My objective in this project is to explore the concept of moral luck as it relates to sports. I am especially interested in constitutive luck. As a foundation I draw from both Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel’s classic handling of moral luck, generally. Within the philosophy of sport are similar explorations of this nexus by Robert Simon and David Carr that also factor into the present work. My intent is to put a new lens in front of a puzzle (...) drawn from Torbjörn Tännsjö’s well-known article ‘Is Our Admiration of Sports Heroes Facistoid?’ Specifically, the idea that we might admire an athlete who excels without having worked hard for it. If we may call this puzzle ‘the talent problem,’ the questions driving the present work are as follows: what is the relationship between moral luck and the talent problem, and can this relationship provide a prescription for morally assessing the talent problem? The thesis that this exploratory work suggests that more complex games (and... (shrink)

Applying Bernard Suits’s conceptual definition of game-playing, and his outline of a conceptual definition of sport, I ask and answer the following question: can hunting be a sport? An affirmative answer is substantiated via the following logic. Premise one, all sports are games. Premise two, a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Premise three, fair-chase hunters voluntarily accept unnecessary obstacles. Conclusion one: fair-chase hunting is a game. Premise four, a sport can be defined as a game (...) that requires the exercise of physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability. Premise five, some fair-chase hunts require physical skill, have a wide following, and have institutional stability. Conclusion two: fair-chase hunting that requires physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability is a sport. After substantiating each premise and conclusion I consider and refute several important objections. Primarily, that hunting lacks constitutive rules and that hunting lacks volitional engagement and thus cannot be a game or sport. (shrink)

A concise, easy-to-read introduction to informal logic, "With Good Reason" offers both comprehensive coverage of informal fallacies and an abundance of engaging examples of both well-conceived and faulty arguments. A long-time favorite of both students and instructors, the text continues in its sixth edition to provide an abundance of exercises that help students identify, correct, and avoid common errors in argumentation.

Time is analyzed as being those processes by which a system notes the processes which comprise its own existence. The directionality of time is given by the concepts, past, present, and future. To understand the meaning of these concepts, a set of experiments was carried out with four male subjects in which areas of time were expanded or ablated by means of post-hypnotic suggestions. These operations were carried out singly or in combination. The data suggest that the present is primarily (...) associated with stimulus input, the past with the criteria for defining that input as well as the development of response inhibitions and the future with the directionality of that input. Marked personality changes which range from the occurence of catatonic-like states to obsessive types of reaction and manic-like reactions are associated with different combinations of time alterations. Some of the changes are in accord with the serialist position on time of J. W. Dunne. The concept of death is very important both with regard to one’s view of time and how one lives. While it is important to live in the present, the present has no meaning without at least a past or a future. Implications of these findings for psychopathology in general and schizophrenia in particular are considered. (shrink)

his book develops an account of legal reasoning based on underlying narrative patterns, and compares other such approaches in legal philosophy, psychology and history. Download full ToC and Preface from http://www.legaltheory.demon.co.uk/books_lfnc.html.

It is said that America came of age in­tellectually with the appearance of the pragmatic movement in philosophy. _Pragmatic Naturalism _presents a selec­tive and interpretative overview of this philosophy as developed in the writings of its intellectual founders and chief exponents—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey. Mr. Eames groups the leading ideas of these pragmatic natu­ralists around the general fields of “Na­ture and Human Life,” “Knowledge,” “Value,” and “Education,” treating the primary concerns and special emphasis (...) of each philosopher to these issues. Philosophy students, teachers of phi­losophy, and general readers will find this book a comprehensive overview of American philosophy. (shrink)

Later reprinted by Deborah Charles Publications (and not available from Amazon), this book expounds and comments on the application of Greimasian semiotics to a legal text, as found in the article by Greimas and Landowski in Greimas, Sémiotique et Sciences Sociales (1976), compares this with the semiotic presuppositions of Hart, Dworkin, MacCormick and Kelsen, and offers my own analysis of the implications of such semiotic analysis for legal theory, including some more recent radical non-positivist accounts.

