The genetically manipulated organism crisis demonstrated that technological development based solely on the law of the marketplace and State protection against serious risks to health and safety is no longer a warrant of ethical acceptability. In the first part of our paper, we critique the implicitly individualist social-acceptance model for State regulation of technology and recommend an interdisciplinary approach for comprehensive analysis of the impacts and ethical acceptability of technologies. In the second part, we present a framework for the analysis (...) of impacts and acceptability, devised—with the goal of supporting the development of specific nanotechnological applications—by a team of researchers from various disciplines. At the conceptual level, this analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgement about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. On a practical level, we present a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgement about acceptability. (shrink)

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has shed more light on the difficulty of making health care decisions integrating scientific knowledge and values associated to life and death issues, human suffering, quality of life, economic losses, liberty of movement, etc. But the difficulties related to health care decisions and the use of innovative drugs or technologies are not new, and many countries have created agencies that have the mandate to evaluate new technologies in health care. Health Technological Assessment (HTA) reports’ aim is (...) to guide the decision makers in these difficult matters. There are two ethical components in HTA. The first is the report’s presentation of an ethical evaluation of the technology. The second is the value-ladenness of the HTA decision-making process itself. When implicit value judgments are not elicited, the justification of the final decision cannot be transparent. The present paper aims to identify and elicit the implicit value-judgments related to each step of the HTA process. This research is grounded on an applied ethics decision-making paradigm based on the role of value judgments in the decision-making process. The first part discusses two different approaches to values and value judgments in HTA. In the second part, citations mentioning value judgments extracted from a systematic review on the integration of ethics into HTA were categorized to elicit the value judgments and their criteria for each different HTA decision-making steps. The results show that there are 18 decision-making steps in the HTA process where 23 implicit value-judgments can be recognized. The range of these value judgments encompasses the whole HTA process: from the initial request, the presenting of the principal issues, to the final report’s dissemination. Since stakeholders need to understand which value judgments the conclusion of a report relies on, eliciting the implicit value judgments in the HTA decision-making process should yield more transparency. (shrink)

Volume 8 of this landmark edition follows Peirce from May 1890 through July 1892—a period of turmoil as his career unraveled at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The loss of his principal source of income meant the beginning of permanent penury and a lifelong struggle to find gainful employment. His key achievement during these years is his celebrated Monist metaphysical project, which consists of five classic articles on evolutionary cosmology. Also included are reviews and essays from The Nation in (...) which Peirce critiques Paul Carus, William James, Auguste Comte, Cesare Lombroso, and Karl Pearson, and takes part in a famous dispute between Francis E. Abbot and Josiah Royce. Peirce's short philosophical essays, studies in non-Euclidean geometry and number theory, and his only known experiment in prose fiction complete his production during these years. Peirce's 1883-1909 contributions to the Century Dictionary form the content of volume 7 which is forthcoming. (shrink)

