Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Paul Ricoeur was one of the foremost interpreters and translators of Edmund Husserl's philosophy. These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic. In Ricoeur's philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism came of age and these essays provide an introduction to the Husserlian elements which most heavily influenced his own philosophical position.

Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to (...) be published by Cambridge University Press. We describe the materials that make up Moore’s notes, explain their unique value, review the principal editorial challenges that these materials present, and provide a brief outline of our editorial project. (shrink)

Taking Parenting Public makes a compelling case that parenting has become dangerously undervalued in America today. It calls for a new investment—both personal and public—into the work of raising children and argues that we are all "stockholders" in the next generation. With a foreword by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, Taking Parenting Public crosses boundaries to bring together thinkers from diverse fields spanning the political spectrum. It features contributions from distinguished experts in economics, political science, public policy, child development, (...) public health, history, and the media. While recent books have focused on working mothers or absent fathers, Taking Parenting Public is the first volume to take a comprehensive look at the common struggles of parents. These essays go beyond the usual chest-beating about busy parents torn between work and family demands to suggest bold solutions. Instead of the typical call for "parent replacement"—more child care, more after school programs and more mentors—the contributors offer fresh strategies for "parent replenishment," ways to put mothers and fathers back into the lives of their children not only as economic providers, but also as emotional and moral providers. (shrink)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

Utilising science and technology to maximize human performance is often an essential feature of military activity. This can often be focused on mission success rather than just the welfare of the individuals involved. This tension has the potential to threaten the autonomy of soldiers and military physicians around the taking or administering of enhancement neurotechnologies (e.g., pills, neural implants, and neuroprostheses). The Hybrid Framework was proposed by academic researchers working in the U.S. context and comprises “rules” for military neuroenhancement (e.g., (...) ensuring transparency and maintaining dignity of the warfighter). Integrating traditional bioethical perspectives with the unique requirements of the military environment, it has been referenced by military/government agencies tasked with writing official ethical frameworks. Our two-part investigation explored the ethical dimensions of military neuroenhancements with military officers – those most likely to be making decisions in this area in the future. In three workshops, structured around the Hybrid Framework, we explored what they thought about the ethical issues of enhancement neurotechnologies. From these findings, we conducted a survey (N = 332) to probe the extent of rule endorsement. Results show high levels of endorsement for a warfighter’s decision-making autonomy, but lower support for the view that enhanced warfighters would pose a danger to society after service. By examining the endorsement of concrete decision-making guidelines, we provide an overview of how military officers might, in practice, resolve tensions between competing values or higher-level principles. Our results suggest that the military context demands a recontextualisation of the relationship between military and civilian ethics. (shrink)

This essay combines information on the recent ISUD Sixth World Congress Humanity at the Turning Point: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom and some reflections inspired by presentations and discussions at the congress. It is focused on the presentation of one of the keynote speakers, Karl-Otto Apel, entitled “Discourse Ethics, Democracy, and International Law: Toward a Globalization of Practical Reason”. Apel argued that the transcendental-pragmatic foundation of morality serves as the ultimate basis for the universal conception of law, e.g., of human (...) rights. It establishes the transcendental basis of the idea of democracy, and at the same time establishes a regulative principle for a possible critique of the democratic states. Apel discussed the question of a political order of law able to represent the idea of human rights. In his approach to it, he referred to Kant’s idea of “a federation of free states” (as opposite to a “world state”) in the solution of the problem of a cosmopolitan system He noticed the tension between two orientations of international law: one towards “human rights” and hence a cosmopolitan law of single citizens and the other towards the sovereignty of single states. He asserted that the universal conception of law cannot be reduced to the legislative autonomy of any state. Consequently, the universal conception of human rights cannot be adequately realized either by particular democratic states or by a world state as a despotic superpower. Apel concluded that an adequate institution for the current debate regarding the issues of global peace and security can only be a federation of nations like the UN, the meta-institution of global discourse and the political representation of international law. At the heart of the essay is Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal and its relevance for today’s discussions about peace and security. Attention is paid to the attempts to rethink Kant by Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Jaques Derrida, Martha Nussbaum, and David Held, among others. Some of the authors indicate the tension between the sovereignty ofstates and the universality of human rights. Other authors criticize cosmopolitanism as overly unifying in contrast to the socio-cultural diversity of societies. The essay draws a contrast between two tendencies concerning international relations. One is the current neoconservative course toward American domination throughout the world. An alternative to this is the philosophers’ call for “the cosmopolitan model of democracy” and strengthening the network of transnational grass-roots movements and international institutions, including the UN. (shrink)

