Rousseau’s founding critique of liberalism, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, takes the ambiguous form of a sweeping myth of civilization. Political theorists usually interpret the myth by reading it as a tale of passage from primordial nature to civil society, but what happens when we privilege another of the essay’s organizing devices, its symbolic depiction of the history of the species as the life of an individual? Interpreted through this metaphor, Rousseau’s myth becomes a charged tale of a (...) ‘life’ gone wrong, one that sheds interesting light on his critique of bourgeois society and selfhood. (shrink)

Recent research has investigated whether people think of their moral beliefs as objectively true facts about the world, or as subjective preferences. The present research examines variability in the perceived objectivity of different moral beliefs, with respect both to the content of moral beliefs themselves (what they are about), and to the social representation of those moral beliefs (whether other individuals are thought to hold them). It also examines the possible consequences of perceiving a moral belief as objective. With respect (...) to the content of moral beliefs, we find that beliefs about the moral properties of negatively valenced acts are seen as reliably more objective than beliefs about the moral properties of positively valenced acts. With respect to the social representation of moral beliefs, we find that the degree of perceived consensus regarding a moral belief positively influences its perceived objectivity. The present experiments also demonstrate that holding a moral belief to be objective is associated with a more ‘closed’ response in the face of disagreement about it, and with more morally pejorative attributions towards a disagreeing other person. (shrink)

Norms are a pervasive yet mysterious feature of social life. In Explaining Norms, four philosophers and social scientists team up to grapple with some of the many mysteries, offering a comprehensive account of norms: what they are; how and why they emerge, persist and change; and how they work.

Locke is famed for his caution in speculative matters: “Men, extending their enquiries beyond their capacities and letting their thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure footing; ‘tis no wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes”. And he is skeptical about the pretensions of natural philosophy, which he says is “not capable of being made a science”. And yet Locke is confident that “Our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, (...) that there is an eternal, most powerful and most knowing being; which whether anyone will please to call God it matters not”. His certainty about the existence and attributes of God, I will argue, led him to surprisingly strong convictions about a deep and disputed problem at the intersection of seventeenth century metaphysics and natural philosophy: the absolute reality of space and time. Specifically, he based his absolutist conceptions of space and time on God’s literal omnipresence and eternity. Leibniz probably had Locke in mind when he inveighed in 1716 against “real absolute space, the idol of some modern Englishmen”. And Leibniz was right a decade earlier to voice through his mouthpiece Theophilus the suspicion that, despite Locke’s claim to know nothing about the substance of void space, “there are grounds for thinking you know more about it than you say or believe that you do. Some people have thought that God is the place of objects”. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book revisits the writings of classic theorists in an effort re-evaluate the importance and influence the psychology of esteem has on the economy. The authors explore ways the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes and offer new ways of thinking about how society works and may be made to work.

Artificial Intelligence in the form of different machine learning models is applied to Big Data as a way to turn data into valuable knowledge. The rhetoric is that ensuing predictions work well—with a high degree of autonomy and automation. We argue that we need to analyze the process of applying machine learning in depth and highlight at what point human knowledge production takes place in seemingly autonomous work. This article reintroduces classification theory as an important framework for understanding such seemingly (...) invisible knowledge production in the machine learning development and design processes. We suggest a framework for studying such classification closely tied to different steps in the work process and exemplify the framework on two experiments with machine learning applied to Facebook data from one of our labs. By doing so we demonstrate ways in which classification and potential discrimination take place in even seemingly unsupervised and autonomous models. Moving away from concepts of non-supervision and autonomy enable us to understand the underlying classificatory dispositifs in the work process and that this form of analysis constitutes a first step towards governance of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This book briefly outlines the evolution of general philosophical ideas since 1900, emphasizing how the concept of philosophy itself has changed.

A nontechnical review is given of a topological bootstrap theory, with emphasis on theraison d'être for an electromagnetism whose fine-structure constant is of order10 −2.

