Woolcock, Peter G A topic much exercising the minds of religious believers at the moment is whether or not science and religion are natural enemies. The Religion and Ethics program on the ABC's Radio National, for example, has recently provided access on its website to a series of articles on the topic, with titles such as Science or Naturalism? The Contradictions of Richard Dawkins; Christianity and the Rise of Western Science; Did Darwin Defeat God?; Does Science Make Belief (...) in God Obsolete?; Does Science Preclude Belief in Science; Genesis Created Science; Lawrence Krauss's Deficiencies; Theology Must Save Science from Naturalism, just to mention a few. As these titles suggest, the Religion and Ethics program is clearly on a mission to defend religion against the onslaught of philosophical materialism, presenting (as it does) only articles that argue either for the compatibility of science and religion or for the dependence of science on religion. My aim here is to redress the balance. Yes, science and religion are best understood as natural enemies. (shrink)

Woolcock, Peter G Review of: Social humanism: A new metaphysics, by Brian Ellis, Routledge, New York, 2012. $120.

First published in 1998, this volume argues that two conditions need to be met for any agreement between people with conflicting desires to count as an unforced one, namely, that the parties argue as if they had equal power and that their antipathy to being coerced exceeds their desire to coerce others. These conditions entail objective moral principles and a theory of justice, modifying and developing Rawls' contractarian theory, but without the veil of ignorance. They support Rawls on basic civil (...) liberties and constitutional liberal democratic government, including religious tolerance, anti-paternalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism, but dispute his Difference Principle, his circumstances of justice, Laws of Peoples, reflective equilibrium, and freedom of conscience as a basic liberty. The book also gives a contractarian account of epistemology, metaethics, education, the rationality of being moral, the rights of animals and other non-persons, and the rights of indigenous peoples. Writers such as Brian Barry, R.S. Peters, Isaiah Berlin, Vinit Haksar, Jurgen Habermas, R.M. Hare, Philip Pettit, Derek Parfit, Michael Smith, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, Bronwyn Davies, Quentin Skinner and Will Kymlicka are also discussed. (shrink)

Desire-based accounts of practical argument about incompatible ends seem limited either to advice about means or to coercive threats. This paper argues that this can be avoided if the parties to the dispute desire its resolution by means other than force more than they desire the satisfaction of any particular ends. In effect, this means they must argue as if in a position of equal power. This leads to an explanation of the apparent objectivity of moral claims and of why (...) moral reasons appear to be categorical and external. It also explains how notions such as reciprocal altruism and TIT-FOR-TAT can play a role in an evolutionary account of morality. The paper concludes with an argument to the effect that a desire-based metaethic must accept the is-ought gap and explains why there may appear to be no is-ought gap from within a given normative perspective. (shrink)

Desire-based accounts of practical argument about incompatible ends seem limited either to advice about means or to coercive threats. This paper argues that this can be avoided if the parties to the dispute desire its resolution by means other than force more than they desire the satisfaction of any particular ends. In effect, this means they must argue as if in a position of equal power. This leads to an explanation of the apparent objectivity of moral claims and of why (...) moral reasons appear to be categorical and external. It also explains how notions such as reciprocal altruism and TIT-FOR-TAT can play a role in an evolutionary account of morality. The paper concludes with an argument to the effect that a desire-based metaethic must accept the is-ought gap and explains why there may appear to be no is-ought gap from within a given normative perspective. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that any adequate evolutionary ethical theory needs to account for moral belief as well as for dispositions to behave altruistically. It also needs to be clear whether it is offering us an account of the motivating reasons behind human behaviour or whether it is giving justifying reasons for a particular set of behaviours or, if both, to distinguish them clearly. I also argue that, unless there are some objective moral truths, the evolutionary ethicist cannot offer (...) justifying reasons for a set of behaviours. I use these points to refute Waller's claims that the illusion of objectivity plays a dispensable role in Ruse's theory, that my critique of Ruse's Darwinian metaethics is built on a false dilemma, that there is nothing to be distressed about if morality is not objective, and that ethical beliefs are subject to a kind of causal explanation that undermines their objectivity in a way that scientific beliefs are not. (shrink)

Michael Ruse, in Taking Darwin Seriously seeks to establish that taking Darwin seriously requires us to treat morality as subjective and naturalistic. I argue that, if morality is not objective, then we have no good reason for being moral if we can avoid detection and punishment. As a consequence, we will only continue to behave morally as long as we remain ignorant of Ruse''s theory, that is, as long as the cat is not let out of the bag. Ruse offers (...) a number of arguments to show that his theory can overcome such problems. I argue that they all fail. Ruse also argues that he can offer a naturalistic account of ethics which steps around the naturalistic fallacy and avoids the confusion of reasons with causes. His principal argument for this view is an analogy between spiritualism and morality. I argue that this analogy fails. (shrink)

Peter Woolcock, in Ruse's Darwinian Meta-Ethics: A Critique, argues that the subjectivist (nonobjectivist) Darwinian metaethics proposed by Michael Ruse (in Taking Darwin Seriously) cannot work, because the illusion of objectivity that Ruse claims is essential to morality breaks down when it is recognized as illusion, and there then remain no good reasons for acknowledging or following moral obligations. Woolcock, however, is mistaken in supposing that moral behaviour requires rational motivation. Ruse's Darwinian metaethical analysis shows why such objective (...) support for morality is neither plausible nor necessary; and when that is recognized, it can also be seen that Ruse's proposed illusion of moral objectivity is superfluous. (shrink)

In 1972, the young philosopher Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which rapidly became one of the most widely discussed essays in applied ethics. Through this article, Singer presents his view that we have the same moral obligations to those far away as we do to those close to us. He argued that choosing not to send life-saving money to starving people on the other side of the earth is the moral equivalent of neglecting to save drowning children (...) because we prefer not to muddy our shoes. If we can help, we must--and any excuse is hypocrisy. Singer's extreme stand on our moral obligations to others became a powerful call to arms and continues to challenge people's attitudes towards extreme poverty. Today, it remains a central touchstone for those who argue we should all help others more than we do. As Bill and Melinda Gates observe in their foreword, in the age of today's global philanthropy, Singer's essay is as relevant now as it ever was. This attractively packaged, concise edition collects the original article, two of Singer's more recent popular writings on our obligations to others around the world, and a new introduction by Singer that discusses his current thinking. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

This study of the "radicalization" of psychiatry analyzes the writings of Laing, Foucault, Szasz, and Goffman, constructs a model for understanding mental illness, and emphasizes collective responsibility for the care of the mentally ill.

