'There is much food for thought in McGinn's discussions and each chapter is rich with a series of considerations for thinking that the currently received views on the various topics have some serious difficulties that need confronting... For those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, this book will stimulate much further thought' -Mind 'The sweep of the book is broad and the pace is brisk... There is much material here to provide the basis for many a deep philosophical (...) discussion' -Mind 'Lucid and provocative little book... clear, direct and well argued' -Times Higher Education SupplementIdentity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth are fundamental philosophical concerns. Colin McGinn treats them both philosophically and logically, aiming for maximum clarity and minimum pointless formalism. He contends that there are real logical properties that challenge naturalistic metaphysical outlooks. These concepts are not definable, though we can say a good deal about how they work. The aim of Logical Properties is to bring philosophy back to philosophical logic. (shrink)

This paper scrutinizes the debate over logical pluralism. I hope to make this debate more tractable by addressing the question of motivating data: what would count as strong evidence in favor of logical pluralism? Any research program should be able to answer this question, but when faced with this task, many logical pluralists fall back on brute intuitions. This sets logical pluralism on a weak foundation and makes it seem as if nothing pressing is at stake in the debate. The (...) present paper aims to improve this situation by looking at a promising case study and drawing general lessons about the kind of evidence that would support logical pluralism. I argue that the best motivation for logical pluralism will ultimately be rooted in certain kinds of performative data. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing arti® cial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from (...) computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational di culties accompanying the diŒerent types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the eŒects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of arti® cially intelligent automata. (shrink)

This note motivates a logic for a theory that can express its own notion of logical consequence—a ‘syntactically closed’ theory of naive validity. The main issue for such a logic is Curry’s paradox, which is averted by the failure of contraction. The logic features two related, but different, implication connectives. A Hilbert system is proposed that is complete and non-trivial.

Should cognitive scientists be any more embarrassed about their lack of a discipline-fixing definition of cognition than biologists are about their inability to define “life”? My answer is “no”. Philosophers seeking a unique “mark of the cognitive” or less onerous but nevertheless categorical characterizations of cognition are working at a level of analysis upon which hangs nothing that either cognitive scientists or philosophers of cognitive science should care about. In contrast, I advocate a pluralistic stance towards uses of the term (...) ‘cognition’ that eschews the urge to treat cognition as a metaphysically well-defined “natural” kind. (shrink)

Colin McGinn presents his latest work on consciousness in ten interlinked papers, four of them previously unpublished. He extends and deepens his controversial solution to the mind-body problem, defending the view that consciousness is both ontologically unproblematic and epistemologically impenetrable. He also investigates the basis of our knowledge that there is a mind-body problem, and the bearing of this on attempted solutions. McGinn goes on to discuss the status of first-person authority, the possibility of atomism with respect to consciousness, (...) extreme dualism, and the role of non-existent objects in constituting intentionality. He argues that traditional claims about our knowledge of our own mind and of the external world can be inverted; that atomism about the conscious mind might turn out to be true; that dualism is more credible the more extreme it is; and that all intentionality involves non-existent objects. These are all surprising positions, but he contends that what the philosophy of mind needs now is 'methodological radicalism' - a willingness to consider new and seemingly extravagant ideas. (shrink)

Milton Friedman's article, The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits, owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. It is false that business does, or would, operate exclusively in economic terms, that managers concentrate obsessively on profitability, and that ethics can be marginalized. These errors reflect basic contradictions: an apolitical political base, altruistic agents of selfishness, and good deriving from (...) greed. (shrink)

The principle of autonomy is widely recognized to be of utmost importance in bioethics; however, we argue that this principle is often misapplied when one fails to distinguish two different contexts in medicine. When a particular patient is offered treatment options, she has the ultimate say in whether to proceed with any of those treatments. However, when deciding whether a particular intervention should be regarded as a form of medical treatment in the first place, it is the medical community who (...) has the ultimate say. Some argue that particular interventions should be allowed by virtue of the fact that they are autonomously requested. But making such an argument fails to distinguish between these two contexts and misapplies the principle of autonomy, ultimately having the potential to instigate problematic changes in the practice of medicine. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the study of paracompleteness and paraconsistency. We present two logics that address the following questions in novel ways. How can the paracomplete theorist characterize the formulas that defy excluded middle while maintaining that not all formulas are of this kind? How can the paraconsistent theorist characterize the formulas that obey explosion while still maintaining that there are some formulas not of this kind?

