In George Nakhnikian’s interesting and stimulating paper, “Quantum Cosmology, Theistic Philosophical Cosmology, and the Existence Question” (present issue) he addresses the fundamental issue of whether it is metaphysically possible or justifiable to believe that our universe began to exist without a cause, divine or otherwise. His conclusion is negative, and he argues that, contrary to my views, quantum cosmology is consistent with theism. In this paper, I shall evaluate Nakhnikian’s arguments.

ABSTRACT Robert Owen’s ideas and achievements largely shaped French republicanism in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly through the action of former Saint-Simonian socialists. This article explores this process, focusing on two of its major actors: the philosophers Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, who joined the Republican Party in 1833. The two friends formulated an ambitious and influential republican doctrine in their Encyclopédie Nouvelle, in which Owen’s philosophy was largely mobilised, most particularly when Leroux theorised his religion de la fraternité on (...) the model of the ‘Religion of Charity’. Furthermore, Reynaud implemented key elements of Owen’s educational principles in the Second Republic’s policies when he became a leading figure of Hippolyte Carnot’s Ministère de l’instruction publique et des cultes in 1848. Finally, as the two men had a great influence on George Sand, sometimes described as Leroux’s ‘prophetess’, they introduced her to Owen’s ideas, which she presented and discussed in her novels. Thus, even if they sometimes remained ambivalent towards the British reformer, Leroux and Reynaud introduced parts of his thought and ideals into French republicanism, be it in terms of ideology, policies, or literary mythologies. (shrink)

"This is a splendid, substantial volume." -Clio.

In a recent essay, Quentin Smith revisits a question of philosophical cosmology. Why does the universe exist? This is one way of asking the existence question EQ. Smith notes that all theistic philosophical cosmologists have answered this question in terms of God’s creative choice. Smith favors an “atheistic” philosophical answer: “The universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of existing based on a fundamental law of nature.” He further declares: “This law of nature... is inconsistent with theism and (...) implies that God does not exist.” The structure of Smith's reasoning in defense of these claims is the following: (1) The answer to EQ of theistic philosophical cosmologists is logically inconsistent with the answer of atheistic philosophical cosmologists. (2) Therefore, theistic and atheistic philosophical cosmologies are logically inconsistent with each other. (3) The atheistic answer to EQ is a complete answer to EQ. (4) Therefore, theism is demonstrably false. I shall argue that Smith’s reasoning in defense of (1) is not sound. From that, it follows that (2) is not a proven truth. Assumption (3) is controversial, and in the present context question-begging. It presupposes that materialism is true. Therefore, (4) is not a proven truth. (shrink)

