This is a transcript of a conversation between P F Strawson and Gareth Evans in 1973, filmed for The Open University. Under the title 'Truth', Strawson and Evans discuss the question as to whether the distinction between genuinely fact-stating uses of language and other uses can be grounded on a theory of truth, especially a 'thin' notion of truth in the tradition of F P Ramsey.

ABSTRACT Thematic analysis is the most widely used method for analysing qualitative data. Recent debates, highlighting the binary distinctions between reflexive TA grounded within the qualitative paradigm and codebook TA with neo-positivist orientations, have emphasized the existence of numerous tensions that researchers must navigate to produce coherent and rigorous research. This article attempts to resolve some of these tensions through developing an approach to TA underpinned by realist philosophy of science. Focusing on interview data, we propose the use of three (...) types of themes and the use of corresponding validity indicators. Using an illustrative example, we outline the conceptual foundations of a realist approach to TA and present recommendations for conducting it in practice. This approach, we claim, reconciles several existing binaries between distinctive types of TA by incorporating the contributions of both for the development of different types of themes. (shrink)

We argue that the robustness analysis of idealized models can have confirmational power. This responds to concerns recently raised in the literature, according to which the robustness analysis of models whose idealizations are not discharged is unable to confirm the causal mechanisms underlying these models, and the robustness analysis of models whose idealizations are discharged is unnecessary. In response, we make clear that, where idealizations sweep out, in a specific way, the space of possibilities— which is sometimes, though not always, (...) the case—they can be holistically discharged. In turn, this can be used to show that the robustness analysis of idealized models can have confirmational force after all. (shrink)

Theoria, EarlyView. -/- In his recent book Thin Objects, Øystein Linnebo (2018) argues for the existence of a hierarchy of abstract objects, sufficient to model ZFC, via a novel and highly interesting argument that relies on a process called dynamic abstraction. This paper presents a way for a nominalist, someone opposed to the existence of abstract objects, to avoid Linnebo's conclusion by rejecting his claim that certain abstraction principles are sufficient for reference (RBA). Section 1 of the paper explains Linnebo's (...) argument for RBA. It offers a reading of Linnebo's work upon which he has two arguments for RBA: one deductive and one abductive, and argues that whilst the deductive argument is unsound the abductive one is prima facie plausible. The nominalist must therefore find a way to respond to the abductive argument. Section 2 outlines just such a response, by offering an alternative explanation of the cases Linnebo wishes to argue from. Most interestingly, it shows that abstraction in Linnebo's most difficult case (the “reference to ordinary bodies” case) can be achieved using mereological means, rather than relying on RBA. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Kevin Krein’s Philosophy and Nature Sports. Gunnar Breivik, Jim Parry and Irena Martínková, and Rebekah Humphreys provide critical commentary on the text. The critical comments are followed by a response from Krein. The discussion covers a broad range of topics. These include the definition of “sport,” comparisons between nature sports and friluftsliv, the role of risk in nature sports, the experience of flow and the sublime in nature sports, and the understanding of nature. (...) Krein argues, as he does in the book and elsewhere, that nature sports provide a framework that facilitates intimate and meaningful interactions with nature. He argues further that the discussion included here shows how deeply our understanding of nature, and our understanding of nature sports, influence both our experiences within those sports and our broader experience of the world. (shrink)

As has recently been highlighted, despite the prevalence of methodological “confessional tales” in ethnography generally, the challenges of undertaking ethnographic research specifically in institutional sports settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a 3-year ethnographic study of competitive swimming in the United Kingdom (UK), here we explore some of the practical challenges of balancing different elements of the researcher’s role when undertaking ethnographic “insider” research in familiar settings. In particular, we consider the difficulties of balancing the role of a doctoral (...) researcher and the chosen research role of a volunteer coach with a competitive swimming program. Employing the anthropological concept of liminality, we also analyze the lived challenges of leaving a highly familiar field and entering a state of liminality, where the researcher was caught on the threshold betwixt and between a return to full-time employment in the former “known” role of coach, and a move forward to embrace a new “unknown” role as a full-time member of academic staff. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

If states are permitted to create and maintain a military force, by what means are they permitted to do so? This paper argues that a theory of just recruitment should incorporate a concern for moral risk. Since the military is a morally risky profession for its members, recruitment policies should be evaluated in terms of how they distribute moral risk within a community. We show how common military recruitment practices exacerbate and concentrate moral risk exposure, using the UK as a (...) case study. We argue that the British state wrongs its citizens by subjecting them to excessively morally risky recruitment practices. Since, we argue, this risk exposure cannot be justified by appealing to the benefits of a military career for recruits, our argument calls for reform of existing practices. Our method of evaluation is generalizable and thus can be used to assess other states’ practices. (shrink)

This paper outlines three broad ways one might think about logical correctness: the Realist approach, the One-Language approach and my own Neo-Carnapian view. Although the realist and one-language views have dominated the philosophy of logic in recent years, I argue against them, favouring of the Neo-Carnapian approach.

