One of the few authors to have explicitly connected the physical issue of the expansion of the universe with the philosophical topic of the metaphysical status of space is Gerald James Whitrow. This paper examines his view and tries to highlight its strong and weak points, thereby clarifying its obscure aspects. In general, this really interesting philosophical approach to one of the most important phenomena concerning our universe, and therefore modern cosmology, has been very rarely tackled. This unicity (...) increases the value, from a physical, philosophical and historical point of view, of Whitrow’s attempt and calls for new research. (shrink)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, professa belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devotevery little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examinesways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of thesepeople, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has noimplications for behaviour in an unequal one; that what''s bad aboutinequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce; thatprivate action cannot ensure that others have good lives; that privateaction can only achieve a ``drop in (...) the ocean''''; that private effortis not called for, since justice is a matter for the state to enforce;that private effort cannot remove the fundamental injustice, whichis inequality of power; and that private effort involves an unreasonablylarge psychological burden. (shrink)

Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains.

In Veritas, Gerald Vision defends the correspondence theory of truth -- the theory that truth has a direct relationship to reality -- against recent attacks, and critically examines its most influential alternatives. The correspondence theory, if successful, explains one way in which we are cognitively connected to the world; thus, it is claimed, truth -- while relevant to semantics, epistemology, and other studies -- also has significant metaphysical consequences. Although the correspondence theory is widely held today, Vision points to (...) an emerging orthodoxy in philosophy that claims that truth as such carries no significant weight in philosophical explanations. He devotes much of the book to a criticism of that outlook and to a less vulnerable formulation of the correspondence theory.Vision defends the correspondence theory by both presenting evidence for correspondence and examining the claims made by such alternative theories as deflationism, minimalism, and pluralism. The techniques of the argument are thoroughly analytic, but the problem confronted is broadly humanistic. The question examined -- how we, as thinking beings, are connected to and manage to cope in a world that was not designed for our comfort or convenience -- is more likely to be raised by continentalists, but is approached here with the tools of clarity and precision more highly prized in analytic philosophy. The book seeks to avoid both the obscurantism that infects much continental thought and the overly technical concerns and methodology that limit the interest of much work in analytic philosophy. It thus provides a rigorous but largely nontechnical treatment of the topic that will be of interest not only to readers familiar with philosophy but also to those with a background in literary theory and linguistics. (shrink)

This book contains the material for a first course in pure model theory with applications to differentially closed fields.

This paper develops a stronger version of ‘inference-to-the-best explanation’ scientific realism. I argue against three standard assumptions of current realists: realism is confirmed if it provides the best explanation of theories’ predictive success ; the realist claim that successful theories are always approximately true provides the best explanation of their success ; and realists are committed to giving the same sort of truth-based explanation of superseded theories’ success that they give to explain our best current theories’ success. On the positive (...) side, I argue that the confirmation of realism requires explaining theories’ explanatory success, not just their predictive success ; in turn this task requires a richer realist model of explanation that brings into the explanans both successful theories’ epistemic virtues and the standards governing these virtues, as well as truth; this richer realist model is further confirmed because it can better explain the success of theories in gaining wide acceptance among scientists; and the model is further supported because it is superior to ‘preservative realism ’ in providing a plausible rebuttal of the pessimistic meta-induction from the many past successful-but-false theories to the like- lihood that our best current theories are likewise false. (shrink)

Gerald L. Bruns. the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work" (p. 80). The notion of a pure language, a language uncontaminated by mere speech, may be one of modernity's great unkillable ...

In this essay, I criticize Laudan's view that methodological rules in science are best understood as hypothetical imperatives, for example, to realize cognitive aim A, follow method B. I criticize his idea that such rules are best evaluated by a naturalized philosophy of science which collects the empirical evidence bearing on the soundness of these rules. My claim is that this view yields a poor explanation of (1) the role of methodological rules in establishing the rationality of scientific practices, (2) (...) the debates scientists have over rival methodological rules, and (3) the reasons on the basis of which scientists actually embrace, challenge, or transform methodological rules. A better explanation is provided by treating at least some methodological rules as foundational standards of theory-appraisal which define the criteria of scientific truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, explanations, etc., for a certain tradition or community of scientific practice. Such standards are in turn grounded or challenged on the basis of their coherence or incoherence with a wider body of scientific judgments. This view leads away from a naturalized philosophy of science back to its more classical epistemological conception. (shrink)