" Au bas de la statue d'Auguste Comte, place de la Sorbonne, à Paris, on pouvait lire récemment - et peut-être le peut-on encore : "Ni Comte ni Sponville". Ce graffiti exprime à sa manière l'un des grands défis de la philosophie française de cette fin de siècle, à savoir celui de sa popularité. Car la philosophie est désormais au centre de la vie publique : elle trône dans les cafés, se fait une place dans l'entreprise et s'installe même dans (...) les cabinets privés. Mais ce qui ne laisse pas d'étonner, c'est l'écho qu'elle rencontre auprès d'un grand public avide de lectures philosophiques. Il convient de s'interroger sur cet engouement, ou plutôt d'interroger les philosophes à ce sujet, eux qui sont sans doute les mieux placés pour y répondre. " Précédés d'une introduction à l'œuvre des auteurs interviewés, les six entretiens réunis dans ce livre font le point à la fois sur la pensée de chacun d'eux et sur la situation générale de la philosophie française actuelle. Bien qu'on n'ait dans aucun sens affaire ici ni à une école ni à une improbable " pensée 98 ", il se dégage quand même de ces rencontres l'image d'une philosophie qui a renoué avec la vie, qui est arrivée à reformuler, à nouveaux frais, les questions de la philosophia perennis et qui a rétabli le dialogue avec son temps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 236-239 [Access article in PDF] Book Review An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues. By Peter Harvey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xx + 478 pp. In my 1993 review article on Damien Keown's brilliant book The Nature of Buddhist Ethics (see Buddhist Studies Review 10, 1 [1993], 95-108), I praised Keown's volume as (...) one of the very most important research studies on Buddhist ethics to have been [End Page 236] written in the last half of the twentieth century. It ultimately became the grounding basis for the highly successful online Journal of Buddhist Ethics, and has helped to reawaken interest in an exciting but often overlooked aspect of the Buddhist tradition. I have no doubt that Peter Harvey's new work will do for the beginning of the new century precisely what Keown's did for the end of the previous one. In a few words, it is a scholarly masterpiece, a splendid in-depth tour of the entire Buddhist ethical tradition.Because of our shared interest, I had known that Peter Harvey was working on a comprehensive study of Buddhist ethics for some time prior to its publication, but as late as August 1999, I had not seen any part of it in manuscript form. While attending the International Association of Buddhist Studies meeting in Lausanne, I got my first chance to see the foundation of this book—its bibliography. Knowing that I am a bit of a bibliophile, Peter rather matter-of-factly handed me a copy of the bibliography and asked what I thought of it. It would be sorely understating the case to call it anything short of overwhelming, and while its totality would have been impractical to include in the book, it surely whetted my appetite for the book that is under review here.Harvey says in the introduction that "The schools of Buddhism have rich traditions of thought on ethics, though this is often scattered through a variety of works which also deal with other topics. This book aims to be an integrative over-view of ethics in the different Buddhist traditions, showing the strong continuities as well as divergencies between them" (1). In so doing, he has given us a volume that can easily serve as a stand-alone text for any university course on Buddhist ethics. The book is really divided into two major parts: Chapters 1-3, which introduce the reader to the foundation of Buddhist ethics, both Hinayana and Mahayana; and chapters 4-10, which cover the applications of Buddhist values to a wide variety of issues, some of which are both volatile and controversial. The book concludes with a glossary, list of references, list of useful addresses (some of which lead the reader into the Internet), and several valuable indexes.In the first portion of the book, chapter 1 considers "The Shared Foundations of Buddhist Ethics." It is a concise and clear survey of basic Buddhist ideas, culminating in a discussion of the place of ethics on the Buddhist path, a consideration of wise and skillful actions, and the means for distinguishing between good and bad actions. Moreover, the first chapter leads directly into the second, "Key Buddhist Values." Here the reader is taken through a very thorough consideration of the lay precepts—and especially the five precepts—and of monastic values. From this solid base, Harvey expands outward into a consideration of interpersonal relationships and social ethics. Unlike most studies of Buddhist ethics, Harvey gives ample attention to Mahayana ethics (in chapter 3, "Mahayana Emphases and Adaptations"). He considers the ethics and precepts of the bodhisattva, the role of compassion, wisdom, and skill-in-means, including such controversial topics as compassionate killing, compassionate stealing, noncelibacy, and lying. He also leads us through some specific sectarian applications of Buddhist ethics by considering Tantra, Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren. Throughout, Harvey offers his readers a helpful mix of primary and secondary [End Page 237] literature, as well as a consideration of ancient and... (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 117-118.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 27-29, August 2011.

This edition of previously unpublished correspondence from the archive of the New York Union Theological Seminary between young Charles Augustus Briggs and his teacher Isaak August Dorner dates from the second half of the 19th century. It offers insight into the transnational idea flow and interconfessional exchange on the understanding of theology. It is supplemented by letters from August Dorner jun. to Charles Briggs and two letters of recommendation that illustrate the density of the enticing web (...) of intellectual relationships. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. (...) He is widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that,despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a p. (shrink)

Although often presented as an essential, ahistorical or innate psychological entity, the notion of a ‘scientific mind’ is ripe for historical analysis. The growing historical interest in the self-fashioning of masculine identities, and more particularly the self-fashioning of the nineteenth-century scientist, has opened up a space in which to probe what was understood by someone being said to possess a ‘scientific mind’. This task is made all the more urgent by the recently revived interest of some psychologists in the concept (...) and the highly gendered and culturally conditioned understanding of the scientific mind displayed in some contemporary debates. This article contributes to that task, and fills a rare gap in Darwin studies by making the first detailed exploration of Charles Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind, as revealed in the psychological self-analysis he undertook in his ‘Recollections of the development of my mind and character’ (1876), and supplemented in hisLife of Erasmus Darwin(1879). Drawing upon a broad range of Darwin's published and unpublished works, this article argues that Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind was rooted in his earliest notebooks, and was far more central to his thought than is usually acknowledged. The article further delineates the differences between Darwin's understanding and that of his half-cousin Francis Galton, situates his understanding in relation to his reading of William Whewell and Auguste Comte, and considers what Darwin's view of the scientific mind tells us about his perspective on questions of religion and gender. Throughout, the article seeks to show that the ‘scientific mind’ is always an agglomeration of historically specific prejudices and presumptions, and concludes that this study of Darwin points to the need for a similarly historical approach to the question of the scientific mind today. (shrink)

