Bakhtin's dialogical philosophy of the everyday, double‐voiced prosaic and poetic discourse of asymmetrically interrelated, embodied selves, each answerable to others and the world, found liberating wisdom in modern novelizing texts, notably those of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, with the Chalcedonian Christ prototype as background. He suggests how language is used in Christian contexts by attending to different voices in confessional utterances that may include God's voice/an interlocutory infinite “third”—heard in and through others’ voices—without collapsing perspectival pluralism into relativism. Current work on (...) comparative theology, contrasted with old‐style comparative religion, echoes his insights. (shrink)

We introduce a dynamic model for evolutionary games played on a network where strategy changes are correlated according to degree of influence between players. Unlike the notion of stochastic stability, which assumes mutations are stochastically independent and identically distributed, our framework allows for the possibility that agents correlate their strategies with the strategies of those they trust, or those who have influence over them. We show that the dynamical properties of evolutionary games, where such influence neighborhoods appear, differ dramatically from (...) those where all mutations are stochastically independent, and establish some elementary convergence results relevant for the evolution of social institutions. (shrink)

During the period covered by this volume, Bertrand Russell first retired from and then resumed his philosophical career. In 1927 he published two philosophy books, The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy . His next book in academic philosophy, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , was not published until 1940. Yet, Russell published a significant amount of essays and popular books between 1927 and 1946, mostly to finance the running of Beacon Hill School, and his growing family. (...) Those years also saw his break-up with Dora Russell, his marriage to Patricia Spence and a move of the family to the United States. Volume 10 brings together Russell's writings on ethics, politics, religion and academic philsophy. It is an invaluable guide to the thought and development of one of the most famous philosophers of this century. (shrink)

This volume collects together Russell's philosophical writings during the period from 1947-68. For about half of this period Russell worked steadily at philosophy but after the publication of _My Philosophical Development_ in 1959 he retired from academic philosophy for the second time. After that date, only the occasional philosophical piece appeared, as he was preoccupied with political writings. In this volume there are a handful of papers dated later than 1959, and all of these were certainly written by Russell himself. (...) This volume contains Russell's writings on diverse philosophical interests, including autobiographical and self-critical papers, critiques of other philosophers and his controversial opinions on Christianity. (shrink)

This chapter explores if androids like Ash in Alien have rights. Philosophers have tried to answer this type of question in several ways. The chapter looks at a few of these different ways, thinking about some cases that might be surprisingly difficult to explain, like why babies matter, whether animals have moral status, and what we should think about synthetics in this regard. Australian philosopher, Peter Singer argues that it is speciesist to treat human beings as the only things (...) worthy of moral status. He thinks speciesism, like racism and sexism, is morally abhorrent. Animals, aliens, or androids might be in the class of things having moral status. Autonomy is one trait some philosophers, have thought is a good candidate for conferring moral status. One reason people might think of autonomy as the supreme notion of moral status is the role it plays in fixing the meaning of other moral ideas. (shrink)

