To the evolutionarily oriented clinical psychiatrist, the discipline of behavioural ecology is a fertile basic science. Human psychology discusses variation in terms of means, standard deviations, heritabilities, and so on, but behavioural ecology deals with mutually incompatible alternative behavioural strategies, the heritable variation being maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection. I suggest that behavioural ecology should be included in the interdisciplinary dialogue recommended by Keller & Miller (K&M). (Published Online November 9 2006).

Many of the seemingly bland assertions and bald statements of the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume contain more than the mind immediately perceives. Author John Valdimir Price contends that an understanding of Hume's writings cannot be separated from an understanding of his life. By examining the works of Hume, Price shows the way in which an ironic way of seeing events and an ironic mode of expression permeated Hume's life and writings. Price examines Hume's irony as it is exhibited in (...) letters to his friends and in his writings concerned with morality, people, philosophy, politics, history, and above all religion. Hume's opinions on life in general are stated in works ranging from the Treatise of Human Nature and the Essays, Moral and Political, through the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and the Enquiry concerning Principles of Morals, to the Dialogue and Four Dissertations of his maturity. Price feels that Hume's recognition of the ironic in life came about from his perception of the disproportion between human hopes and human accomplishments. The rhetorical consequences of applying reason to a duality in human nature creates the ironic mode. Hume conceived man's opposing tendencies as his willingness to commit himself orally to a concept, a dogma, an idea, or an ideology, and his unwillingness to involve himself in the logical and rhetorical implications of articulating those principles. Hume's use of the ironic mode in his writings provides him with a means of challenging certain dogmatic assumptions common to thought, particularly to traditional religious thought; it acts as a mask for his sceptical intentions, and it is an implied criticism of many ideas. In his political writing, Hume frequently implied that the question under argument was almost too ridiculous to deserve serious treatment. This tactic was effectively employed in the Account of Stewart, in which Hume came to the defense of a friend. In his most profitable venture, the History of England, Hume not only used irony to advantage, but developed a new approach to the writing of history—the use of narrative. He presented history as a series of more or less connected events, not as a series of "right" or "wrong" attitudes. The author believes that Hume's initial religious scepticism, combined with the predominant satiric-ironic mode in the literature of his time, led him to seek irony as a method of self expression. This scepticism, which permeated all of Hume's attitudes toward life, reached its most complete expression in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, which accepted reason as its guide, but also accepted experience as its master. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive reference source on 18th-century authors writing in the English language about philosophical ideas and issues. It features authors taken from 1689 through to the mid-19th century, the period beginning with John Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart. The word philosophical is used in a wide, 18th-century sense. Therefore, the Dictionary includes epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, education, politics, rhetoric, science, medicine, biology, geology, chemistry and theology.

AA 180& 'What has to be accepted, the given, is, so one could say, forms of life'. (PI p 226) Compare with Nietzsche. Nietzsche works out a theory of demoralisation. Understanding of the logic of language games makes a difference to those one will play. Compare Heraclitus. The form of life as the will, prana, that which determines whatever it is that is said or believed. The language is merely the medium. Yet this is not something to be set up (...) as a metaphysical theory. It is too particular, and any motive for demolishing it is likely to be sufficient to do so. There is no one way which is true over and above all others. To be able to talk on this plane we need a kind of higher logic. There are those who are desperate to discover the one explanation which is in a sense true. For them, an philosophy which focus on the nature of explanation itself, and thus dissolves the problem will appear irrelevant. Henceforth what is needed is not philosophical statements but logical tools. What we do with these tools is not the business of philosophy. 'one wonders what philosophy would have been like in Britain and the United States if it had not been for the accident of Wittgenstein, for he might not have been on the scene at all…. I meant that he became known to the world of philosophy through the very special circumstances of making a strong impression on Bertrand Russell, and being accepted into the world of philosophy through the bold initiative of Cambridge. Nature is wasteful, and if one wants to get something exceptionally good, one must take great risks about having a great deal that is simply wild. I am sure that both Russell and Cambridge were right to adopt such a policy. Cambridge is possibly the only university in the world that would have touched Wittgenstein at any price. Had it not been for Cambridge, and had it not been for Russell, - and some people would hold that he made an error of judgement- almost certainly nothing more would have been heard of Wittgenstein'.. (shrink)