The "tree of life" iconography, representing the history of life, dates from at least the latter half of the 18th century, but evolution as the mechanism providing this bifurcating history of life did not appear until the early 19th century. There was also a shift from the straight line, scala naturae view of change in nature to a more bifurcating or tree-like view. Throughout the 19th century authors presented tree-like diagrams, some regarding the Deity as the mechanism of change while (...) others argued for evolution. Straight-line or anagenetic evolution and bifurcating or cladogenetic evolution are known in biology today, but are often misrepresented in popular culture, especially with anagenesis being confounded with scala naturae. Although well known in the mid 19th century, the geologist Edward Hitchcock has been forgotten as an early, if not the first author to publish a paleontologically based "tree of life" beginning in 1840 in the first edition of his popular general geology text Elementary Geology. At least 31 editions were published and those between 1840 and 1859 had this "paleontological chart" showing two trees, one for fossil and living plants and another for animals set within a context of geological time. Although the chart did not vary in later editions, the text explaining the chart did change to reflect newer ideas in paleontology and geology. Whereas Lamarck, Chambers, Bronn, Darwin, and Haeckel saw some form of transmutation as the mechanism that created their "trees of life," Hitchcock, like his contemporaries Agassiz and Miller, who also produced "trees of life," saw a deity as the agent of change. Through each edition of his book Hitchcock denounced the newer transmutationist hypotheses of Lamarck, then Chambers, and finally Darwin in an 1860 edition that no longer presented his tree-like "paleontological chart.". (shrink)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often provide (...) better evidence of the development of his ideas than can be found in his published writing. In doing so, the book traces the development of a number of central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, including his conception of philosophical method, the picture theory of meaning, the limits of language, the application of language to experience, his treatment of private language, and what he called the "flow of life." Arguing that Wittgenstein's views are often much more simple (and more radical) than we have been led to believe, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy and brings to light aspects of his philosophy that have been almost universally neglected. (shrink)

The Reputation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the chief architects of twentieth century American law, has gone through a number of phases, changing from being altogether praiseworthy in the last years of his life and the first years after his death in 1935 to that of more sober evaluations. Writing at mid-century Henry Steele Commager offered the judgment that Holmes had had about him “much of the Olympian [and] something of the Mephistophelean.” The most useful account of (...) how the winds of change swept along Holmes' reputation is an article by G. Edward White, “The Rise and Fall of Justice Holmes,” which appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1971. White examined the myth of Justice Holmes as it obtained from 1932 to 1940 and then proceeded to describe the demythologizing of Holmes from 1941 through 1949. (shrink)

This chapter examines the developments that led from Wittgenstein’s early logical atomist view that all meaningful discourse can be analyzed into logically independent elementary propositions to his later philosophy. In 1929, Wittgenstein rejected logical atomism for a “logical holist” conception of language as composed of calculi, formal systems characterized by their constitutive rules. By the mid-1930s, he had rejected the model of a calculus, emphasizing that language is action within a social and natural context — more like a game than (...) a calculus — and that rule-governed behavior is dependent on a background of practices which cannot themselves be explicitly formulated as rules. The discussion of these central developments for the emergence of his later “practical holism” focuses on changes in his conception of the nature of measurement and the role of mind and mental processes in linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Unlike most books on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language begins from the initial articulation of his thoughts in his first drafts, conversations, and lectures, and attends closely to the process of revision that led to the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. This introductory chapter provides information about the nature of the Wittgenstein papers, summarizes the rationale for reading his work in this way, and outlines the reading of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that this approach yields. This discussion on the (...) development of Wittgenstein’s thought emphasizes the role of his changing conception of the nature of experience and its relationship to the world, the closely related problem of the relationship between ordinary language and its analysis, his later conception of the role of analogies in generating — and dissolving — philosophical problems, the parallels with psychoanalysis, and the variety of philosophical methods employed in his later philosophical writing. There is also an overview of a central theme of the book as a whole: the contrast Wittgenstein drew between “ordinary” and “philosophical” ways of looking at things when he wrote the Tractatus, and how that contrast was transformed in his subsequent writing, focusing on his contrast between “primary” and “secondary” worlds and his notion of a “phenomenological language”. (shrink)