... eminently readable... admirably picks up the spirit of what Hegel is saying.... more readable and accurate than Hartmann's, and it trans-lates a more readable text than does Nisbet's. It includes (as Hartmann's does not) an excerpt, which serves as chapter five, from 'The Geo-graphical Basis of History' (particularly interesting for what it says of America), and a brief chapter six, entitled 'The Division of History.' The volume closes with an appendix, translating §§341-360 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and deals (...) directly with the very concept of 'World History.' It constitutes a big help in coming to grips with what Hegel means by 'Spirit.' --Quentin Lauer, SJ, Fordham University, in International Philosophical Quarterly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 589-590 [Access article in PDF] Luc Foisneau. Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000. Pp. 424. Paper, FF 174. As a recent conference in London confirmed, Hobbes scholarship remains sharply divided, even precarious, with several plausible and diametrically opposed interpretations en jeu. This is especially true as to the question of Hobbes's religion in relation to (...) his political thinking. The famous "Strauss thesis" appeals to many, and, not long ago (Journal of the History of Philosophy 34, no. 2, 1996), this journal printed an exchange between Edwin Curley and A. P. Martinich that canvassed the old arguments and introduced many new ones. The issue seems to be whether Hobbes was sincere in making his theological arguments, prompting us to include them in his thought, or ironic, allowing us to pass them by.French philosopher Luc Foisneau has produced a carefully written, brilliantly crafted account of Hobbes's theory of political obligation that includes the theological elements and makes them central, but without resort to the difficult concept of authorial sincerity. Foisneau, who teaches at the Institut d'Études Politiques, Paris, finds his interpretive key in Hobbes's description of divine omnipotence. The concept, he claims, figures centrally in Hobbes's theory of knowledge. It grounds the theory of political obligation and provides a principal justification for sovereignty itself. Moreover, Foisneau draws a starkly moving picture of human mortality vis-à-vis God's "irresistible power," asserting that the secular or lay temper of modern moral and political theory stems less from a rejection of theology (certainly not in Hobbes's case) than from a sharpened awareness of human limitations. Foisneau gives an impressive and convincing answer to the abiding question: "Hobbes's theology: What does it matter?" Namely, Hobbes's theology is the core of Hobbes's politics.Before briefly considering one strand in the tissue of Foisneau's argument, let us consider two features of his work and the context of its production.The first is that the author's focus is securely on the text itself, recalling the French explication du texte tradition. According to its strictures, working in detail, the analyst of the text carefully unfolds its meaning, precisely contained in and coextensive with the text's form. Hobbes the man and his contemporaries recede as limiting cases or frames of reference, though they and the other Hobbesian texts do figure as material illustrative [End Page 589] of points made through textual interpretation. Indeed, the history of ideas serves to illuminate the text; see the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction, below. This steady, ample focus on the text's possible coherence and the concern not to leave the four corners of the document bear comparison with the contextualism of Lucien Lefebvre and Quentin Skinner.The second feature is linked to the first, and it is Foisneau's association with the Centre Thomas Hobbes (CTH), at the Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques, Paris, headed by Prof. Yves Charles Zarka. The foremost academic institution devoted solely to the study of Thomas Hobbes, the CTH annually holds extended, international seminars, explicating two or three chapters of Leviathan. Several books and articles have appeared under CTH sponsorship, dealing with specific aspects of Hobbes's work, for example, detailed analyses of his philosophic vocabulary. The CTH's highly focused, on-going program of study gives promise that the rough places in Hobbes scholarship may one day be a bit plainer. Foisneau's book is a major contribution toward that end.Let us consider one particular, viz., Hobbes's modeling of the sovereign's power upon God's absolute power. Hobbes's long-time interlocutor, John Bramhall, is quick to detect and criticize this in De Cive, moving him to reprove both the theological and political deficiencies of Hobbes's conceptual translatio. Bramhall denies one can consider God's absolute power independently of His ordained power, expressed in the eternal laws He has ordained. Nor may one place the power of the sovereign beyond the reach of the law. Impressed... (shrink)