This paper investigates some delicate tradeoffs between the generality of an algorithmic learning device and the quality of the programs it learns successfully. There are results to the effect that, thanks to small increases in generality of a learning device, the computational complexity of some successfully learned programs is provably unalterably suboptimal. There are also results in which the complexity of successfully learned programs is asymptotically optimal and the learning device is general, but, still thanks to the generality, some of (...) those optimal, learned programs are provably unalterably information deficient—in some cases, deficient as to safe, algorithmic extractability/provability of the fact that they are even approximately optimal. For these results, the safe, algorithmic methods of information extraction will be by proofs in arbitrary, true, computably axiomatizable extensions of Peano Arithmetic. (shrink)

John Wilkins and Malte Ebach respond to the dismissal of classification as something we need not concern ourselves with because it is, as Ernest Rutherford suggested, mere ‘‘stamp collecting.’’ They contend that classification is neither derivative of explanation or of hypothesis-making but is necessarily prior and prerequisite to it. Classification comes first and causal explanations are dependent upon it. As such it is an important (but neglected) area of philosophical study. Wilkins and Ebach reject Norwood Russell Hanson’s thesis that (...) classification relies on observation that is theory-laden and deny the need for aetiological assumptions and historical reconstruction to justify its arrangement. What they offer instead is a significant (albeit controversial) contribution to the philosophical literature on classification, a pre-theoretic natural classification based on the observation of patterns in data of ready-made phenomena. Their notion of ready-made phenomena rests on a conception of tacit knowledge or know-how. This is evident in their distinction between strong Theory-dependence and na ̈ıve theory-dependence. Their small t-theory-dependence permits patterns of observation that facilitate know-how but does not rely on a domain-specific explanatory theory of their aetiology. Wilkins and Ebach suggest classification differs from theory building in that it is passive (whereas theory building is active). Classification is possible just because it does not require the sieve of theory to capture classes that are ‘‘handed to you by your cognitive dispositions and the data that you observe’’ (p. 18). Finding regularities sans-theory is just something we do and can do without any prior theory about the underlying causes or origins of the resultant regularities. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds serves as an exemplar of a passive, theory-free classification system and the periodic table and the DSM help to illustrate this type of non-aetiological patterning. A recurrent theme is the nature of naturalness. For Wilkins and Ebach, the conception of naturalness is not one that is based on the generation or discovery of natural kind categories popular in both the traditional metaphysics of Mill and Wittgenstein as well as updated notions within philosophy of biology such as Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster kinds. Instead, Wilkins and Ebach define the naturalness of classification as the falling into hierarchical patterns, aligning the search for natural arrangement with the aim of systematics, and as something that is grounded in a cognitive task or activity. However, they leave the question of realism v. antirealism open. ‘‘In natural classification...we must have real relations no matter how we might interpret ‘real’’’ (p. 70). There is tension with regard to their ontological commitments as they vacillate between constructive, operationalist, and realist approaches. Wilkins and Ebach initially define real as that which is causal and important (pp. 70–71), and later as that which ‘‘depends in no way upon a mind or observer’’ (p. 122). This makes their claim that there was ‘‘no real theory involved [in the pre-Darwinian classifications of Jussieu and Adanson]’’ (p. 64) difficult to interpret. Cont’d……. (shrink)

