibon met Weil at a time when her interior life and her creative genius were at the height of their glowing maturity. During the short but deep period of their acquaintance with her, they came to know her as she actually was. Their accounts of this time reveal her to us in the bare parlour of the Dominican convent at Marseilles where, after waiting her turn among a stream of refugees, she discussed her personal problems with Father Perrin. They show her to us in the vineyards of Ardèche, and on the stone seat by the fountain overlooking the Rhone valley where she read Plato to Thibon, her host. First published in 1953, and now newly introduced by Patricia Little, this unique portrait depicts Weil through the eyes of her friends, not as a strange and unaccountable genius but as an ardent and very human young person in search of truth and knowledge. (shrink)

According to Jago (2014a), logical omniscience is really part of a deeper paradox. Jago develops an epistemic logic with principles of indeterminate closure to solve this paradox, but his official semantics is difficult to navigate, it is motivated in part by substantive metaphysics, and the logic is not axiomatized. In this paper, I simplify this epistemic logic by adapting the hyperintensional semantic framework of Sedlár (2021). My first goal is metaphysical neutrality. The solution to the epistemic paradox should not require (...) appeal to a metaphysics of truth-makers, situations, or impossible worlds, by contrast with Jago’s official semantics. My second goal is to elaborate on the proof theory. I show how to axiomatize a family of logics with principles of indeterminate epistemic closure. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

This paper describes both an exegetical puzzle that lies at the heart of Frege’s writings—how to reconcile his logicism with his definitions and claims about his definitions—and two interpretations that try to resolve that puzzle, what I call the “explicative interpretation” and the “analysis interpretation.” This paper defends the explicative interpretation primarily by criticizing the most careful and sophisticated defenses of the analysis interpretation, those given my Michael Dummett and Patricia Blanchette. Specifically, I argue that Frege’s text either are inconsistent (...) with the analysis interpretation or do not support it. I also defend the explicative interpretation from the recent charge that it cannot make sense of Frege’s logicism. While I do not provide the explicative interpretation’s full solution to the puzzle, I show that its main competitor is seriously problematic. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that true belief is of epistemic value, but that knowledge is of even more epistemic value. Some claim that this surplus value is instrumentally valuable to the value of true belief. I call the conjunction of these claims the Instrumentalist’s Conjunction. The so-called “Swamping Problem” is meant to show that Instrumentalist’s Conjunction is inconsistent. Crudely put, the problem is that if knowledge only has surplus value to the value of true belief, and a belief is true because (...) known, then knowledge cannot be of any more value than true belief. Given the inconsistency, most philosopher reject the claim the surplus value of knowledge is instrumental to the value of true belief. This paper argues that the Swamping Problem is illusory. Once we clean up the problem and pay attention to the distinction between token/type properties, we can see that Instrumentalist’s Conjunction is perfectly coherent. (shrink)

Religion and the Rebel, Colin Wilson's second volume from his internationally acclaimed Outsider Cycle, is a casebook about and for rebels. With inspirational wisdom and engaging clarity, Wilson shows us that the purpose of religion, of our personal relationship with the sacred and the all-pervading mystery of existence, is to expand our consciousness and intensify our sense of life. Wilson heroically claims that the power to create meaning resides in our mental and spiritual discipline. Examining the lives and works (...) of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rilke, Shaw, Pascal, Swedenborg, Rimbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, among others, Wilson explores the main existential questions and shows how these remarkable writers, scientists, philosophers and poets faced their need for transcendence. Like many of us, they were driven by a need to become more than men. Religion and the Rebel is an outstanding and enjoyable book that combines philosophical analysis, historical interest, and religious insight. (shrink)

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.