The object of this paper is to explore the intersection of two issues. The first concerns the role that feasibility considerations play in constraining normative claims – claims, say, about what we (individually and collectively) ought to do and to be. The second concerns whether normative claims are to be understood as applying only to actions in their own right or also non-derivatively to attitudes. In particular, we argue that actions and attitudes may be subject to different feasibility constraints – (...) and hence that how we conceive of the role of feasibility in an account of normativity will depend in part on how we conceive of the role of actions and attitudes in normative theorising. (shrink)

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

This article examines some of the ways that Muslim and evangelical Christian schools in England and The Netherlands deal with religious education. Various schools take different views about how aspects of religious belief should be taught and how Christian or Muslim belief should be related to the wider curriculum of the school. While some of the schools have attempted to integrate, for example, evangelical Christianity throughout the whole of the curriculum, others have been content to have the religious teaching as (...) a separate component of the curriculum. This paper uses the work of Basil Bernstein to describe and understand the nature of the religious curriculum in these schools. Through a series of case studies of schools and curricula it examines the nature of the curricula and their possible effects on children. (shrink)

This paper identifies several ways in which personality informs philosophical belief. In the present study, individuals holding doctorates in philosophy were given a personality inventory and asked to respond to nine philosophical questions, seven of which produced significant sample sizes. Personality predicted response to three of these seven questions, suggesting that philosophers' beliefs are determined in part by their personalities. This is taken as evidence that philosophy is intrinsically subjective, a claim which is herein developed more completely and defended against (...) several objections. (shrink)

Widely regarded as the most influential proponent of the truth of original sin in the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr worked hard to excise any "literalistic" element from his interpretation of the doctrine. In his attempt to "correct" the Augustinian tradition on original sin by purging it of all "literalistic errors," however, Niebuhr assumed as his starting point the most characteristically modern objection to the doctrine: that birth is a thoroughly natural, animal, and morally meaningless event. As a result, Niebuhr unnecessarily (...) constrained his vision of the dimensions of human freedom, and hence his description of the dynamic of anxiety and freedom that energizes sin. Through a careful reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's writings on original sin, in light of the truth that the end of human life is inseparable from its origins, a reappraisal and recovery of the meaningfulness of the assertion of original sin as a literal inheritance is possible. The result of such a reappraisal and recovery is an amplified insight into the existential anxiety that Niebuhr otherwise described so convincingly. (shrink)

This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766–1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included features that made (...) them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. The expositions and analyses of these theories are given in terms of details that were in the literature at the time or otherwise potentially understandable by the participants given contemporary practice. Some relevant methodological aspects of the history of science are discussed, and the secondary literature is briefly surveyed. The second paper deals with the contemporary development of the new chemistry, and with theory comparison and theory choice in the same period. (shrink)

Philosophy, Music and Emotion explores two contentious issues in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music´s power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two are related and provides a radically new account of what it means to say that music "expresses emotion." Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, and also (...) to the dominant "cognitivist" approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgments and beliefs. This book argues that the cognitivist account of the nature of emotion is false and should be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling. Central to this bold analysis is a new account of two closely connected mental states, desire and pleasure, and their role in human motivation. (shrink)

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into (...) an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Following a brief preface, the second section of this paper discusses Mill's early reflections on the problem of how deductive inference can be illuminating. In the third section it is suggested that in his Logic Mill misconstrued the feature that the premises of a logically valid argument contain the conclusion as the ground of a charge that deductive proof is question-begging. The fourth section discusses the nature of the traditional petitio objection to syllogism, and the fifth shows that Mill had (...) a theory capable of answering it. The final section cites the confusion described in section 3 to explain why Mill nevertheless continued to think that syllogistic proofs beg the question. (shrink)

A generation of social theorists have argued that if free-rider considerations show that certain collective action predicaments are unresolvable under individual, rational choice – unresolvable under an arrangement where each is free to pursue their own relative advantage – then those considerations will equally show that the predicaments cannot be resolved by recourse to norms (Buchanan, 1975, p. 132; Heath, 1976, p. 30; Sober and Wilson, 1998, 156ff; Taylor, 1987, p. 144). If free-rider considerations explain why people do not spontaneously (...) keep the streets clean, though they would each prefer unlittered streets, then those considerations will also explain why there is no effective norm against littering the streets. (shrink)

This is the second of a pair of papers, of which the first showed how each of the main late phlogistic theories effectively reached impasses due to internal problems or included features which made them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. This paper deals with theory comparison and theory change. It gives an unprecedentedly detailed comparison between the available theories in 1790–1791, and shows that this was overwhelmingly in favour of the new chemistry. This time period correlates well with many chemists (...) changing to the new theory. There was a plurality of views held by individuals and there was freedom of individual choice concerning theories, yet there was also a widespread and rational change to the new chemistry. (shrink)

Starting from a behavioural-economics critique of standard rational choice theory Sugden seeks to restate the case for classical liberalism. That case has three strands: a refutation of libertarian...