Introduction: Schools have become a primary setting for providing mental health care to youths in the U.S. School-based interventions have proliferated, but their effects on mental health and academic outcomes remain understudied. In this study we will implement and evaluate the effects of a flexible multidiagnostic treatment called Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, or Conduct Problems on students' mental health and academic outcomes.Methods and Analysis: This is an assessor-blind randomized controlled effectiveness trial conducted across five (...) school districts. School clinicians are randomized to either MATCH or usual care treatment conditions. The target sample includes 168 youths referred for mental health services and presenting with elevated symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, and/or conduct problems. Clinicians randomly assigned to MATCH or UC treat the youths who are assigned to them through normal school referral procedures. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of MATCH compared to UC on youths' mental health and school related outcomes and assess whether changes in school outcomes are mediated by changes in youth mental health.Ethics and Dissemination: This study was approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. We plan to publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals and present them at academic conferences.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02877875. Registered on August 24, 2016. (shrink)

The idea that there is a fundamental difference in value between persons and things, and that respecting this difference is an important moral requirement, has strong intuitive appeal. Kantian ethics is unique in placing this requirement at the center of a moral system and in explicating the conditions for complying with it. Unlike challenges to Kantian ethics that focus on tragic cases that pit respect for one person against respect for another, this paper focuses on the question of how we (...) can respect the value distinction between persons and things under conditions of uncertainty. After exploring why decision making under uncertainty is a neglected topic among Kantians and demonstrating how uncertainty challenges our ability to comply with this norm, we propose a notion of morally insignificant risk within a framework that allows agents to navigate real-world decisions involving material benefit and some risk to dignity without violating the Kantian’s core commitments. We conclude by exploring some of the challenges facing this approach. (shrink)

The Free Discussion between Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (1778) originated as a correspondence between the two after the publication of Priestley's Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, his most important philosophical work (1777). At the time it was thought remarkable that a controversey such as this could be conducted so amicably, but then the two were close friends. Nevertheless their philosophical, as opposed to their oft mentioned political views, were at opposite ends of a spectrum.

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be preferable, and, (...) in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be preferable, (...) and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 30-42 [Access article in PDF] How Can Music Seem to be Emotional? Kingsley Price Johns Hopkins University Preliminary Let me make some preliminary remarks about my question. First, the distinction employed in it, the distinction between seeming and reality, comes in two forms. The first is inclusive. A thing that really is so-and-so also seems to be so-and-so. The butler really is (...) guilty and seems guilty as well. The second is exclusive. A thing that is really not so-and-so seems to be so-and-so. The butler is really not guilty but seems to be guilty. The distinction that underlies my question is of the exclusive form.Second, the music I ask about is not music as read from scores on paper or held in memory. Nor is it music that contains linguistic elements-words or gestures as in song, opera, ballet, etc. Rather, it is purely instrumental music, and that as perceived or heard.Third, the emotions I refer to are not physiological conditions that may cause them, nor the behavior that may express them, but the conscious feelings we find in ourselves when we are undergoing emotion. [End Page 30] The Problem Persons (perhaps even the lower animals) can seem to be, without really being, emotional. They are pretending, or we perceive mistakenly. There is no difficulty, in principle, in explaining the situation. But there would be if they were sculptured persons only-that is, if they could not possibly be emotional. A sculpture cannot seem to be emotional by pretending it; nor can we perceive mistakenly that it is emotional when we know that it is a sculpture only.Much music is like sculpture. Not personal, we know that it cannot really be emotional. None-the-less, we hear the wedding march from Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream as joyful, the second movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor as sorrowful, "The Great Fugue" as grimly resigned, the first movement of the first Razumowski as hopeful, etc. How can this be so? How can music seem to be emotional?I look for an answer to this question, first, within the perception, the hearing of music, and then, without it in its meaning. If seeming emotionality is found in either place, I shall have answered the question. And now, for the first place. The Perception In sense perception there are two major constituents.1 One is awareness; the other is the object of awareness. Awareness occurs in all the kinds of consciousness-in remembering, imagining, dreaming, and thinking, for example, as well as in sense perception. In this last, it is brought about by operation of the senses; while in the others, that operation plays no direct part. But although it differs in its cause, awareness in sense perception is precisely the same, considered in itself, as it is in all the other kinds of consciousness, considered in themselves.What is awareness? It cannot be explained, as many notions can, by eliciting its parts. To understand what squareness is, for example, we need only bring forward the parts that constitute it: four straight lines equal in length, four right angles, and closed plane figure. But awareness has no parts and cannot be explained in this way. To call attention to its simplicity and its identity in all kinds of consciousness, indeed, is all that can be done to explain it though we might add the simile that likens awareness to the light that brings things before our minds out of the dark that conceals them in its absence.Now, hearing is a kind of sense perception-the kind that occurs by virtue of operation of the auditory organs; and music heard is one of the objects of auditory awareness. Can we understand how this object can seem to be emotional by appeal to the awareness of it? If that awareness seemed to exist and did not really do so, the answer would be that we cannot since the awareness of it... (shrink)