An analysis of the sources of Wittgenstein’s picture theory — which include not only his moment of insight on reading a magazine story about the use of models in a traffic court, but also the work of Russell, Hertz, and Boltzmann — provides the basis for an exploration of Wittgenstein’s articulation of a pictorial conception of representation in his wartime notebooks and its crystallization in the Tractatus. A discussion of Wittgenstein’s later criticism of the picture theory and his notion of (...) a “philosophical picture” illustrates the fundamental reversal in his transition to his later conception of philosophy: instead of taking literal pictures as a guide to the nature of meaning, he came to regard philosophical theories as akin to expressing an aesthetic preference for a certain style of representation. Wittgenstein’s treatment of factual language in the picture theory is related to his Tractarian approach to logical form, and the role of the show/say distinction in his early conception of logic and language. Particular attention is given to the difficulties generated by the idea that the conditions for the possibility of a given domain of discourse cannot be described in language, but must be shown by the form of words in question. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the ontology of the Tractatus is best understood as the consequence of Wittgenstein’s conception of logic and representation in general, and the postulate of the determinacy of sense in particular. Once it is recognized that Wittgenstein arrived at the idea of simple objects based on an abstract argument about the nature of complexes and analysis without providing any specific examples of such analyses, it is easy to see the need for caution in attributing any characteristics to (...) the objects over and above those demanded by Wittgenstein’s logicolinguistic commitments. Commentators have taken the Tractatus to be setting out a bewildering variety of highly specific views about the nature of objects. But the truth is that the book is so programmatic that its ontology can be elaborated in any number of ways. The final section of this chapter analyzes Wittgenstein’s treatment of the self in the Tractatus and his writing from the 1930s as a central example of the extreme tensions between the positivisistic doctrines stated in the Tractatus and the antipositivistic subtext it aims to convey or “show”: if the exoteric doctrine of the Tractatus is that there is no such thing as the subject of experience, the esoteric doctrine is that there is. This leads to a close reading of his proposal in the early 1930s that is considered a “subjectless” language as a way of clarifying the nature of experience, and his subsequent critique of the notions of the “metaphysical self” and the “visual world”. He had transmuted the difference between the first person and third person modes of speech into differences between two worlds and then had tried to put them back together again. (shrink)

The first section of this chapter presents a close reading of Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Logical Form”, focusing on the conception of the relationship between language and experience, and the nature of the analysis of immediate experience that are set out there. Section two sets out an interpretation of what Wittgenstein meant when he said that he had rejected “phenomenological language” or “primary language” as his goal. Distinguishing between a weak and a strong sense of these terms shows how he could (...) have given up the goal of formulating a language that would amount to a complete analysis of immediate experience, yet retain the goal of finding ways of clarifying what we say about experience. Section three discusses Wittgenstein’s use of the analogy of the pictures on a roll of film in a movie projector and the pictures on a cinema screen for the relationship between world and experience. The final section analyzes how and why the analogy leads Wittgenstein to a paradoxical conception of immediate experience as a separate realm, “timeless” and “neighborless”, a conception of the “world as idea” that is supposedly inexpressible. (shrink)