Recently something close to a consensus about the best way to naturalize the notion of biological function appears to be emerging. Nonetheless, teleological notions in biology remain controversial. In this paper we provide a naturalistic analysis for the notion of natural design. Many authors assume that natural design should be assimilated directly to function. Others find the notion problematic because it suggests that evolution is a directed process. We argue that both of these views are mistaken. Our naturalistic account does (...) not simply equate design with function. We argue that the distinction between function and design is important for understanding the evolution of the physical and behavioral traits of organisms. (shrink)

Whether it's conkers in the schoolyard, kicking a football in the park, or playing tennis on Wimbledon Centre Court, sport impacts all of our lives. But what is sport and why do we do it? Colin McGinn, renowned philosopher , reflects on our love of sport and explores the value it has for us and the part it plays in a life lived well. Written in the form of a memoir, McGinn discusses many of the sports he has engaged (...) in - from pole-vaulting and gymnastics to windsurfing and tennis - and describes the athletic experience from the inside, as a participant, articulating what is uniquely valuable about sport as an activity. Sport, argues McGinn, takes us to our fullest potential as human beings, it's what we fling at mortality to keep it at bay, a holiday from the Unbearable Heaviness of Being. "Sport" expresses our nature, it bears upon our self-realization. If a happy life consists in one that expresses fully our natural faculties, then sports must play an essential role in our lifes. Mind-body unity, the nature of practical knowledge and physical skill, success and failure, the ethics of competition, peak experiences, the spectacle of professional sport, aesthetics and death, McGinn discusses these and many other issues while telling of his own sporting mishaps and adventures. To use the vernacular of philosophy, "Sport" captures the phenomenology of sport - what it's like to do it - and in doing so shows how sport is a way of expressing and understanding who and what we are, way beyond whether we are a good sportsman, a bad loser or a team-player. For anyone who has ever thought that there must be less humiliating ways to enjoy yourself than being thrashed on the tennis court, "Sport" will reassure you that it's time not wasted. (shrink)

I argue that by incorrectly translating Wittgenstein's remarks into a set of philosophical theses of the sort Wittgenstein explicitly denies making, Colin McGinn systematically misinterprets Wittgenstein's later claims about meaning and rules. Once this sort of mistake is corrected, it becomes implausible to claim, as McGinn does, that Wittgenstein rejects a social conception of rules and meaning.

Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.

Knowledge and Reality brings together a selection of Colin McGinn's philosophical essays from the 1970s to the 1990s, whose unifying theme is the relation between the mind and the world. McGinn defends a realist view, but emphasises the epistemological problems that come with it. He has written a new postscript to each essay, placing it in its philosophical context and offering his current reflections on the topic.

In this paper we1 assess the potential for research on nonhuman animals to address questions about the phenomenology of painful experiences. Nociception, the basic capacity for sensing noxious stimuli, is widespread in the animal kingdom. Even rel- atively primitive animals such as leeches and sea slugs possess nociceptors, neurons that are functionally specialized for sensing noxious stimuli (Walters 1996). Vertebrate spinal cords play a sophisticated role in processing and modulating nociceptive signals, providing direct control of some motor responses to noxious (...) stimuli, and a basic capacity for Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning (Grau et al. 1990; Grau 2002). Higher brain systems provide additional layers of association, top-down control, and cognition. In humans, at least, these higher brain systems also give rise to the conscious experiences that are characteristic of pain. What can be said about the experiences of other animals who possess nervous systems that are similar but not identical to humans? (shrink)

Questions about fish consciousness and cognition are receiving increasing attention. In this paper, I explain why one must be careful to avoid drawing conclusions too hastily about this hugely diverse set of species.

Although Anders Nygren deserves a lot of the credit for launching the debate about the Christian understanding of love, his insistence on the distinctiveness of agape has been severely challenged by advocates for the sensuousness of eros and the mutuality of philia. The most serious challenge, however, may come from defenses of agape where the altruistic distinctiveness of the theological thrust is qualified by the claims of an ethical horizon. In spite of his disservice to eros and his neglect of (...) philia, Nygren deserves to be heard in his insistence that agape is a unique concept, and that this uniqueness is due particularly to its theological source and reference. (shrink)

This paper is about the underlying logical principles of scientific theories. In particular, it concerns ex contradictione quodlibet (ECQ) the principle that anything follows from a contradiction. ECQ is valid according to classical logic, but invalid according to paraconsistent logics. Some advocates of paraconsistency claim that there are ‘real’ inconsistent theories that do not erupt with completely indiscriminate, absurd commitments. They take this as evidence in favor of paraconsistency. Michael (2016) calls this the non-triviality strategy (NTS). He argues that this (...) strategy fails in its purpose. I will show that Michael's criticism significantly over-reaches. The fundamental problem is that he places more of a burden on the advocate of paraconsistency than on the advocate of classical logic. The weaknesses in Michael's argument are symptomatic of this preferential treatment of one viewpoint in the debate over another. He does, however, make important observations that allow us to clarify some of the complexities involved in giving a logical reconstruction of a theory. I will argue that there are abductive arguments deserving of further consideration for the claim that paraconsistent logic offers the best explanation of the practice of inconsistent science. In this sense, the debate is still very much open. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOscar Larsson’s sympathetic critique of constructivist institutionalism calls for a clarification of my understanding of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and their mutual interdependence. That interdependence lies at the heart of any genuinely constructivist approach, just as the interdependence of structure and agency lies at the heart of any genuinely institutionalist approach. As such, I reject the charge of subjectivism just as I would that of voluntarism. Building on the social ontology of Berger and Luckmann, we can distinguish between subjectivity and intra-subjectivity and (...) proceed to show how the latter implies a notion of inter-subjectivity. An example of the social construction of a political crisis shows that social facts are made and remade through a fusion of inter- and intra-subjectivities. (shrink)