There is fierce controversy in the United States over whether parents should be able to choose their children's schools and/or curriculum. To discuss the pedagogical arguments inherent in this question, Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig begin with the classical concept of Bildung as developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt around 1800. Next, they compare Humboldt's ideas with the ideas of John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman, who stand in the tradition of liberal thought, as Mill was strongly influenced by (...) Humboldt and Friedman, in turn, by Mill. Finally, they consider Friedman's role as a central figure in the school choice movement, and are thus able to trace a line of thought from Humboldt to actual controversies. Price and Mattig's analysis here shows that the liberalism of Humboldt, Mill, and Friedman revolves around diversity and choice in education. Moreover, it traces that in the process of translating, translocating, and transcontextualizing Humboldt's original thought through Mill to Friedman, the complexity of arguments about education and the role of parents and the state in a liberal society has been unduly reduced. The authors conclude the paper by proposing a principle for thinking about the relationship between different educational institutions in democracies. (shrink)

Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA is the first and only statute prohibiting bribery and other corrupt business practices by U.S. citizens and companies conducting business overseas. This paper provides an overview of the FCPA during the two decades of its existence. More specifically, the objectives of this paper are four-fold. First, the paper provides background information about the FCPA of 1977 and subsequent amendments in 1988. Second, the paper (...) discusses the enforcement of the FCPA since its passage by examining the number of cases prosecuted under the FCPA and the respective penalties imposed. Third, the paper discusses the economic impact of the FCPA by addressing whether the FCPA places U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage. Fourth, the paper provides public policy recommendations to expand the reach and scope of the FCPA. It covers efforts to criminalize bribery through multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). It also covers bilateral arrangements and efforts by non-governmental organizations such as Transparency International. (shrink)

Is helping those whose subsistence needs are not meet a matter of charity or an obligation? What role should ordinary citizens of developed nations play? In a globalized world, the causes, connections, and responsibilities become complicated. Agriculture subsidies that keep food prices low for many in relatively rich countries may, for example, negatively impact poor farmers in developing countries. Students in Ethics/Philosophy 352 report on their project examining whether, and to what extent, a true obligation to aid exists.

This chapter discusses the Bayesian analysis of miracles. It is set in the context of the eighteenth-century debate on miracles. The discussion is focused on the probable response of Thomas Bayes to David Hume's celebrated argument against miracles. The chapter presents the claim that the criticisms Richard Price made against Hume's argument against miracles were largely solid.

In Expressing Our Attitudes, Mark Schroeder speculates about the relation between expressivism and relativism. Noting that “John MacFarlane has wondered whether relativism is expressivism done right,” he suggests that this may get things back to front: “it is worth taking seriously the idea that expressivism is relativism done right”. In this piece, motivated both by Schroeder’s suggestion and by recent work from Lionel Shapiro, I compare and contrast my version of expressivism with MacFarlane’s version of relativism. I identify some (...) significant differences concerning the treatment of linguistic disagreement, but conclude that despite these differences, MacFarlane’s version of relativism counts as a version of expressivism in my sense, in most of the respects that matter. (shrink)