Glenn Aparicio Parry organized and participated in thirteen groundbreaking dialogues between Native American elders and leading-edge Western scientists that explored the underlying principles of the cosmos. Inspired by these dialogues, Original Thinking unfolds in a similar way to a dialogue circle. The questions it asks penetrate ever deepening layers of meaning, such as, Is it possible to come up with an original thought?, What does it mean to be human?, and How has our thinking created our world today? Delving (...) into the evolution of Western thought, Parry seeks to recover the living roots of wisdom that can correct the imbalances in our modern worldview. In doing so he invites us to reconnect with a living, original source--nature and her interconnected elements and cycles--and to reintegrate our heart with our head in order to expand our self-imposed narrowing of consciousness"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Technologies for enhancement of the human body historically have taken the form of an apparatus: a technological device inserted in, or appended to, the human body. The margins of these devices were clearly discernible and materially circumscribed, allowing the distinction between the corporeality of the human body and the “machine” to remain both ontologically and materially secure. This dualism has performed some important work for human rights theorists, regulators, and policy makers, enabling each to imagine they can establish where the (...) human ends and the other begins. New regenerative products such as Infuse™ and Amplify™ subsist, as animal-derived scaffolds seeded with growth hormone implanted within a prosthetic device. They are much more materially complex, and their identities thus remain open to contestation. Following Lochlann Jain’s 2006 work, I thus attend closely to their social lives, particularly the stories that are told about them and how these are employed to construct understandings of what kind of a phenomenon they are: systemic drug, biologic, or combinatorial medical device. The significance of this classificatory project is revealed in the final section of this paper, which explores how these stories shape understandings of “product failure,” liability, and causation when such products overflow their material and ontological categorization and their recipients become disturbingly “more than human.”. (shrink)

We will investigate the relation between the notion of the craft of ruling in the "Euthydemus" and in the "Republic". In the "Euthydemus", Socrates' search for an account of wisdom leads to his identifying it as the craft of ruling in the city. In the "Republic", the craft of ruling in the city is the virtue of wisdom in the city and the analogue of wisdom in the soul. Still, the craft of ruling leads to aporia in the former dialogue (...) while in the latter it is a central feature of Socrates' account of justice -- both in the city and in the soul. Some commentators hold that the aporia at the end of the second protreptic interlude of the "Euthydemus" shows that Socrates' account of wisdom is fatally flawed and must be rejected. However, the difficulty for this position is that the craft of ruling from the "Euthydemus" is a hardy notion that plays an extremely important role in the "Republic". Indeed, reflecting this fact, other commentators hold that the aporia is solved in the "Republic". Still, what is so far missing is an analysis that clearly shows the way to this solution in the "Republic". In what follows, we will analyze the two protreptic inter-ludes in the "Euthydemus" in order to see how the aporia arises. As we shall see, Socrates presents the aporia as a labyrinth. Indeed, it is a labyrinth with a little noticed step that -- once it is noticed -- shows the way out. The result will be that the aporia of the "Euthydemus" points to a solution in which ruling in the soul implies a command of one's appetites and emotions. (shrink)

The ethical nature of transformational leadership has been hotly debated. This debate is demonstrated in the range of descriptors that have been used to label transformational leaders including narcissistic, manipulative, and self-centred, but also ethical, just and effective. Therefore, the purpose of the present research was to address this issue directly by assessing the statistical relationship between perceived leader integrity and transformational leadership using the Perceived Leader Integrity Scale (PLIS) and the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). In a national sample of (...) 1354 managers a moderate to strong positive relationship was found between perceived integrity and the demonstration of transformational leadership behaviours. A similar relationship was found between perceived integrity and developmental exchange leadership. A systematic leniency bias was identified when respondents rated subordinates vis-à-vis peer ratings. In support of previous findings, perceived integrity was also found to correlate positively with leader and organisational effectiveness measures. (shrink)

This essay constructs a picture of the meaning of life based on De Anima 2. 2-4. It shows that there are organisms that preserve their form through the exercise of identifiable functions. For an individual to be a short, living thing is for it to be one of these naturally species-preserving organisms. For an individual living thing to be actually living is for it to be able to perform one of the psychic or living functions appropriate to its species.