In 1929, Wittgenstein made use of river imagery to convey the supposedly inexpressible thesis that all is in flux. However, he rejects this extreme thesis in manuscripts from the early 1930s and drafts of the Philosophical Investigations, affirming that one can step twice into the same river. His later discussion of the “stream of life” involves a return, in certain respects, to the river analogy, albeit in a very different key. Examining Wittgenstein’s changing use of this image casts light on (...) the continuities and discontinuities in the development of his philosophy. Wittgenstein’s argument that a private definition is impossible because ostension always depends on a “technique of use”, and his rejection of a positive theory of mind is clarified by examining some unusually explicit notes for a public lecture on private language. This material shows how the treatment of training and practice in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations is the basis for the subsequent discussion of both rule-following and privacy. (shrink)

In this chapter I suggest how Casey’s work opens some radical implications for phenomenology. Casey does this by showing that place is what first of all grants room for the appearance of things—but only in virtue of a non givenness. That is, place undergirds determinate things only in being something “less” than fully delimited or determinate, something less than space would be as an already given dimension. Place thus echoes Bergson’s durée as openly generative becoming, in contrast to time as (...) already fixed dimension. In showing us how determinate phenomena are conditioned by place as less than given, and in complementary work on “periphenomena” (see, e.g., WG 438-448), such as glances and edges, Casey reveals what I call a subliminal dimension of phenomena: a way in which periphenomena and thence phenomena appear as delimited only by edging out into what is less than delimitable. This subliminal dimension is phenomenologically paradoxical. It cannot appear as such, precisely because it is less than delimitable, vagrant with respect to classical conditions of appearance. Yet this vagrant “less than” precisely appears as subliminal within and to delimited appearances, versus being something ideal or behind appearances. (shrink)

Can nature be restored to a pristine state through deliberate action? Must the preservation of wilderness always subordinate the interests of humans to those of other species? Can indigenous peoples be entrusted with the guardianship of their own wild resources? This collection of international writings tackles tough questions like these as it expands wilderness conservation beyond its American roots. One of the first anthologies to consider wilderness as a global issue, it takes a stand against the notion that wilderness is (...) a northern colonialist conceit and is irrelevant to the plans of third world countries. Contributions from all over the planetÑ Nepal, Borneo, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, South Africa, India, and the United StatesÑ show instead that wilderness has an important place in the environmental thought and policy of any nation, industrial or developing. The World and the Wild boldly advances the idea that our concept of wilderness must expand to take in new vistas. It breaks fresh ground in global environmentalism and is essential reading for anyone concerned with development issues related to conservation. Contents Foreword: Whither World Wilderness? / Vance G. Martin Introduction: Wilderness in the Rest of the World / David Rothenberg How Can Four Trees Make a Jungle? / Pramod Parajuli The Unpaintable West / Zeese Papanikolas Restoring Wilderness or Reclaiming Forests? / Sahotra Sarkar For Indian Wilderness / Philip Cafaro and Monish Verma In the Dust of Kilimanjaro / David Western Why Conservation in the Tropics Is Failing / John Terborgh "Trouble in Paradise": An Exchange / David Western and John Terborgh Zulu History / Ian Player Bruno Manser and the Penan / William W. Bevis Roads Where There Have Long Been Trails / Kathleen Harrison Volcano Dreams / Tom Vanderbilt Recycled Rain Forest Myths / Antonio Carlos Diegues The Park of Ten Thousand Waterfalls / Dan Imhoff Mapping the Wild / Edward A. Whitesell Earth Jazz / Evan Eisenberg They Trampled on Our Taboos / Damien Arabagali. (shrink)