I once stood staring at a map in a large US airport, looking for an ATM. Next to me a couple also stared at the map, trying to figure out where in the airport they were. “Sheesh!” said the male at last, pointing to the red dot and the words ‘You are here’ in the key beside the map: “We’re way over here, right off the map!” Jenann Ismael’s understanding of red dots lies very much at the other extreme, but (...) self-location – the task that couple were engaged in, however haplessly – is the unifying theme of The Situated Self. In Ismael’s hands, it is a thread that turns out to tie together a remarkable range of topics. Imagine being taken on a tour of your own home town, weaving in and out through various neighbourhoods, familiar and less so, and ducking between them via surprising paths and shortcuts. (“This next to that? Who knew!”) The Situated Self is that kind of book – an exhilarating and often demanding excursion, startling in its breadth and the ways it relates seemingly unconnected topics. Although the route of Ismael's tour is often highly original, the vehicle itself has a familiar shape, at least in outline. Ismael builds a chassis to specifications due especially to John Perry, fits it out to her own requirements, and then shows us where it can take us. Mostly, I found the excursion convincing, as well as fascinating. In what follows, I shall take up one case in which I was not convinced, and then raise an issue about another destination – somewhere in the same vicinity, apparently – and ask whether Ismael’s bus takes us there, too. First, though, to the fundamentals, as Ismael develops them. (shrink)

Donald Gustafson has argued that grief centres on a combination of belief and desire:The belief that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss.The desire that this should not be the case.And yet, as Gustafson points out, if the belief is true, the desire cannot be satisfied. Gustafson takes this to show that grief inevitably implies an irrational conflict between belief and desire.I offer a partial defence of grief against Gustafson's charge of irrationality. My defence rests on two elements. First, I (...) offer an alternative model of emotion, which presents emotions as complex episodes, initiated by emotional appraisals. Secondly, I appeal to John Bowlby's account of grief to argue that grief involves two forms of sadness (anguish and desolation) which Gustafson's analysis runs together. I concede that anguish does characteristically involve an element of irrationality. But the irrationality of anguish does not arise from an apparently gratuitous clash between belief and desire, but from a conflict between emotion and belief—a form of irrationality that is both familiar and easily explained. Moreover, desolation need not involve any irrationality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 30-42 [Access article in PDF] How Can Music Seem to be Emotional? Kingsley Price Johns Hopkins University Preliminary Let me make some preliminary remarks about my question. First, the distinction employed in it, the distinction between seeming and reality, comes in two forms. The first is inclusive. A thing that really is so-and-so also seems to be so-and-so. The butler really is (...) guilty and seems guilty as well. The second is exclusive. A thing that is really not so-and-so seems to be so-and-so. The butler is really not guilty but seems to be guilty. The distinction that underlies my question is of the exclusive form.Second, the music I ask about is not music as read from scores on paper or held in memory. Nor is it music that contains linguistic elements-words or gestures as in song, opera, ballet, etc. Rather, it is purely instrumental music, and that as perceived or heard.Third, the emotions I refer to are not physiological conditions that may cause them, nor the behavior that may express them, but the conscious feelings we find in ourselves when we are undergoing emotion. [End Page 30] The Problem Persons (perhaps even the lower animals) can seem to be, without really being, emotional. They are pretending, or we perceive mistakenly. There is no difficulty, in principle, in explaining the situation. But there would be if they were sculptured persons only-that is, if they could not possibly be emotional. A sculpture cannot seem to be emotional by pretending it; nor can we perceive mistakenly that it is emotional when we know that it is a sculpture only.Much music is like sculpture. Not personal, we know that it cannot really be emotional. None-the-less, we hear the wedding march from Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream as joyful, the second movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor as sorrowful, "The Great Fugue" as grimly resigned, the first movement of the first Razumowski as hopeful, etc. How can this be so? How can music seem to be emotional?I look for an answer to this question, first, within the perception, the hearing of music, and then, without it in its meaning. If seeming emotionality is found in either place, I shall have answered the question. And now, for the first place. The Perception In sense perception there are two major constituents.1 One is awareness; the other is the object of awareness. Awareness occurs in all the kinds of consciousness-in remembering, imagining, dreaming, and thinking, for example, as well as in sense perception. In this last, it is brought about by operation of the senses; while in the others, that operation plays no direct part. But although it differs in its cause, awareness in sense perception is precisely the same, considered in itself, as it is in all the other kinds of consciousness, considered in themselves.What is awareness? It cannot be explained, as many notions can, by eliciting its parts. To understand what squareness is, for example, we need only bring forward the parts that constitute it: four straight lines equal in length, four right angles, and closed plane figure. But awareness has no parts and cannot be explained in this way. To call attention to its simplicity and its identity in all kinds of consciousness, indeed, is all that can be done to explain it though we might add the simile that likens awareness to the light that brings things before our minds out of the dark that conceals them in its absence.Now, hearing is a kind of sense perception-the kind that occurs by virtue of operation of the auditory organs; and music heard is one of the objects of auditory awareness. Can we understand how this object can seem to be emotional by appeal to the awareness of it? If that awareness seemed to exist and did not really do so, the answer would be that we cannot since the awareness of it... (shrink)