It has been much debated whether Tractarian objects are what Russell would have called particulars or whether they include also properties and relations. This paper claims that the debate is misguided: there is no logical category such that Wittgenstein intended the reader of the Tractatus to understand his objects either as providing examples of or as not providing examples of that category. This is not to say that Wittgenstein set himself against the very idea of a logical category: quite the (...) contrary. However, where Russell presents his logical variety of particulars and the various types of universal, and Frege presents his of objects and the various types of function, Wittgenstein denies the propriety of such a priori expositions. Wittgenstein envisages a variety of logical types of entity but insists that the nature of these types is something to be discovered only through analysis. (shrink)

Colin McGinn; XI*—A priori and a posteriori Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 195–208, https://doi.org/.

Here I interpret a central passage in Plato's Sophist by focusing on understudied elements that provide insight into the fit of the dialogue's parts and the Sophist-Statesman diptych as a whole. I argue that the Eleatic Stranger's account of what the dialectician "adequately views" at Sophist 253d1-e3 involves both division and the communion of ontological kinds, not just one or the other as has been typically argued. I also consider other key passages and the turn throughout the dialogue from imagistic (...) opining toward noetic understanding. (shrink)

Property rights are the rules governing ownership in society. This Element offers an analytical framework to understand the origins and consequences of property rights. It conceptualizes of the political economy of property rights as a concern with the follow questions: What explains the origins of economic and legal property rights? What are the consequences of different property rights institutions for wealth creation, conservation, and political order? Why do property institutions change? Why do legal reforms relating to property rights such as (...) land redistribution and legal titling improve livelihoods in some contexts but not others? In analyzing property rights, the authors emphasize the complementarity of insights from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, including Austrian economics, public choice, and institutional economics, including the Bloomington School of institutional analysis and political economy. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to provide enough of an account of the origins of cognitive ethology and the controversy surrounding it to help ethicists to gauge for themselves how to balance skepticism and credulity about animal minds when communicating with scientists. We believe that ethicists’ arguments would benefit from better understanding of the historical roots of ongoing controversies. It is not appropriate to treat some widely reported results in animal cognition as if their interpretations are a matter of (...) scientific consensus. It is especially important to understand why loose references to “cognitive ethology” by philosophers can signal ignorance of the field to scientists who are more deeply immersed in the relevant literature. Understanding the variety of approaches to cognitive phenomena in animals is essential if such capacities are to form the foundation of scientifically-informed ethical reasoning about animals. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett and Stephen Stich have independently, but similarly, argued that the contents of mental states cannot be specified precisely enough for the purposes of scientific prediction and explanation. Dennett takes this to support his view that the proper role for mentalistic terms in science is heuristic. Stich takes it to support his view that cognitive science should be done without reference to mental content at all. I defend a realist understanding of mental content against these attacks by Dennett and (...) Stich. I argue that they both mistake the difficulty of making content ascriptions precise for the impossibility of doing so. (shrink)

Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman exhibit several related dialectical methods relevant to Platonic education: maieutic in Theaetetus, bifurcatory division in Sophist and Statesman, and non-bifurcatory division in Statesman, related to the ‘god-given’ method in Philebus. I consider the nature of each method through the letter or element paradigm, used to reflect on each method. At issue are the element’s appearances in given contexts, its fitness for communing with other elements like it in kind, and its own nature defined through its (...) relations to others. These represent stages of inquiry for the Platonic student inquiring into the sources of knowledge. (shrink)