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? (...) Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

A complete system of classical Aristotelian logic intended for honors high school and college.

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Ohne Rücksicht auf disziplinäre Schranken bringt dieses Buch verschiedene nicht-reduktionistische Lerntheorien miteinander ins Gespräch. In einem offenen Diskurs, der die Konzepte zueinander in Beziehung setzt, werden die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven kritisch abgewogen und hinsichtlich ihrer Stärken und Schwächen diskutiert.

Delo se loteva vprašanja aktualnosti pojma subjekta v filozofiji in politiki skozi analizo tistih avtorjev, ki so ga domnevno najbolj radikalno pokopali: pokaže, da vznik radikalno novega in problematika subjekta zavzema osrednje mesto v Deleuzovi filozofiji, kakor tudi v Lyotardovi pozni misli posvečeni praznini, v Foucaultovi obravnavi biopolitike in biooblasti, v delu Negrija in Hardta o Imperiju, ter nazadnje v Badioujevi predelavi temeljnih filozofskih kategorij biti, resnice in subjekta, na osnovi katerih je dandanes znova možna renesansa filozofije. Ta ima po (...) Badiouju štiri razsežnosti, ki se v delu Vznik subjekta nenehno prepletajo: »V osnovi želja filozofije implicira razsežnost upora: ni filozofije brez nezadovoljstva mišljenja v njegovem soočenju s svetom, kakršen je. Pa vendar želja filozofije vključuje tudi logiko: to je, prepričanje v moč argumenta in uma.«. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical foundations of the realist view of the progress of science as cumulative. It is a view that has recently been faced with a number of powerful attacks in which successive scientific theories are seen, not as extending their scope and honing their explanations, but as incommensurable. There is, it is held, in principle no way of establishing that they are about the same things. From the voluminous literature on the topic, Dr Smith has selected relevantly (...) and incisively and his exposition of the contending arguments is vigourous and clear, without undue technicality. As an explication and defence of realism it will interest all those concerned with this basic question in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at (...) an opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

What is narrative? What is distinctive about the great literary narratives? In virtue of what is a narrative fictional or non-fictional? In this important new book Peter Lamarque, one of the leading philosophers of literature at work today, explores these and related questions to bring new clarity and insight to debates about narrative in philosophy, critical theory, and narratology.

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.

Metz holds that we can use African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices such as appropriation, production, distribution and consumption in such a way that promotes harmonious relations. In this article, I will show that Metz’s reformist approach to constituting the global economic practices is problematic as it fails to deal with the fundamental problem that pertains to a racialised world order that is structurally configured by coloniality of being. I will show that reformist approaches such as Metz’s use (...) of African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices in a way that promotes harmonious relations are undesirable attempts that are opposed and curtailed by a structural racialised logic/ontology of the world that governs and supervises the evolution of the world economic structures and practices in a way which undermines harmonious relations and in a way which causes economic marginalisation and impoverishment of historically disadvantaged indigenous Africans. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. In this book, one of the most distinguished of living philosophers, assuming no previous knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader, sets out to explain and illustrate a (...) certain conception of the nature of analytical philosophy. Strawson draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed what he regards as the most productive route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking. Among the distinctive features of his exposition are the displacement of an older, reductive conception of philosophical method in favor of elucidating the interconnections between the complex but irreducible notions which form the basic structure of our thinking; and the demonstration that the three traditionally distinguished departments of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic are but three aspects of one unified enquiry. Strawson has produced an elegant work that will be invaluable to students and stimulating for professional philosophers and general readers alike. (shrink)

Why do we engage in folk psychology, that is, why do we think about and ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, intentions etc. to people? On the standard view, folk psychology is primarily for mindreading, for detecting mental states and explaining and/or predicting people’s behaviour in terms of them. In contrast, McGeer (1996, 2007, 2015), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013) maintain that folk psychology is not primarily for mindreading but for mindshaping, that is, for moulding people’s behavior and minds (e.g., (...) via the imposition of social norms) so that coordination becomes easier. Mindreading is derived from and only as effective as it is because of mindshaping, not vice versa. I critically assess McGeer’s, and Zawidzki’s proposal and contend that three common motivations for the mindshaping view do not provide sufficient support for their particular version of it. I argue furthermore that their proposal underestimates the role that epistemic processing plays for mindshaping. And I provide reasons for favouring an alternative according to which, in social cognition involving ascriptions of propositional attitudes, neither mindshaping nor mindreading is primary but both are complementary in that effective mindshaping depends as much on mindreading as effective mindreading depends on mindshaping. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain versions of functionalism. While (...) Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

This introduction by leading scholar Peter Trawny is the first to tackle the Black Notebooks, whose recent publication revealed the extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism. Trawny directly confronts the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's thought, also fully surveying his work, from early writings to his magnum opus, Being and Time.

"How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses and making inferences? According to the model of 'inference to the Best explanation', we work out what to inter from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves." (...) "The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contractive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and incudes a new bibliography."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)