Huw Price has recently argued that representationalism – the notion that the primary function of statements is to represent the world – is an utter failure. In its place he proposes a “global expressivism” that instead links the meaning of statements to how they are used. This makes his global expressivism a kind of pragmatism: a linguistic pragmatism because it focuses on linguistic meaning; a radical pragmatism because it rejects representationalism across the board. Price also introduces a distinction between two (...) types of representation: external representation, which he mostly rejects, and internal representation, which he champions. In this article I weigh the strengths of Price’s radical pragmatism. I conclude that radical pragmatism has significant benefits, especially if we supplement external and internal representation with a third variety that I call operational representation. (shrink)

John Cottingham identifies “the grand traditional project of synoptic ethics” as an attempt to define the essential features of a good human life within a rational understanding of the world, and of man’s place within it. That the project now seems dated he explains in two ways. First, he notes the recent specialization and professionalization of philosophy, its preference of technical topics to grand questions. Second, he adduces a skepticism that doubts the objectivity, and a liberalism that accepts a (...) plurality, of values. The upshot of both trends is a “committee ethics” that takes on “the task of articulating the structure of an optimal political system in which maximum scope is given for the pursuit of whatever values are in fact chosen by the citizens” —a grandish issue, surely, but neither a personal nor a metaphysical one. Cottingham’s main aim is to cast further doubt on the practicability of the traditional project so long as it is pursued in the traditional “ratiocentric” style. What that is he conveys through discussions of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. (shrink)