The second International Knowledge and Discourse Conference, held at the University of Hong Kong in June 2002, was the forum for the long-awaited debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller. Bruno Latour counts beyond two. He places the blame for the emphasis in academia on the subject-object distinction on Kant. Latour wants academics to acknowledge that things act, and suggests we look at other traditions, e.g. the Chinese, for alternatives to the subject-object dichotomy. Steve Fuller concentrated on the moral project (...) of science, which is to draw a distinction between the human and the non-human and, to highlight the fact that, as the culmination of the sciences, social science has a particular responsibility to make this distinction. He accused Bruno Latour of evading the moral issue. The debate can be read as a reiteration of the postions of Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller on the question of heterogeneity at the theoretical level, but it did not address the topic at the practical or research level. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis of social play reveals rules of (...) engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. Because of its significance in development, play may provide a foundation of fairness for other forms of cooperation that are advantageous to group living. Questions about the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality are best answered by attention to the details of what animals do when they engage in social play – how they negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, and to develop trust. We consider questions such as why play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does “being fair” mean being more fit? Do individual variations in play influence an individual’s reproductive fitness? Can we use information about the foundations of moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? We conclude that there is likely to be strong selection for cooperative fair play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play, to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. (shrink)

In this chapter, Colin Marshall argues that Schopenhauer’s views about the foundations of morality pose important challenges for five tenets of contemporary metaethics. After presenting these challenges, Marshall explores the potential viability of contemporary Schopenhauerian approaches to metaethics that would leave aside his radical metaphysical monism.

ABSTRACT A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue and those for whom it was a positional issue. The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism (...) characteristic of Western liberal democracies. (shrink)

First paragraph: This paper seeks to understand various paradoxes as cases of conflicting rules. In particular, the ambition is to outline a new perspective on and response to the Liar -- though it will take us a while to get that far. We begin in Section 1 with an account of simple rule confliction. Section 2 then brings this account to bear on a paradox, the Secretary Liberation Paradox, which is readily seen to involve conflicting rules. Finally in Section 3 (...) I suggest that the Liar can also be seen as a case of rule confliction, and outline briefly how that perspective provides for Liar arguments to be blocked. (shrink)

Cognitive ethologists are in need of a good theoretical framework for attributing intentional states. Heyes and Dickinson (1990) present criteria that they claim are necessary for an intentional explanation of behavior to be justified. They suggest that questions of intentionality can only be investigated under controlled laboratory conditions and they apply their criteria to laboratory experiments to argue that the common behavior of approaching food is not intentional in most animals. We dispute the details of their argument and interpretation of (...) the laboratory experiments. While criteria such as those suggested have a role to play in comparative studies of cognition, both laboratory and field studies are important for assessing the applicability of intentional explanations across different taxa. (shrink)

By an argument form I shall mean a schema consisting of a string of symbols that are place-­‐holders for either logical terms or non-­‐logical (descriptive/content) terms: substituting terms of the appropriate kind for the symbols yields an argument. A substitution instance of an argument form is an argument that arises as a result of such a substitution. By a valid argument I shall mean an argument such that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. (...) Thus, an invalid argument is an argument such that it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. (shrink)

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments. I will describe two different ways of diminishing the appearance of the gap, and argue that both (...) of them present challenges to ethicists seeking a firm scientific basis for their claims about the moral status of animals. I argue that more clarity about the role of appeals to science by applied ethicists leads to questions about the effectiveness of such appeals, and that these questions might best be pursued empirically. (shrink)

The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple. Suppose indispensability to science is the only good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects. Either the dispensability of mathematical objects to science can be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects, or their (...) dispensability cannot be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of mathematical objects which are genuinely platonic. Therefore, indispensability, whether true or false, does not support platonism. Mathematical platonists claim that at least some of the objects which are the subject matter of pure mathematics (e.g. numbers, sets, groups) actually exist. Furthermore, they claim that these objects differ radically from the concrete objects (trees, cats, stars, molecules) which inhabit the material world. We take the standard platonistic position to include the claim that platonic objects lack spatio-temporal location and causal powers. Many (perhaps most) mathematical platonists subscribe to this view.1 But some who call themselves (or might be called) mathematical platonists.. (shrink)

Like all previously published volumes of his lectures, the content of The Government of the Living defies brief summary. It shows us Foucault in 1980 mapping out a major new phase in his work in terms that complicate our existing understanding of his unfinished project. My review looks in turn at the two parts of the course: an unusually lengthy discussion of method and heuristics, followed by a tightly focused study of early Christian regimes of truth. I suggest that the (...) complex opening theoretical reflections in these lectures go well beyond mapping the course of the immediately following historical analysis. They need to be seen in coordination with other conceptual innovations introduced over the following years, putting a task that Foucault calls here a “history of the power of truth” on his agenda alongside, and in integral connection with the previously defined tasks of a history of governmentality and a history of the subject. A newly published discussion in Berkeley later in 1980 adds crucial context to these Paris lectures, spelling out the linkage of structures of subjectivation to governability and of penitential ascetics to pastoral power. Taken together, the later books and lectures can now be seen to establish a framework of what I suggest we can call “alethic” or “aletheological” analysis, analysing and mapping across the span of Western history the modes of engagement of life and truth, with a view to enabling a renewed analysis of the political present. (shrink)