Past research has suggested that those spontaneous movements of the human hand made during talk convey significant semantic information over and above the speech, at least when the unit of speech analyzed is the individual clause. However, no previous research has tested whether this information is represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative . The first study, reported here, uses an experimental procedure to identify which specific imagistic gestures add semantic information to the speech. The second study analyzes whether the specific (...) gestures still do this when respondents hear the whole narrative. It was found that two thirds of the semantic information, thought to be carried by the gestures, is, in fact, represented in the linguistic discourse, or is inferable from it. However, one third of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures is not represented linguistically in the narrative nor is it inferable from it. In other words, a proportion of the imagistic gestures that accompany speech are absolutely critical to semantic communication. (shrink)

When economists pay homage to the wisdom of the distant past it is more likely that a work two decades old is being admired than one two centuries old. Economics is a science, and the sciences are noteworthy for their digestion and assimilation of the work of previous generations. Contributions remain only as accretions to the accepted body of knowledge; the writings and the writers disappear almost without trace. A conspicuous exception to this rule of professional cannibalization is Adam Smith. (...) Since 1776 he has not lacked for honors that have escaped even his most illustrious peers. Who, after all, wears a David Ricardo necktie? So to the author of The Wealth of Nations, all praise! (shrink)

Derrida's earlier work has a good deal to say about the question of metaphor. Very strikingly in view of Derrida's later thematic interest in the question of animality, metaphor is also presented in a piece on Edmond Jabès as an “animality of the letter,” as “the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life”. “White Mythology” argues for a certain irreducibility of “metaphor in the text of philosophy”. The trajectory of Derrida's thought here is especially difficult to capture, but (...) seems to be circling around the question of being itself and to involve a crucial detour via Heidegger, and more notably his notion of the als‐Struktur. This point of Derrida's thinking must also be thought beyond the reach of any ontology and of any “thinking of being,” to which the early remarks on metaphor might seem to be leading us, but which the thought of dissemination always resists. (shrink)

In Part III of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith declares that people desire to be both esteemed and to be esteem-worthy, but that the latter desire both does and ought to take priority. The main object of this paper is to challenge that priority claim—mainly in its descriptive aspect. If that claim were true, then: agents would be at pains to eliminate any distortions in their self-evaluations; and the effects of the size (especially of total secrecy) and the (...) character of audience on behaviour would be second-order. Empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover the normative claim seems to overlook some advantages of inflated self-evaluation; and to allow no independent room for norms of modesty/humility. (shrink)

This chapter identifies three main sources of the Stoic elements in Hobbes's philosophy: the early Christian‐Stoic Tertullian, the modern “Neo‐Stoic” school of Justus Lipsius, and the natural philosophers of the Cavendish Circle he frequented. Perhaps the most direct Stoical impact on Hobbes was the second/third century Church Father Tertullian. Hobbes and Cavendish are at bottom kindred Stoic spirits, though their systems diverge on the precise nature of material activity. The chapter explores the Stoic character of Hobbesian space, time, causality, and (...) God, especially as these notions are employed in his natural philosophy. Hobbes's quasi‐realism about imaginary space is highly reminiscent of the Stoics' conception of pure space as one of the problematic “incorporeals.” The chapter shows that Hobbes's metaphysical views, though quite unorthodox in his day, served to buttress his overall materialist, empiricist, and mechanist program in natural philosophy. (shrink)

Richard Popkin opened an early paper with the observation "No figure in the history of European philosophy has had a more direct and enduring influence on American thought than George Berkeley."2 Popkin's case for Berkeley's "enduring" influence well into classical pragmatism is compelling.3 But in what follows I will be concerned with his more "direct" influence on the Connecticut philosopher and theologian Samuel Johnson —not to be confused with the English stone-kicking confuter of Berkeley—during Berkeley's brief, abortive Rhode Island sojourn (...) of 1729–31. Johnson studied classics and history at the nascent Yale College, until, "accidentally lighting on Lord Bacon's Instauratio Magna or Advancement of... (shrink)