This paper explores Richard Tuck's account of Grotius as the key innovator in the history that leads to the invention both of the free individual, protective of his or her rights, and of the modern liberal state, respectful of individuals' rights. Contextualism as a method for dealing with texts is discussed by way of a recent interview given by Tuck's teacher, Quentin Skinner. The attempt is made to see contextualism in context.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 101-103 [Access article in PDF] Cees Leijenhorst. The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xv + 242. Cloth, $97.00. Cees Leijenhorst, the young Dutch scholar and student of the late Karl Schuhmann, has written the most important book on Thomas Hobbes's natural science since Frithiof Brandt's Thomas Hobbes's Mechanical Conception of (...) Nature of 1928. This is true despite the undoubted brilliance and success of Leviathan and the Air Pump, published in 1985 by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Why this is so, it will be the burden of this review to clarify.Writing in the modern historiographical tradition known as contextualism, long associated with John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck, Leijenhorst seeks to locate Hobbes within the horizon of that current of natural thought that began with Aristotle, led through antiquity and then flourished and came to predominate with the West's recovery of the Stagirite in the late Middle Ages. The course of so long a filiation of ideas cannot be the subject of a book whose length is under 250 pages, though a companion collection of essays on Aristotle and his long progeny, edited by Leijenhorst and others, has also appeared [End Page 101] (to be reviewed in the Journal). Instead, Leijenhorst focuses on the last, self-avowed inheritors and developers of that tradition, known as late Aristotelianism, though precisely how to define that tradition is itself problematized.Classically trained, Hobbes was well equipped to study Aristotle directly in Greek, without intermediaries; he early on published a translation of Thucydides. Still, Leijenhorst's concern is less to draw Hobbes closer to Aristotle than to relate him both to his immediate intellectual predecessors and to his own contemporaries, though, in each case, for different reasons. In the former, Leijenhorst convincingly argues that, as Gilson showed for Descartes, Hobbes assumed, drew upon, adopted and modified prevailing Aristotelian doctrines, even as he famously condemned their ancient author. And, Hobbes's sources, as they themselves interpreted, rejected and modified the views of their forebear, were rather various, including such writers of manuals as Bartholomaeus Anglicus and John Case, as well as others whose interests and directions were more varied and less conservative, including Scaliger, Rudolph Goclenius and Otto Casmann.A common source for both these strains of late Aristotelianism was the great stream of commentaries produced largely by members of the Jesuit Order from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, including Franciscus Toletus, Antonio Rubio, Petrus Fonseca, as well as Franciscus Suarez and members of other orders.This stream of thought also fed into the confessional strife of post-Reformation Europe, so that both Lutherans and Calvinists developed their own Aristotelianisms. One of the most striking conclusions of Leijenhorst's work is that, in characterizing both Aristotle's and his own metaphysics (or philosophia prima) as a universal science rather than as a particular theological science, Hobbes is an heir of this "Protestant ontology."Finally, Hobbes looked to the great names of natural-scientific thinking in sixteenth-century Italy, Zabarella, Pomponazzi, Fracastoro, Telesio and Campanella. Like Hobbes, these latter authors, "though vehemently anti-Aristotelian," nonetheless "exploited kinematic, empiricist and materialist tendencies found within the Aristotelian tradition itself, particularly in the School of Padua" (11).Such investigations into sources and lines of argument illuminate relations with predecessors and contemporaries in ways that social-constructivist accounts, like those of Schaeffer and Shapin and of the Edinburgh sociologist of knowledge David Bloor, may not accomplish. The author gives one instance of direct conflict between the results of that school and his own contextualism which illustrates this larger point.In his fight with Boyle, Hobbes is at pains to deny the existence of the void. Though he came to reject it rather late in his scientific thinking, the void, Schaffer and Shapin suggest, served to give space to the "incorporeal substances," similar to the scholastics' "abstract essences," upon which the latter erected the "kingdom of darkness" that... (shrink)

The first of three volumes of essays by Quentin Skinner, one of the world's leading intellectual historians. This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates (...) the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. (shrink)

Questions the research, assumptions, and intention behind Danish statistician Bj²rn Lomborg's attacks on peer-reviewed scientific theories of global warming.

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly (...) employed. I present Grice’s account of linguistic meaning and transpose his actual strategy and method to epistemic representation. This results in a reduction of epistemic representation to mental states that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality. (shrink)

Global Economy, Global Justice explores a vital question that is suppressed in most economics texts: "what makes for a good economic outcome?" Neoclassical theory embraces the normative perspective of "welfarism" to assess economic outcomes. This volume demonstrates the fatal flaws of this perspective--flaws that stem from objectionable assumptions about human nature, society and science. Exposing these failures, the book obliterates the ethical foundations of global neoliberalism. George DeMartino probes heterodox economic traditions and philosophy in search of an ethically viable (...) alternative to welfarism. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, DeMartino proposes the egalitarian principle of the "global harmonization of capabilities" to guide economics. This principle provides a basis for resisting oppression the world over while nevertheless demanding respect for cultural diversity. DeMartino puts this principle to work adjudicating contemporary debates over global policy regimes, and completes thebook with a set of deeply egalitarian global policies for the year 2025. Global Economy, Global Justice 's engaging prose will appeal to those seeking to understand the intersection between economics and political philosophy. Its focus on the normative foundations of contemporary policy disputes makes it unique in the literature on globalization. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

Cogent, engaged, accessible, and indeed exhilarating, this new book will appeal to readers of history, politics, and philosophy at all levels from upper-undergraduate upwards, and provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the ...