In a famous paper in Noûs in 1979, John Perry points out that action depends on indexical beliefs. In addition to “third-person” information about her environment, an agent need “first-person” information about where, when and who she is. This conclusion is widely interpreted as a reason for thinking that tensed claims cannot be translated without loss into untensed language; but not as a reason for realism about tensed facts. In another famous paper in the same volume of Noûs, Nancy (...) Cartwright argues that action requires that agents represent their world in causal terms, rather than merely probabilistic terms: for, Cartwright argues, there’s a distinction between effective and ineffective strategies, that otherwise goes missing. This is widely taken as a reason for thinking that causal claims cannot be translated without loss into merely probabilistic claims; and also – in contrast to Perry’s case – widely regarded as a reason for realism about causation. In this paper I ask whether the latter conclusion is compulsory, or whether, as in Perry’s case, the need for causal beliefs might merely reflect some “situated” aspect of a decision-maker’s perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 454-456 [Access article in PDF] Michael Potter. Reason's Nearest Kin: Philosophies of Arithmetic from Kant to Carnap.New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 305. Cloth, $45.00. This book tells the story of a remarkable series of answers to two related questions:(1) How can arithmetic be necessary and knowable a priori? [End Page 454](2) What accounts for the applicability of (...) arithmetic to matters of empirical fact?These are philosophical questions, part of a "wider puzzle of explaining the link between experience, language, thought, and the world" (18). But answers to them are heavily constrained by technical results in logic and mathematics, and most of Potter's protagonists are either mathematicians (Frege, Dedekind, Ramsey, Hilbert, Gödel) or mathematically trained philosophers (Kant, Russell, Carnap). (Only Wittgenstein fits neither category.) Potter, whose doctorate was in pure mathematics, is an able guide.It is not hard to think of answers to these questions taken singly; what is hard is answering both at the same time. Formalists can easily explain why arithmetic does not depend for its justification on empirical fact—it is just a game with symbols, not responsible to anything beyond its own rules—but they then have trouble explaining why the world of empirical fact is constrained by this game. Empiricists can explain the applicability of arithmetic in just the same way they explain the applicability of physics, but they then must then explain away the apparent a prioricity and necessity of arithmetic. Kant was the first to propose a plausible answer to both questions: arithmetic is both necessary and empirically applicable because it is grounded in the spatio-temporal form of any possible experience.What unites Frege, Dedekind, Russell, Ramsey, Hilbert, and Carnap is that they reject Kant's answer while continuing to seek an answer to his question: how can arithmetic's necessity be reconciled with its applicability? Potter helpfully classifies their projects by the surrogates they substitute for Kant's appeal to the form of spatio-temporal intuition: Frege and Dedekind appeal to thought, Russell to necessary features of the world, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, and Carnap to language, and Hilbert to the necessary structure of our experience of finitary combinations of objects. (Revealingly, the logicists are not grouped together in Potter's taxonomy.) A chapter (or two) is devoted to each of these thinkers, plus Kant and Gödel.This breadth of coverage does not come at the price of superficiality: Potter's chapters are (by and large) accurate, penetrating, and full of interesting insights. I cannot think of another book that offers such clear explanations of the many mathematical concepts and distinctions one must grasp in order to follow debates in the philosophy of arithmetic. The Russell chapters are enhanced by numerous quotations from archival material. The exposition of Hilbert's programme and the implications for it of Gödel's theorems is the best I have seen. The discussions of Wittgenstein's views on arithmetic and of Carnap's syntactical approach also shine. The chapters on Kant and Frege are somewhat weaker; the discussion of Kant, in particular, would have benefited from some engagement with Michael Friedman's views.But the real contribution of Potter's book is its integration of these nine thinkers into a single coherent story. No one will be surprised that Russell's motivations can only be understood in light of Frege's failures, or that many features of Wittgenstein's cryptic work become clearer when seen in light of the specific problems with Russell's system. But there are also some less obvious payoffs: for example, Hilbert's programme is usefully compared with Russell's regressive method (227-8), and Carnap and Russell are shown to face a common dilemma (269, 286).If there is a central theme to Potter's story, it is "how often we have had to reject an [End Page 455] account not for philosophical reasons but for technical ones" (278). Frege's program founders on Russell's paradox, Russell's... (shrink)

John Cottingham identifies “the grand traditional project of synoptic ethics” as an attempt to define the essential features of a good human life within a rational understanding of the world, and of man’s place within it. That the project now seems dated he explains in two ways. First, he notes the recent specialization and professionalization of philosophy, its preference of technical topics to grand questions. Second, he adduces a skepticism that doubts the objectivity, and a liberalism that accepts a (...) plurality, of values. The upshot of both trends is a “committee ethics” that takes on “the task of articulating the structure of an optimal political system in which maximum scope is given for the pursuit of whatever values are in fact chosen by the citizens” —a grandish issue, surely, but neither a personal nor a metaphysical one. Cottingham’s main aim is to cast further doubt on the practicability of the traditional project so long as it is pursued in the traditional “ratiocentric” style. What that is he conveys through discussions of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. (shrink)