One of the first envatted brains, the most cyborgian element of J. D. Bernal’s 1929 futuristic manifesto, The world, the flesh and the the devil, proposed a technological solution to the dreary certainty of mortality. In Bernal’s scenario the brain is maintained in an ‘out of body’ but ‘like-body’ environment—in a bath of cerebral–spinal fluid held at constant body temperature. In reality, acquiring prospective immortality requires access to very different technologies—those that allow human organs and tissues to be preserved in (...) a quite ‘inhuman’ life-world—the cryogenic storage chamber. Like Bernal, today’s cryonicists consider that immortality can be secured through preservation of the brain alone. In this article I trace attempts to preserve or suspend life, and especially brain function, through the application of new ‘technologies of immortality’. Drawing together historical information on the development of refrigeration, cryopreservation, transplantation, and nanotechnologies, I explore the uneasy relationship between cryonics and the technology on which it depends for its success—cryogenics. In so doing, I argue that the ability to successfully realize the science fiction fantasy of human immortality will rest on a moral and scientific parasitism: the capacity to use the biotechnological artifacts or proxies—cryogenically preserved brains, archived brains, tissues, and immortalized cell lines—derived from the dead, in order to prolong life. (shrink)

Despite reservations over the status of esports as sports, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has, for policy reasons, encouraged International Federations to pursue links with providers of ‘virtual and simulated’ sports, in part by the introduction of an event, the Olympic Virtual Series, first held in 2021. In providing an account of ‘virtuality’ and ‘simulation’, we query the theoretical basis of the Olympic Virtual Series. In particular, we query the IOC’s use of the term ‘virtual’ in the description of two (...) very different activities: what it calls ‘physical virtual sports’ (which we argue are simply Olympic-type sports – real sports! – and should just be called ‘sports’) and ‘non-physical virtual sports’ (which we argue are not sports at all, and should be recognized for what they are – computer games). (shrink)

‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.’ This paper is an attempt to follow Russell’s advice by using a puzzle about the contingent a priori to test and explore certain theories of reference and modality. No one could claim that (...) the puzzle is of any great philosophical importance by itself, but to understand it, one has to get clear about certain aspects of the theory of reference; and to solve it, one has to think a little more deeply than one is perhaps accustomed about what it means to say that a statement is contingent or necessary. (shrink)

We report on an interview-based study of decision-making capacity in two classes of patients suffering from depression. Developing a method of second-person hermeneutic phenomenology, we articulate the distinctive combination of temporal agility and temporal inability characteristic of the experience of severely depressed patients. We argue that a cluster of decision-specific temporal abilities is a critical element of decision-making capacity, and we show that loss of these abilities is a risk factor distinguishing severely depressed patients from mildly/moderately depressed patients. We explore (...) the legal and clinical consequences of this result. (shrink)

Later Platonists and their Heirs among Christians, Jews and Muslims offers a thought-provoking exploration of the reception of Platonism among communities of faith from early Christianity to the sixteenth century, from the Byzantine East to the Latin West. Rare emphasis is placed on the importance of Platonic thought and its diffusion in late antique and medieval Syria, Armenia, and Georgia but also among Arab and Jewish intellectuals from the seventh century onwards. As such, the volume makes a statement against the (...) separation of Neoplatonic philosophy from Christianity and the other Abrahamic faiths, since all four traditions promoted a life of virtue and goodness despite operating under different divine auspices. The volume seeks to establish paths of transmission and modes of adaptation across times and places. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Life of Nietzsche Nineteenth‐century Europe Romanticism and German Idealism Pessimism German Politics The Text.

In this essay, hegemony in traditional Marxism is posited as a social ontology based on overcoming the alienation of the masses. The aim of hegemony is to produce the full realization through the work of the proletariat as one specific political subject, as a collective version of the bourgeois subject. The emancipation through hegemony marks the self-realization of the proletariat as the subject of history, as one subject that somehow imposes itself on the alienated forms of capitalism. On the other (...) hand, poshegemony is thought from the decline of the subjectivist and productivist idolatry of hegemony, from the end of its expired truth, in the name of another promise. (shrink)

