Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Barbara Adam, Gender, Space, and Time is a brilliant study that offers a unique and original threefold conceptualization of how space and time is developed and applied in an empirical study of women's lives. Moss conceptualizes women as centers of action and demonstrates the ways in which they construct personal pathways, connect different spheres of experience, intergrate new time demands into the multiple rhythms of their everyday lives, and carve out personal (...) space. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of (...) sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

Fitch’s argument purports to show that for any unknown truth, p , there is an unknowable truth, namely, that p is true and unknown; for a contradiction follows from the assumption that it is possible to know that p is true and unknown. In earlier work I argued that there is a sense in which it is possible to know that p is true and unknown, from a counterfactual perspective; that is, there can be possible, non-actual knowledge, of the actual (...) situation, that in that situation, p is true and unknown. Here I further elaborate that claim and respond to objections by Williamson, who argued that there cannot be non-trivial knowledge of this kind. I give conditions which suffice for such non-trivial counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

Section 1 briefly examines three theories of indicative conditionals. The Suppositional Theory is defended, and shown to be incompatible with understanding conditionals in terms of truth conditions. Section 2 discusses the psychological evidence about conditionals reported by Over and Evans (this volume). Section 3 discusses the syntactic grounds offered by Haegeman (this volume) for distinguishing two sorts of conditional.

A critical essay on St. Augustine's social and political thought. In describing Augustine, the author captures the essence of the man in these words: "Genius he had in full measure... he is the master of the phrase or the sentence that embodies a penetrating insight, a flash of lightning that illuminates the entire sky; he is the rhetorician, the epigrammist, the polemicist, but not the patient, logical systematic philosopher.".

"Cassirer employs his remarkable gift of lucidity to explain the major ideas and intellectual issues that emerged in the course of nineteenth century scientific and historical thinking. The translators have done an excellent job in reproducing his clarity in English. There is no better place for an intelligent reader to find out, with a minimum of technical language, what was really happening during the great intellectual movement between the age of Newton and our own."—_New York Times._.

Think of the color spectrum, spread out before you. You can identify the different colors with ease. But if you are asked to indicate the point at which one color ends and the next begins, you are at a loss. "There is no such point", is a natural thought: one color just shades gradually into the next.

Book synopsis: The Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey died tragically young, but had already established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. Besides groundbreaking work in philosophy, particularly in logic, language, and metaphysics, he created modern decision theory and made substantial contributions to mathematics and economics. In these original essays, written to commemorate the centenary of Ramsey's birth, a distinguished international team of contributors offer fresh perspectives on his work and show how relevant it is to (...) present-day concerns. Each of the ten essays addresses fundamental and contentious issues, including success semantics, propositions, infinity, conditionals, conceptual analysis, decision theory, and intergenerational justice. They also shed light on the intellectual context in which Ramsey developed his thought, including his relationship with such leading thinkers as John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the recent history of philosophy and economics, as well as for practitioners and students of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, decision theory, and welfare economics. (shrink)

Concept and theory formation in the social sciences, by A. Schutz.--Is it a science? by S. Morgenbesser.--Knowledge and interest, by J. Habermas.--Sociological explanation, by T. Burns.--Methodological individualism reconsidered, by S. Lukes.--The problem of rationality in the social world, by A. Schutz.--Concepts and society, by E. Gellner.--Symbols in Ndembu ritual, by V. Turner.--Telstar and the Aborigines or La pensée sauvage, by E. Leach.--Groote Eylandt totemism and Le totémisme aujourd'hui, by P. Worsley.--Bibliography (p. 225-228).

It is a sobering experience to be giving my first Sir Samuel Hall Oration in the line of succession of Samuel Alexander. Some of his Sir Samuel Hall Orations have been published in his book on Beauty and the Other Forms of Value and the Philosophical and Literary Pieces, and they must indeed have been a joy to his audiences. I think it is fitting that I should devote this first lecture to Samuel Alexander, taking one of the central ideas (...) of his philosophy and considering it. If some of what I have to say is critical, I think he would have thought that was all in order. “Pitch into me,” he used to say. After all, the best tribute one can pay to a philosopher is to try to go on with one's own thinking helped by the stimulus of his ideas, and often not least helped by finding oneself impelled to criticize them. (shrink)

The logical constants are technical terms, invented and precisely defined by logicians for the purpose of producing rigorous formal proofs. Mathematics virtually exhausts the domain of deductive reasoning of any complexity, and it is there that the benefits of this refined form of language are felt. Pragmatic issues may arise — issues concerning the point of making a certain statement — for there will be more or less perspicuous and illuminating ways of presenting proofs in this language, and we may (...) be puzzled or misled when we wonder why the mathematician is taking some particular step. But this is hardly a compulsory topic in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

British marriage statistics (N = 311,564) suggest that women of breeding age choose young men. Women past breeding age who could still be raising children extend choices to include older men. After this, women do not marry. The choices of men over 50 are restricted to women between 40 and 55: past breeding but young enough to be raising children; the few men over 50 that marry choose women in this age range.

‘Doing the will of God’, or seeking to do it, is a notion close to the centre of at any rate Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religion. So too is the notion of ‘accepting’ something as God's will: Fiat voluntas tua. In the former case, the notion of ‘doing the will of God’ is invoked in connection with what would be right to do in a practical situation; in the latter in connection with happenings and circumstances outside our control and as (...) something to be accepted rather than accomplished. I shall be concerned here with the notion of the will of God as something to be accomplished, asking what, if anything, to say that an action is in accordance with the will of God adds to saying that it is right. I shall also look at ways in which we think of relations between our wills and those of other people when we say that one person is doing the will of another person, and ask whether these help us at all in trying to see what might be meant by ‘doing the will of God’. (shrink)