This book reviews the classical schools of jurisprudence with particular reference to their linguistic presuppositions, and summarises an alternative account based on Paris school semiotics. Detailed ToC available from linked web page. NOT available from Amazon.

The failures of a philosophic system are often a good deal more revealing than its successes, for such failures test its strength and mark the limits of its endurance. Yet if these failures disclose any uniform pattern they are not only revealing but instructive and can be turned to good account.

STEPHEN TOULMIN George Santayana used to insist that those who are ignorant of the history of thought are doomed to re-enact it. To this we can add a corollary: that those who are ignorant of the context of ideas are doom ed to misunderstand them. In a few self-contained fields such as pure mathematics, concepts and conceptual systems can perhaps be de tached from their historico-cultural situations; so that (for instance) a self-taught Ramanujan, living alone in India, mastered number theory (...) to a point at which he could make major contributions to European mathematics. But elsewhere the situation is different - and, in philosophy, inevitably so. For philosophical ideas and problems confront us like geological specimens in situ; and, in the act of prising them free from their historical and cultural locations, we can too easily forget about the matrix in which they took shape, and end by impossing on them a sculptural form of our own making. Something of this kind has happened in the case of Ludwig Wittgen stein. For his philosophical work has commonly been seen as an episode in the development, either of mathematicallogic, or oftwentieth-century British philosophy. His associations with Frege and Russell, Moore and Waismann, have over-shadowed everything else in his cultural origins and intellectual concerns. (shrink)

I outline some of my work and results on my matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis, according to which the entropy of a closed quantum gravitational system is equal to the system’s matter-gravity entanglement entropy. The main arguments presented are: that this hypothesis is capable of resolving what I call the second-law puzzle, i.e. the puzzle as to how the entropy increase of a closed system can be reconciled with the asssumption of unitary time-evolution; that the black hole information loss puzzle may be (...) regarded as a special case of this second law puzzle and that therefore the same resolution applies to it; that the black hole thermal atmosphere puzzle can be resolved by adopting a radically different-from-usual description of quantum black hole equilibrium states, according to which they are total pure states, entangled between matter and gravity in such a way that the partial states of matter and gravity are each approximately thermal equilibrium states ; that the Susskind–Horowitz–Polchinski string-theoretic understanding of black hole entropy as the logarithm of the degeneracy of a long string cannot be quite correct but should be replaced by a modified understanding according to which it is the entanglement entropy between a long string and its stringy atmosphere, when in a total pure equilibrium state in a suitable box, which ) goes over, at strong-coupling, to a black hole in equilibrium with its thermal atmosphere. The modified understanding in is based on a general result, which I also describe, which concerns the likely state of a quantum system when it is weakly coupled to an energy-bath and the total state is a random pure state with a given energy. This result generalizes Goldstein et al.’s ‘canonical typicality’ result to systems which are not necessarily small. (shrink)

This slender volume contains notes, kept by some of those who were present, of lectures on aesthetics and religious belief, and of conversations with Rush Rhees concerning Freud. The lectures were given informally by Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1938; the conversations took place between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein neither wrote down nor saw the material here presented, but the editor reports that the versions of lecture notes by different students agree to a remarkable extent.Despite the varying authorships and intervals of (...) time during which these Lectures and Conversations took place, the book is a surprisingly integrated whole and not simply a miscellany. What seems to unite its three topics and their treatment is Wittgenstein's examination of the kind of evidence upon which each of the three disciplines have tended to rely—his argument being that 1) Psychoanalysis has tended to rest on insufficient evidence; 2) Aesthetics on the wrong kind of evidence; and 3) Religious Belief on the false notion that it is a matter of evidence when this is not at all the case. (shrink)

_Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism _brings together twelve philosophical essays spanning the career of noted Dewey scholar, S. Morris Eames. The volume includes both critiques and interpretations of important issues in John Dewey’s value theory as well as the application of Eames’s pragmatic naturalism in addressing contemporary problems in social theory, education, and religion. The collection begins with a discussion of the underlying principles of Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism, including the concepts of nature, experience, and (...) philosophic method. Essays “Experience and Philosophical Method in John Dewey” and “Primary Experience in the Philosophy of John Dewey” develop what Eames believed to be a central theme in Dewey’s thought and provide a theoretical framework for subsequent discussion. The volume continues with specific applications of this framework in the areas of value theory, moral theory, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Eames’s analysis of value exposes the connection between the immediately felt values of experience and the more sophisticated judgments of value that are the product of reflection. From this basis in moral theory, Eames considers the derivation of judgments of obligation from judgments of fact. This discussion provides a grounding for a consideration of contemporary social issues directed by naturalistic and scientific principles. In the third section, with regard to educational theory, Eames considers possible resolutions of the current dichotomy between the factual worldview of science and the humanistic worldview of the liberal arts. The comprehensive article, “Dewey’s Views of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” connects the essays of the first and second sections and explores the placement of Dewey’s value theory with respect to morals and aesthetics. With “Creativity and Democracy,” in the fourth section, Eames also considers the concept of democracy from the standpoint of current and historical issues faced by society. This article hints at a major project of Eames’s intellectual life—the theory of democracy. The volume concludes with a discussion of the difficulty of maintaining the values of religious experience in a scientifically and technologically sophisticated world, the very topic that first brought Eames to philosophy—the meaning of religion and the religious life. Suggested solutions are offered in “The Lost Individual and Religious Unity.” _Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism _illuminates Eames’ life of inquiry, a life that included moral, social, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of value—all suffused with the influence of John Dewey. _ _ __. (shrink)

We provide a suitable theoretical foundation for the notion of the quantum coherent state which describes the electrostatic field due to a static external macroscopic charge distribution introduced by the author in 1998 and use it to rederive the formulae obtained in 1998 for the inner product of a pair of such states. (We also correct an incorrect factor of 4π\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$4\pi$$\end{document} in some of those formulae.) Contrary to what one might expect, (...) this inner product is usually non-zero whenever the total charges of the two charge distributions are equal, even if the charge distributions themselves are different. We actually display two different frameworks that lead to the same inner-product formulae, in the second of which Gauss’s law only holds in expectation value. We propose an experiment capable of ruling out the latter framework. We then address the problem of finding a product picture for QED—i.e. a reformulation in which it has a total Hamiltonian, arising as a sum of a free electromagnetic Hamiltonian, a free charged-matter Hamiltonian and an interaction term, acting on a Hilbert space which is a subspace (the physical subspace) of the full tensor product of a charged-matter Hilbert space and an electromagnetic-field Hilbert space. (The traditional Coulomb gauge formulation of QED isn’t a product picture in this sense because, in it, the longitudinal part of the electric field is a function of the charged matter operators.) Motivated by the first framework for our coherent-state construction, we find such a product picture and exhibit its equivalence with Coulomb gauge QED both for a charged Dirac field and also for a system of non-relativistic charged balls. For each of these systems, in all states in the physical subspace (including the vacuum in the case of the Dirac field) the charged matter is entangled with longitudinal photons and Gauss’s law holds as an operator equation; albeit the electric field operator (and therefore also the full Hamiltonian) while self-adjoint on the physical subspace, fails to be self-adjoint on the full tensor-product Hilbert space. The inner products of our electrostatic coherent states and the product picture for QED are relevant as analogues to quantities that play a rôle in the author’s matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis. Also, the product picture provides a temporal gauge quantization of QED which appears to be free from the difficulties which plagued previous approaches to temporal-gauge quantization. (shrink)

John Dewey wrote in Experience and Nature that his empirical method exacts of philosophy two things; in the first place, it means that the “refined methods and products” which emerge from analytic reflection or cognitive experience “be traced back to their origin in primary experience, in all its heterogeneity and fullness;” and secondly, “that the secondary methods and conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary experience, in all their coarseness and crudity, for verification.” It is my contention that (...) the precognitive experience out of which emerges reflection, inquiry, or cognitive experience and the post-cognitive experience to which reflection or inquiry returns constitute problems for Dewey’s philosophy which have not been adequately analyzed and solved. There is a certain vagueness in Dewey’s description of primary experience and the relation of primary experience to the cognitive process is a crucial issue. (shrink)