In the aftermath of Peter Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, the argument he put forward received significant criticism, largely on the grounds that it demanded too much of moral agents. Several attempts have been made since to formulate moral principles that adequately express the stringency of our duties of beneficence. Richard Miller proposed one such option, which has several advantages over Singer’s principle. In particular, because it concerns our dispositions rather than operating over every possible occasion for beneficence, it (...) avoids problems of iterative demands. However, I argue that Miller’s principle is inadequate, because 1) it seems too weak, 2) it appears to be ambiguous and 3) it can give unduly harsh verdicts on unlucky moral agents. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: SECTION 1 THE WORLD BEFORE GLOBALIZATION: CHANGING -- SCALES OF EXPERIENCE Edited by Denis Shaw -- Chapter 1 Pre-capitalist worlds Denis Shaw -- Chapter 2 The rise and spread of capitalism Terry Slater -- Chapter 3 The making of the twentieth-century world Denis Shaw -- SECTION 2 SOCIETY, SETTLEMENT AND CULTURE Edited by Denis Shaw -- Chapter 4 Cities Allan Cochrane -- Chapter 5 Rural alternatives Ian Bowler -- Chapter 6 Geography, culture and global change (...) Cheryl McEwan -- SECTION 3 POPULATION, RESOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT -- Edited by iMichael Bradshaw -- Chapter 7 Demographic transformations Tony Champion -- Chapter 8 Resources and development Michael Bradshaw -- Chapter 9 Changing geographies of global food production Brian Ilbery -- Chapter 10 Alternative geographies of global development and inequality -- Marcus Power -- SECTION 4 PRODUCTION, EXCHANGE AND CONSUMPTION -- Edited by Peter Daniels -- Chapter 11 The geography of the economy Peter Daniels -- Chapter 12 The global production system: from Fordism to post-Fordism -- John Bryson and Nick Henry -- Chapter 13 The global financial system: worlds of monies Jane Pollard -- Chapter 14 Worlds of consumption Philip Crang -- SECTION 5 GEOPOLITICS, STATES AND CITIZENSHIP -- Edited by James Sidaway -- Chapter 15 Geopolitical traditions James Sidaway -- Chapter 16 The place of the nation-state James Sidaway -- Chapter 17 States, citizenship and collective action Murray Low -- Conclusions Challenges and promises -- Peter Daniels, Michael Bradshaw, Denis Shaw and James Sidaway -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

A teacher of analytic metaphysics faces a bewildering array of textbook and anthology options. Which should one choose? Thisdepends, of course, on one’s course and goals as instructor. This comparative book review will survey several options—both longstanding and recent to press—from a pedagogical perspective. The options are not exclusive. Many are natural complements and would work nicely with other collections or single-author texts. I shall focus my attention here on six texts (in this order): two textbooks, one by Peter (...) van Inwagen and one by Michael Jubien, two anthologies of previously published papers (one edited by van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman, another by Michael Loux), a collection of new paired “pro-and-con” essays assembled by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean Zimmerman, and finally a hybrid text/anthology by Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd. (shrink)

Introducing The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne tells us that rational thought has turned out to be “more imaginative than cognitive scientists...supposed,” and—more to the point here—that “[I]maginative thought is more rational than scientists imagined”. It would be unwise to take this mini-manifesto too seriously. The claim to which Byrne actually gives sustained attention is less philosophically sexy and more solidly empirical. This book is primarily concerned with experimental evidence in support of the thesis that the particular counterfactual conjectures people entertain—‘If (...) Mary had asked Peter to pick the peppers, he would have picked the peppers’—are governed by the same small set of psychological principles that influence inferential reasoning about them—‘Peter didn’t pick the peppers? Well, then, it stands to reason that Mary didn’t ask him to’. Byrne conjectures that this same small set of principles might also help in understanding how people creatively generate new members of a category, interpret novel phrases like ‘cactus fish’, and solve insight problems. By contrast, Byrne’s discussion of criteria for the rationality of counterfactual thought comes close to the end of the book and is notably modest and tentative. Perhaps counterfactual thought counts as rational if it is capable of producing the “best” judgments; perhaps the best counterfactual judgments are those that strike us as most plausible; perhaps plausibility is a hallmark of rationality because it is grounded in recognition of “fault lines in reality”. On the other hand, perhaps not. Counterfactual thoughts that paralyze people with regret are often compellingly plausible. Despite their plausibility, Byrne characterizes such “dysfunctional” counterfactuals as “irrational.” Perhaps this can be harmonized by the competence/performance distinction; perhaps a canny reader would be better advised to settle for the psychology. (shrink)

The idea behind Lauren Slater's book is simple but ingenious: pluck 10 leading experiments in 20th-century psychology from the pages of the scientific journals in which they were first published, dust off the painfully academic style in which they were written up, add some personal details about the experimenters and retell them as intellectual adventures that help us to understand who we are and what our minds are like.

The idea behind Lauren Slater's book is simple but ingenious: pluck 10 leading experiments in 20th-century psychology from the pages of the scientific journals in which they were first published, dust off the painfully academic style in which they were written up, add some personal details about the experimenters and retell them as intellectual adventures that help us to understand who we are and what our minds are like.