This major new work from Quentin Skinner presents a fundamental reappraisal of the political theory of Hobbes. Using, for the first time, the full range of manuscript as well as printed sources, it documents an entirely new view of Hobbes 's intellectual development, and re-examines the shift from a humanist to a scientific culture in European moral and political thought. By examining Hobbes 's philosophy against the background of his humanist education, Professor Skinner rescues this most difficult and challenging (...) of political philosophers from the intellectual isolation in which he is so often discussed. This book presents a splendid exemplification of the 'Cambridge' contextual approach to the study of intellectual history with which Professor Skinner himself is especially associated. It will be of interest and importance to a wide range of scholars in history, philosophy, politics, and literary theory. (shrink)

Our universe seems to be miraculously fine-tuned for life. Multiverse theories have been proposed as an explanation for this on the basis of probabilistic arguments, but various authors have objected that we should consider our total evidence that this universe in particular has life in our inference, which would block the argument. The debate thus crucially hinges on how Bayesian background and evidence are distinguished and on how indexical or demonstrative terms are analysed. The aim of this article is to (...) take a step back and examine these various aspects of Bayesian reasoning and how they affect the arguments. The upshot is that there are reasons to resist the fine-tuning argument for the multiverse, but the "this-universe-objection" is not one of them. (shrink)

Natural modalities are often analysed from an abstract point of view where they are associated with putative laws of nature. However, the way possibilities are represented in physics is more complex. Lagrangian mechanics, for instance, involves two different layers of modalities: kinematical and dynamical possibilities. This paper examines the status of these two layers, both in the classical and quantum case. The quantum case is particularly problematic: we identify four possible interpretive options. The upshot is that a close inspection of (...) the way possibilities are represented in physics could lead to new ways of thinking about natural modalities. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to establish a connection between modelling practices and interpretive approaches in quantum mechanics, taking as a starting point the literature on scientific representation. Different types of modalities play different roles in scientific representation. I postulate that the way theoretical structures are interpreted in this respect affects the way models are constructed. In quantum mechanics, this would be the case in particular of initial conditions and observables. I examine two formulations of quantum mechanics, the standard (...) wave-function formulation and the consistent histories formulation, and show that they correspond to opposite stances, which confirms my approach. Finally, I examine possible strategies for deciding between these stances. (shrink)

When we ask whether something exists, we expect a yes or no answer, not a further query about what kind of existence, how much of it, whether we mean existence for you or existence for me, or whether we are asking about some property which it might have. In this book, this simple requirement is defended and pursued into its various and sometimes surprising implications. In the course of this pursuit, such questions arise as `Do appearances exist?' `Do unknowable things (...) exist?' `Do past and future exist?' `Does God necessarily exist?' This novel and non-technical approach to important philosophical questions will be of interest to senior students of philosophy and, indeed, to all general readers with philosophical interests. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...) survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment — God and the afterlife —independently predict respondents' assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As well as corroborating experimental work, our findings suggest that, across cultural and religious backgrounds, beliefs about the permissibility of moral transgressions are tied to beliefs about supernatural monitoring and punishment, supporting arguments that these beliefs may be important promoters of cooperation in human groups. (shrink)

This volume puts together twelve new essays by scholars who have done groundbreaking work in epistemology over the past four decades. Unfortunately, the editor’s brief introduction offers only a sketchy presentation of the papers and their background. Given the variety and complexity of the issues tackled, one would have expected a more detailed account of the nature and developments of the epistemological theories and arguments put forward and discussed by the contributors. The absence of such an account is all the (...) more surprising considering that the editor does not himself contribute a paper to the volume. (shrink)

We propose a construct, the Trust Triangle, that highlights three primary mechanisms that provide ex post accountability for opportunistic behavior and motivate ex ante trust in economic relationships. The mechanisms are a society’s legal and regulatory framework, market-based discipline and reputational capital, and culture, including individual ethics and social norms. The Trust Triangle provides a framework to conceptualize the relationships between trust, corporate accountability, legal liability, reputation, and culture. We use the Trust Triangle to summarize recent developments in the empirical (...) finance literature that examine how trust is formed and how trust, or its absence, affects financial markets, firm performance, and the incidence of financial fraud. To date, most studies examine only one leg of the Trust Triangle in isolation. The evidence, however, indicates that all three legs of the Trust Triangle have first-order effects on a wide range of financial outcomes and that they are interrelated. Attempts to model trust and trustworthiness that do not incorporate all three aspects of the Trust Triangle will therefore miss essential aspects of the basic economic problem of how counterparties overcome the risks of moral hazard, asymmetric information, and opportunism to engage in mutually beneficial exchange and production activities. We focus especially on culture-related mechanisms, a recently developed area in empirical finance research that has potential to influence the more established research on laws and reputation. (shrink)