This paper side-steps the question of whether ‘the’ concept of sport exists, or can be usefully analysed. Instead, I try to explain the much more modest aim of exhibition-analysis, which is to seek a description of an actually existing example of some concept of sport internal to a normative position. My example is that of Olympic-sport. I try to set out its logically necessary conditions, which of course are conditioned by its context within a theory that emphasises the values of (...) formal competition, citius-altius-fortius, and excellence in contest, as well as rule-based procedural values related to fairness, justice and equality. In so doing, I readily accept that other kinds of sport can be similarly analysed, and I do not press the value claims of Olympic-sport. Instead, I try to show how Olympic-sport, properly construed, can accommodate the concerns of my critics with regard to sport’s play and game-like characteristics. (shrink)

With the waves of reform occurring in mental health legislation in England and other jurisdictions, mental capacity is set to become a key medico-legal concept. The concept is central to the law of informed consent and is closely aligned to the philosophical concept of autonomy. It is also closely related to mental disorder. This paper explores the interdisciplinary terrain where mental capacity is located. Our aim is to identify core dilemmas and to suggest pathways for future interdisciplinary research. The terrain (...) can be separated into three types of discussion: philosophical, legal and psychiatric. Each discussion approaches mental capacity and judgmental autonomy from a different perspective yet each discussion struggles over two key dilemmas: whether mental capacity and autonomy is/should be a moral or a psychological notion and whether rationality is the key constitutive factor. We suggest that further theoretical work will have to be interdisciplinary and that this work offers an opportunity for the law to enrich its interpretation of mental capacity, for psychiatry to clarify the normative elements latent in its concepts and for philosophy to advance understanding of autonomy through the study of decisional dysfunction. The new pressures on medical and legal practice to be more explicit about mental capacity make this work a priority. (shrink)

Some philosophers, notably Professors Quine and Geach, have stressed the analogies they see between pronouns of the vernacular and the bound variables of quantification theory. Geach, indeed, once maintained that ‘for a philosophical theory of reference, then, it is all one whether we consider bound variables or pronouns of the vernacular'. This slightly overstates Geach's positition since he recognizes that some pronouns of ordinary language do function differently from bound variables; he calls such pronouns ‘pronouns of laziness'. Geach's characterisation of (...) pronouns of laziness has varied from time to time, but the general idea should be clear from a paradigm example: A man who sometimes beats his wife has more sense than one who always gives in to her.The pronouns ‘one’ and ‘her’ go proxy for a noun or a noun phrase in the sense that the pronoun is replaceable in paraphrase by simple repetition of its antecedent. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: Standard Analysis First Alternative Analysis Second Alternative Analysis Third Alternative Analysis of Lying Fourth Alternative Analysis Further Reading.

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and social psychology, this article describes some interactional features of two celebrity TV confessionals and the resources used by the TV interviewers and celebrity guests to attribute, accept or deny responsibility for their transgressions. The analytic interest lies in how confessions are locally and interactionally managed, that is, how ‘doing confessing’ is achieved in the television interview context. We show how the host’s opening turn constrains the celebrity guest’s contribution and secures overt (...) admission of guilt, while simultaneously inviting the celebrity guest to tell their side of the story. We also show how celebrity guests produce descriptions which minimize the extent and severity of their transgressions, reduce agency and transform the character of their transgression. In doing so, we argue that celebrity interviewees can convey mitigations and extenuations which diminish the extent of their responsibility – calling into question the very nature of their confession. We propose that our findings demonstrate the hybrid nature of interviewing in the celebrity TV confessional and contribute to our understanding of how ‘doing confessing’ in the public eye is discursively and interactionally negotiated. (shrink)

In this article, following on from earlier debates in the journal regarding the ‘thorny issue’ of epochē and bracketing in sociological phenomenological research, we consider more generally the challenges of engaging in reflexivity and bracketing when undertaking ethnographic ‘insider’ research, or research in familiar settings. We ground our discussion and illustrate some of the key challenges by drawing on the experience of undertaking this research approach with a group of competitive swimmers, who were participating in a British university performance swimming (...) programme at the time of the doctoral study. The primary researcher was highly familiar with the phenomenon of competitive swimming, having been both a competitive swimmer and swimming coach. Some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying physical-cultural embodiment are first delineated, before addressing the considerable challenges of engaging in sustained reflexivity and bracketing, using the swimming research for illustrative purposes. We suggest some practical ways in which researchers in sport and physical cultures might approach epochē and bracketing in ethnographic ‘insider’ research. -/- KEYWORDS: Sociological phenomenology, competitive swimming, insider research, epochē/bracketing. (shrink)

In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing ‘sensory sociology’ that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and ‘sensory work’, but where there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing (...) on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings. (shrink)

Provides an opinionated overview of some recent debates within the ethics of war.