The valencies of the lanthanides vary more than was once thought. In addition to valencies associated with a half-full shell, there are valencies associated with a quarter- and three-quarter-full shell. This can be explained on the basis of Slater’s theory of many-electron atoms. The same theory explains the variation in complexing constants in the trivalent state. Valency in metallic and organometallic compounds is also discussed.

In his recent comment on my brief essay on concepts of God in this journal Peter Slater raises some pivotal questions that I feel obligated to answer.

Despite decades of concerted efforts to communicate to the public on important scientific issues pertaining to the environment and public health, gaps between public acceptance and the scientific consensus on these issues remain stubborn. One strategy for dealing with this shortcoming has been to focus on the existence of scientific consensus on the relevant matters. Recent science communication research has added support to this general idea, though the interpretation of these studies and their generalizability remains a matter of contention. In (...) this paper, we describe results of a qualitative interview study on different models of scientific consensus and the relationship between such models and trust of science, finding that familiarity with scientific consensus is rarer than might be expected. These results suggest that consensus messaging strategies may not be effective. (shrink)

The impact of Peirce's philosophy of religion on subsequent religious thinkers was almost immediate. Within five years of the appearance of Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," in 1913, Josiah Royce published his brilliant Hibbert Lectures on The Problem of Christianity, delivered at Oxford earlier that year. It was the first—and in many respects remains the most impressive—attempt to adapt Peirce's ideas for the purposes of articulating a comprehensive philosophical theology. During the last 100 years, only a (...) handful of thinkers have followed Royce's lead, first Charles Hartshorne, more recently Robert Corrington, Hermann Deuser, Robert Neville and Peter Ochs. (Other scholars have set about the... (shrink)

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

In the modern world, progress in the art and science of living has not kept pace with progress in the other arts and sciences. Man does not lead a better and a happier life than he used to do. There are many indications that human conduct is getting worse, and that men are more discontented, more miserable than they used to be. One means of moral progress would be to provide a sound and universally accepted code of ethics. The world (...) would then have, at least, a moral standard by which human actions could be judged. It would go a long way toward forming a healthy public opinion on all moral questions. The Christian religion furnishes the highest moral standard ever manifested to the world. Unfortunately, there are two fundamentally different conceptions of Christian morality the Catholic and the Protestant conception. Perhaps if we put them side by side the truth will appear.This book begins: “Is man a moral or a merely physical agent? Are all man's thoughts, words, and actions determined by merely physical and necessary laws like those of electricity or steam? If man is a merely physical agent, then morality is only a department of physics, and, without doubt, it will be an important department of physics. It is important for us to know the laws which govern the action of gravitation, or of electricity, or of steam, but it is still more important for us to know the laws which govern the action of men. If man is nothing but matter and force, by patient study we shall be able to predict his every thought, word, and action with as much certainty as we can predict the action of a steam-engine or of a motor-car. Such knowledge would be invaluable for governments, employers, and parents. It would not be less valuable for the private citizen, the employed, and for children still under parental sway.“But is man a merely physical agent, a mere natural machine? Is man's action determined solely by the antecedents and conditions of action, so that if we knew them all we could predict infallibly what that action would be? Or is there something in man which clearly distinguishes his action from that of merely physical causes?”. (shrink)

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non-nomic matters of fact? Lange's criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of (...) primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a 'mixed' metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive. (shrink)

This paper argues that a set of questioning attitudes are among the foundations of human and animal minds. While both verbal questioning and states of curiosity are generally explained in terms of metacognitive desires for knowledge or true belief, I argue that each is better explained by a prelinguistic sui generis type of mental attitude of questioning. I review a range of considerations in support of such a proposal and improve on previous characterizations of the nature of these attitudes. I (...) then broaden their explanatory scope to include a number of forms of exploratory search. The paper has three main goals: to characterize the nature of the questioning attitudes, outlining their causal role and type of content; to argue that they are fundamental components of the mind, being widespread among animals and not constructed during ontogeny out of other attitudes; and to suggest that they explain a great deal more behavior than one might think. (shrink)