Pendant tout le XVIII° siècle et surtout à partir de 1741, il y eut diverses tentatives pour atteindre le sommet du Mont-Blanc. Le 3 août 1787 Horace-Bénédict De Saussure parvint à la cime du fameux mont et sut donner le plus grand retentissement à cet exploit tant dans les milieux mondain que scientifique.Afin de commémorer cet évênement, Charles François Exchaquet construisit des maquettes de la Vallée de Chamonix et du Mont-Blanc qui se vendirent dans toute l'Europe. A notre connaissance (...) il n'en subsiste plus que cinq exemplaires. L'un d'entre eux est la propriété du Cabinet de Minéralogie du Musée Teyler de Haarlem, Pays-Bas. Il est en parfait état de conservation et accompagné de documents originaux dont un de la main de C. F. Exchaquet. Cette maquette donne de précieux renseignements sur la technique des plans-reliefs, qui a précédé la représentation cartographique plane.SummaryDuring the whole of the eighteenth century, and especially since 1741, various attempts have been made to climb the Mont Blanc. On 3 August 1787, Horace-Bénédict De Saussure reached the summit of the famous mountain. His achievement had an impact on society at large, as well as in the scientific community. To commemorate the event, C. F. Exchaquet built maquettes of Mont-Blanc and the Valley of Chamonix, which he sold all over Europe.To our knowledge, only five of these models have been preserved. One of them, in a perfect state, is the property of the Mineralogical Cabinet of Teyler's Museum at Haarlem, in The Netherlands. Original documentation has been preserved, including one hand-written manuscript from Exchaquet himself.The study of both documents and maquette reveals interesting information on the technique of plan-relief before the traditional use of two-dimensional cartography. (shrink)

Volume 8 of this landmark edition follows Peirce from May 1890 through July 1892—a period of turmoil as his career unraveled at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The loss of his principal source of income meant the beginning of permanent penury and a lifelong struggle to find gainful employment. His key achievement during these years is his celebrated Monist metaphysical project, which consists of five classic articles on evolutionary cosmology. Also included are reviews and essays from The Nation in (...) which Peirce critiques Paul Carus, William James, Auguste Comte, Cesare Lombroso, and Karl Pearson, and takes part in a famous dispute between Francis E. Abbot and Josiah Royce. Peirce's short philosophical essays, studies in non-Euclidean geometry and number theory, and his only known experiment in prose fiction complete his production during these years. Peirce's 1883-1909 contributions to the Century Dictionary form the content of volume 7 which is forthcoming. (shrink)

Weismann's ideas on species transmutation were first expressed in his famous debate with Moritz Wagner on the mechanism of speciation. Wagner suggested that the isolation of a colony from its original source is a preliminary and necessary factor for speciation. Weismann accepted a secondary, facilitating role for isolation, but argued that natural and sexual selection are the primary driving forces of species transmutation, and are always necessary and often sufficient causes for its occurrence. The debate with Wagner, which occurred between (...) 1868 and 1872 within the framework of Darwin's discussions of geographical distribution, was Weismann's first public battle over the mechanism of evolution. This paper, which offers the first comprehensive analysis of this debate, extends previous analyses and throws light on the underlying beliefs and motivations of these early evolutionists, focusing mainly on Weismann's views and showing his commitment to what he later called "the all sufficiency of Natural Selection." It led to the crystallization of his ideas on the central and essential role of selection, both natural and sexual, in all processes of evolution, and, already at this early stage in his theoretical thinking, was coupled with sophisticated and nuanced approach to biological organization. The paper also discusses Ernst Mayr's analysis of the debate and highlights aspects of Weismann's views that were overlooked by Mayr and were peripheral to the discussions of other historians of biology. (shrink)