This paper contends thatMichael Oakeshott's analogy of conversation conveys a conception of philosophy that can be connected with 'philosophical criticism', as interpreted by British Idealists such as Andrew Seth and Edward Caird. Firstly, my claim is that Oakeshott's notion of philosophical definition is animated by a dialectical 'refutation' of current ideas, articulated in the logical study of their presuppositions. Moreover, I show that this critical idea of philosophy is expressed through a re-interpretation of the Socratic Method that can be compared (...) to that of other Idealists. By means of an examination of textual evidence, I stress the consistency of this perspective throughout all Oakeshott's career. Secondly, I consider the image of conversation as an answer to the Idealist question about the possibility of the unity of knowledge. At the outset, I highlight that Oakeshott's position can be juxtaposed to the critiques of Modern philosophy and science paradigmatically put forward by Edward Caird and R.G. Collingwood. I argue that 'conversation' is consistent with Oakeshott's conception of modality, which is a critique both of the possibility of a final synthesis between different forms of understanding and of all reductionisms. Therefore, I analyze the theoretical foundations of this conception, which I have identified with the nature of postulates, the unity ofmind, and the non-propositional character of judgments. In the conclusion, I suggest that this reading has implications for a broader understanding of Oakeshott's Idealism, of his political theory and of the debate with Analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 277-278 [Access article in PDF] John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, editors. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals Division, 2001. Pp. xiii + 376. Cloth, $39.00. Paper, $25.00. Some twenty years ago, when I submitted a dissertation proposal to explore connections between theologies of creation and views of scientific (...) knowledge in the seventeenth century, my doctoral committee was not initially enthusiastic—my idea might make a good dissertation in religion, but was it really history of science? I doubt I would have a similar experience today. Not only has the "warfare" thesis of science and religion been laid permanently to rest, historians have begun seriously to question whether it makes sense even to treat "religion" and "science" in an essentialist manner as separate ways of thinking that do not ordinarily interact. Many detailed case studies demonstrating a variety of fascinating, often important connections between science and religion have appeared from leading scholars in the past two decades. This trend continues in the latest volume of Osiris, which contains sixteen essays documenting various ways in which religious beliefs have influenced the actual content and presentation of science.The volume opens with two companion essays laying out the terrain. First, Brooke engages the new methodological and conceptual problems that confront historians following the demise of the "warfare" thesis. Then Stephen Wykstra offers criteria for sorting out the various roles for metaphysical and religious beliefs (which he distinguishes) in shaping scientific knowledge. The case studies begin with E. Jamil Ragep's essay on medieval Islamic astronomy, arguing that religion sometimes had a constructive role—a rather novel claim for Islamic science, he points out. Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch show how early modern Jewish exegetical practices influenced David b. Solomon Gans's interpretations of astronomical texts, and quite possibly his interpretation of nature also. A Christian astronomer is next, as Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein detail how Johannes Kepler's theology contributed directly to the discovery of scientific laws. Maurice A. Finnocchiaro then reviews various accounts of the Galileo affair, finding far more conflict in the subsequent historiography of the events than in the trial itself.Moving from astronomy to natural philosophy, Margaret G. Cook's essay on Robert Boyle examines the web of connections between theology, the mechanical philosophy, and [End Page 277] "the Aristotelian philosophy that he sought to replace." She demonstrates that Boyle used the classical art/nature distinction "to interpret the biblical account of the Creation and to argue that chemical techniques offered experimental confirmation that the world, created by art, worked by the same mechanical principles as artificial objects, not by the inherent agency of Aristotelian nature" (136). Margaret J. Osler also writes about Boyle. Contrary to the traditional view that final causes were expunged from science by the mechanical philosophy—a view that originated in the "positivism and scientific optimism" of the postwar period (168)—she proves that final causality remained central to the thought of Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The essay by Stephen D. Snobelen presents substantial evidence that the famous General Scholium, appended to the second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia, was a carefully worded declaration of Newton's heterodox theology. "A Trinitarian," Snobelen concludes, "could not have written the General Scholium" (186). He also shows the degree to which Newton's theology shaped his overall natural philosophy, decisively debunking the late Richard S. Westfall's view that such influences could not be found.The final seven essays are mainly devoted to nineteenth-century science. Michael J. Crowe documents several ways in which Christian beliefs about divine goodness and the Incarnation affected astronomy. Martin Fichman shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's theism—not merely a vague spiritualism, as traditional accounts claim—"shaped the cognitive content of his mature evolutionary synthesis, which included a theoretical reconceptualization of the scope of natural selection" (227). In a revisionist account of Charles Darwin's philosophy of "nature," Phillip R. Sloan challenges the received view that... (shrink)