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to (...) clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research. (shrink)

Time, Change and Freedom is the first introduction to metaphysics that uses the idea of time as a unifying principle. Time is used to relate the many issues involved in the complex study of metaphysics. Sections of the book are written in dialogue form which allows the reader to question the theories while they read and have those queries answered in the text. In addition, the authors provide glossaries of key terms as well as recommendations for further reading at the (...) conclusion of each chapter. Quentin Smith and L. Nathan Oaklander examine the tensions between determinism and freedom, temporality and historical change as well as an array of other issues fundamental to introductory metaphysics. (shrink)

This is the first chapter of Modal Empiricism: Interpreting Science Without Scientific Realism. The debate on scientific realism results from a tension between the empiricist methodology, which is a defining feature of science, and claims to the effect that science can unveil the fundamental nature of reality. What distinguishes realist and anti-realist positions is not necessarily that the former take scientific knowledge “at face value” or take the side of scientists in general while the latter do not. Rather, realists and (...) anti-realists propose different ways of interpreting science as a whole, and in particular its aim, its possible achievements and its content. The aim of this book is to defend an interpretation that potentially applies to each of these three levels: modal empiricism. This position purports to be the articulation of a pragmatist stance towards science. This introductory chapter briefly presents the position, then outlines the structure of the book. (shrink)

Some biologists now argue in favour of a pluralistic approach to plant activities, understandable both from the classical perspective of physiological mechanisms and that of the biology of behaviour involving choices and decisions in relation to the environment. However, some do not hesitate to go further, such as plant “neurobiologists” or philosophers who today defend an intelligence, a mind or even a plant consciousness in a renewed perspective of these terms. To what extent can we then adhere to pluralism in (...) the study of plant behaviour? How does this pluralism in the study and explanation of plant behaviour fit into, or even build itself up, in a broader history of science? Is it a revolutionary way of rethinking plant behaviour in the twenty-first century or is it an epistemological extension of an older attitude? By proposing a synthesis of the question of plant behaviour by selected elements of the history of botany, the objective is to show that the current plant biology is not unified on the question of behaviour, but that its different tendencies are in fact part of a long botanical tradition with contrasting postures. Two axes that are in fact historically linked will serve as a common thread. 1. Are there several ways of understanding or conceiving plant behaviour within plant sciences and their epistemology? 2. Can the behaviour of a plant be considered in the same way as that of an animal? The working hypothesis defended in this article consists in showing that the current opposition between growth, development and reductionist physiology on the one hand and the biology of behaviour involving sensitivity and choices in plant activity on the other hand has been built up through the history of botany. (shrink)

Berkeley's idealism started a revolution in philosophy. As one of the great empiricist thinkers he not only influenced British philosophers from Hume to Russell and the logical positivists in the twentieth century, he also set the scene for the continental idealism of Hegel and even the philosophy of Marx. There has never been such a radical critique of common sense and perception as that given in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). His views were met with disfavour, and his response (...) to his critics was the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. This edition of Berkeley's two key works has an introduction which examines and in part defends his arguments for idealism, as well as offering a detailed analytical contents list, extensive philosophical notes, and an index. (shrink)

A brief survey of his life and writings focusing on three major works-The Prince, The Discourses, and The History of Florence.

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes to solve the measurement problem and reconcile completeness and locality of quantum mechanics by postulating relativity to the observer for events and facts, instead of an absolute “view from nowhere”. The aim of this paper is to clarify this interpretation, and in particular, one of its central claims concerning the possibility for an observer to have knowledge about other observer’s events. I consider three possible readings of this claim, and develop the most promising (...) one, relativism, to show how it fares when confronted with the traditional interpretative problems of quantum mechanics. Although it provides answers to some problems, I claim that there is currently no adapted locality criterion to evaluate whether the resulting interpretation is local or not. (shrink)