We propose a solution to the problem of logical omniscience in what we take to be its fundamental version: as concerning arbitrary agents and the knowledge attitude per se. Our logic of knowledge is a spin-off from a general theory of thick content, whereby the content of a sentence has two components: an intension, taking care of truth conditions; and a topic, taking care of subject matter. We present a list of plausible logical validities and invalidities for the logic of (...) knowledge per se for arbitrary agents, and isolate three explanatory factors for them: the topic-sensitivity of content; the fragmentation of knowledge states; the defeasibility of knowledge acquisition. We then present a novel dynamic epistemic logic that yields precisely the desired validities and invalidities, for which we provide expressivity and completeness results. We contrast this with related systems and address possible objections. (shrink)

I first show in this paper how twentieth century Set Theory got into its greatest tangle by, amongst other things, regarding relational remarks like ‘Rxy’ asbinary functions. I then show how the lack of indexicality, and of ‘that’-clauses, in Modern Logic led that subject into its intractable difficulties with the Theory of Truth. Both errors arose not only through a contempt for ordinary language, but also through the related failure to recognise that being logical is not a matter of being (...) brainy, but of being coherent. It is not a mathematical talent, but a literary one. Later in the paper I go on to demonstrate this same conclusion with respect to Modal Logic and General Intensional Logic, and in particular with respect to fictions, since these are the central items that have been misunderstood, as is witnessed in some recent writings of Graham Priest. (shrink)

Joe Campbell has identified an apparent flaw in van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument. It apparently derives a metaphysically necessary conclusion from what Campbell argues is a contingent premise: that the past is in some sense necessary. I criticise Campbell’s examples attempting to show that this is not the case (in the requisite sense) and suggest some directions along which an incompatibilist could reconstruct her argument so as to remain immune to Campbell’s worries.

What is ethics? Where do moral standards come from? Are they based on emotions, reason, or some innate sense of right and wrong? For many scientists, the key lies entirely in biology---especially in Darwinian theories of evolution and self-preservation. But if evolution is a struggle for survival, why are we still capable of altruism? In his classic study The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer argues that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's kin and community members but (...) has developed into a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern. Drawing on philosophy and evolutionary psychology, he demonstrates that human ethics cannot be explained by biology alone. Rather, it is our capacity for reasoning that makes moral progress possible. In a new afterword, Singer takes stock of his argument in light or recent research on the evolution of morality.--Publisher's description. (shrink)

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.

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...) on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)

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)

J. К. Galbraith begins his book on the history and current problems of money with the following statement: “There is much that is diverting in the history of money, but even more that provides a rich reflection of human behavior and human folly.”.

Introduction These essays have been written over a period of about ten years and have already been published separately in various places. ...

Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or (...) was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men. (shrink)

In a previous issue of Philosophical Investigations Professor Radford provides a counterexample to the equation1: a word is on the tip of a man's tongue IFF (a) he can recognize the word and (b1) he believes he may be able to produce It (fairly soon).

Two uses of ‘if are discussed which do not involve conditions. The first is illustrated in the example ‘If he's here, I don't see him’, the second in ‘He's not a dunce, if a trifle stupid’. A third non‐conditional use, cognate with the first is also mentioned: it would be illustrated in the example ‘If he's a Dutchman, I'll eat my hat’. It is argued that recent attempts to formulate a logic of conditionals have distorted our understanding of ‘if, by (...) ignoring these uses, sometimes deliberately. Specifically, as a result, many arguments involving ‘if have been misjudged as invalid, because the expectation has been that ‘if expresses a condition. It is suggested that the traditional analysis of ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ in terms of ‘if and only if, is partly to blame for these misunderstandings. And the proper understanding of ‘if’ which emerges shows it is quite fully captured in the propositional calculus. (shrink)

One of the claims made for C. S. Peirce's existential graphs has been that they are a deductively complete formulation of first-order logic with identity. As Peirce presented them, this is true only for certain versions of first-order logic :those which do not include terms for individuals. I amend Peirce's rules here, showing, in particular, how they are capable of demonstrating that, for instance, ?Jack is in the kitchen? contradicts ?Jack is not in the kitchen?