Otto Weininger was one of the most controversial and widely read authors of fin-de-siècle Vienna. He was both condemned for his misogyny, self-hatred, anti-semitism and homophobia, as well as praised for his uncompromising and outspoken approach to gender and morality. For Wittgenstein Weininger was a 'remarkable genius'. He repeatedly recommended Weininger's Sex and Character to friends and students and included the author on a short list of figures who had influenced him. The purpose of this new collection of essays is (...) to explore the various ways in which Wittgenstein absorbed and responded to Weininger's ideas. Written by an international team of experts on Wittgenstein and Weininger, the volume is especially timely in the light of recent translations of Weininger's work and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of 20th century philosophy, and the literary and cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna. (shrink)

This paper uses a semiotic, performative theory of language and post-colonial theory to argue that nursing's representations of ‘multiculturalism’ need to be grounded in a theory of whiteness, an historicized understanding of how ethnic/cultural differences come to be represented in the ways they are and informed by Foucault's notions of power/knowledge. Using nursing education and ‘cultural compentency’ as examples, the paper draws on a range of literatures to suggest more critical and politically productive ways of approaching difference from within nursing's (...) largely white interpretive framework. (shrink)

Semiotic objections to markets urge us not to place a good on the market because of the message that doing so would send. Brennan and Jaworski reject them on the grounds that either the contingent semiotics of a market can be changed or the weakness of semiotic reasons allows them to be ignored. The scope of their argument neglects the impure semiotic objections that claim that the message a market sends causes, constitutes, or involves a nonsemiotic wrong. These are the (...) most compelling class of semiotic objections and are the kind actually advanced in the literature. Rather than focusing on the necessity or contingency of a market's semiotics, we should instead attend to a semiotic objection's most important feature: its purity or impurity. (shrink)

In this new introduction to a classic philosophical text, David Stern examines Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He gives particular attention to both the arguments of the Investigations and the way in which the work is written, and especially to the role of dialogue in the book. While he concentrates on helping the reader to arrive at his or her own interpretation of the primary text, he also provides guidance to the unusually wide range of existing interpretations, and to the reasons (...) why the Investigations have inspired such a diversity of readings. Following closely the text of the Investigations and meant to be read alongside it, this survey is accessible to readers with no previous background in philosophy. It is well-suited to university-level courses on Wittgenstein, but can also be read with profit by students in other disciplines. (shrink)

Philosophical analysis of ecological theories has lagged behind the study of evolutionary theory. The semantic conception of scientific theories, which has been employed successfully in the analysis of evolutionary theory, is adopted here to analyse ecological theory. Two general problems in ecology are discussed. One arises from the continued use of covering law models in ecology, and the other concerns the applicability of ecological theory in conservation biology. The semantic conception of ecological theories is used to resolve these problems.

There are some things money literally cannot buy. Invariably transformable goods are such things because when they are exchanged for money, they become something else. These goods are destroyed rather than transferred in monetary exchanges. They mark out an impassable limit beyond which money and the market cannot reach. They cannot be for sale, in the strongest and most literal sense. Variably transformable goods are similar. They can be destroyed when offered or exchanged for money, but they differ in their (...) ability to sometimes emerge from financial transactions intact. -/- Analyzing transformable goods reveals informative and surprising results. Like other goods and commodities, they are agent relative, defined by the way particular agents value them. Inside the same transaction, a good could be transformable for one agent and not another, depending on how and what these agents value in the transaction. Applying this conceptual framework can reveal otherwise obscure facets of existing and future debates about the ethics and limits of markets. To demonstrate this, the framework is here applied to Richard Titmuss’s arguments about markets in blood, clarifying and illuminating some of his most confusing claims. Applying this framework to other debates may reveal even more striking results. (shrink)