On April 18, 2019, a small group of Peirce scholars arrived in Milford, the small Pennsylvania town where Charles and Juliette Peirce spent the last few decades of their lives. The purpose of the gathering was to dedicate the monument to Charles Peirce that had been completed some months before, in August, at the Peirce gravesite in the Milford Cemetery. Organized under the auspices of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and with additional support of the (...) class='Hi'>Charles S. Peirce Foundation, the program of activities for the two-day event, "Charles Peirce: In Lasting Memory," consisted of invited papers on Peirce's life; the graveside monument dedication ceremony; a visit to the Columns Museum which houses Peirce memorabilia;... (shrink)

According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have provided an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This narrative typically relies on progressive and teleological understandings of history, and commitment to some version of an ongoing struggle between science and religion. By way of contrast, recent theories of secularization, such as that of Charles Taylor, have (...) suggested that the role of science in secularization has been greatly exaggerated. This article also offers a critique of the standard “science causes secularization” story. But in contrast to other critiques of this kind, it suggests that science nonetheless has a significant role in secularization – one that can be maintained without a commitment to a crude progressivist history or a narrative of science-religion conflict. (shrink)

According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have provided an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This narrative typically relies on progressive and teleological understandings of history, and commitment to some version of an ongoing struggle between science and religion. By way of contrast, recent theories of secularization, such as that of Charles Taylor, have (...) suggested that the role of science in secularization has been greatly exaggerated. This article also offers a critique of the standard “science causes secularization” story. But in contrast to other critiques of this kind, it suggests that science nonetheless has a significant role in secularization – one that can be maintained without a commitment to a crude progressivist history or a narrative of science-religion conflict. (shrink)

From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create ways of being, as individuals and as a society. Here, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning, and the shared practice of speech shapes human experience.

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical record (...) of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true. (shrink)

A book on the problems of ethics from the perspective of language and meaning.

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over (...) other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

Larmore aims to recover three forms of moral complexity that have often been neglected by moral and political philosophers. First, he argues that virtue is not simply the conscientious adherence to principle. Rather, the exercise of virtue apply. He argues - and this is the second pattern of complexity - that recognizing the value of constitutive ties with shared forms of life does not undermine the liberal ideal of political neutrality toward differing ideals of the good life. Finally Larmore agrues (...) for what he calls the heterogeneity of morality. Moral thinking need not be exclusively deontological or consequentialist, and we should recognize that the ultimate sources of moral value are diverse. The arguments presented here do not attack the possibility of moral theory. But in addressing some of the central issues of moral and political thinking today thay attempt to restore to that thinking greater flexibility and a necessary sensitivity to our common experience. (shrink)

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons, yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as black sub-persons. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in the United States today.

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts (...) less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin and other naturalists supported a blending view of inheritance whereby offspring possess a middling mix of their parents' traits. Many of these naturalists also argued that individuals pass at least some of their acquired characteristics to their descendants. Darwin proposed that acquired characteristics and other environmentally induced changes in a parent's hereditary material account in large part for the inheritable variations that drove evolution. Inspired by the evolutionary theories of his first cousin, Darwin, (...) Francis Galton developed hereditarian notions that helped to lay the foundation for both genetics and eugenics. Eugenics was endorsed by evolutionary geneticists such as August Weismann, Karl Pearson, W. F. R. Weldon, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries, which, as a result, gave it enormous scientific credibility in America and Europe. This chapter explores the role of biology in the emergence of the eugenics movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition (...) and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism. Praise for the previous edition. (shrink)

Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne: The future of mind.--Marquis de Condorcet: The taming of the future.--Comte de Saint-Simon: The pear is ripe.--Children of Saint-Simon: The triumph of love.--Charles Fourier: The burgeoning of instinct.--Auguste Comte: Embodiment in the great being.

Conpiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason, "cock-up" theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories, since in many cases the cock-ups are simply failed conspiracies.) Why then is it silly to suppose that historical events are sometimes due to conspiracy? The only argument available to this author is drawn from the work of the late Sir Karl Popper, who criticizes what he calls "the conspiracy theory (...) of society" in The Open Society and elsewhere. His critique of the conspiracy theory is indeed sound, but it is a theory no sane person maintains. Moreover, its falsehood is compatible with the prevalence of conspiracies. Nor do his arguments create any presumption against conspiracy theories of this or that. Thus the belief that it is superstitious to posit conspiracies is itself a superstition. The article concludes with some speculations as to why this superstition is so widely believed. (shrink)