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but (...) by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives. (shrink)

Gerald A. Cohen; II—Beliefs and Rôles, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 June 1967, Pages 17–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The machine as a social movement of today's “precariat”—those whose labor and lives are precarious. In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition (...) between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

In this essay I sketch a philosophical argument for classical liberalism based on the requirements of public reason. I argue that we can develop a philosophical liberalism that, unlike so much recent philosophy, takes existing social facts and mores seriously while, at the same time, retaining the critical edge characteristic of the liberal tradition. I argue that once we develop such an account, we are led toward a vindication of “old” (qua classical) liberal morality—what Benjamin Constant called the “liberties of (...) the moderns.” A core thesis of the paper is that a regime of individual rights is crucial to the project of public justification because it disperses moral authority to individuals thus mitigating what I call the “burdens of justification.” Footnotesa Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Philosophy Department workshop on the morality of capitalism, and at the conference on rights theory at the Murphy Institute, Tulane University. I am grateful for the comments of the participants; my special thanks to David Schmidtz, Julian Lamont, and Andrea Houchard for their useful written comments and suggestions. (shrink)

This almost self-contained introduction to higher recursion theory is essential reading for all researchers in the field.

The ethical choices faced by engineers today are increasingly complex. Competing and conflicting ethical demands from clients, communities, employees, and personal objectives combine to suggest that engineers employ ethical approaches that are adaptive yet grounded in three concrete professional circumstances: first, that engineers apply unique professional skills in the service of a client, subject to protecting the public interest; second, that engineers advance the state of knowledge of their professional field through reflection, research, and sharing experience in journals and conferences, (...) and third, that they develop new professionals by active mentoring. This paper examines five features of American pragmatism and suggests that its emphasis on specific, context-based ethical decision making can assist engineers in a postmodern setting. In particular, it considers the venues of interpersonal ethical choices, institutional ethical conflicts, and social choices that have ethical components. Pragmatism suggests that in such a complex ethical climate, there is a need for the co-evolution of judgment and action, for individual reflective judgment in particular situations, and for ceasing to search for a single, immutable principle for ethical choice. (shrink)

David lyons has recently argued that mill's ethics is an alternative to both act and rule utilitarianism. In the first part of this paper I argue that lyons makes mill out to be far too much of a rule utilitarian. The second part of the article then provides an account of mill's theory of moral rules based on an analysis of the four functions rules serve in his ethics. On this reading mill's theory is a hybrid of act and rule (...) utilitarianism: violation of a moral rule is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for wrongdoing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 327-341 [Access article in PDF] The Rise of Postmodernisms and the "End of Science" Gerald Holton * [Errata]In a remarkable essay, "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will," Isaiah Berlin leads up to a key question facing historians of ideas today. He begins with the observation that beliefs have entered our culture that "draw their plausibility" from a deep and radical (...) revolt against the central tradition of Western thought. That central tradition rested on the "pillars of the social optimism," which had found its fullest expression in the Enlightenment, "that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle solvable; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole." 1But these pillars, Berlin notes, "came under attack toward the end of the eighteenth century by a movement first known in Germany as Sturm und Drang, and later in the many varieties of romanticism... and the many contemporary forms of irrationalism of both the right and the left, familiar to everyone today." In our time, in the alleged absence of "objective rules," the new rules are those made up by the rebels: "Ends are not... objective values," and "ends are not discovered at all but made, not found but created." And he concludes: "The prophets of the nineteenth-century predicted many things... but what none of them, so far as I know, predicted was that the last third of the twentieth century would be dominated by... the enthronement of the will of individuals or classes, and the rejection of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit. How did this begin?" 2 As if to ensure that the question be considered central to the understanding of our age, Berlin adds that the explosion of irrationalism is one of the "outstanding characteristics of our century, the most demanding of explanation [End Page 327] and analysis." 3 Elsewhere he also appeals to seek the causes of "what appears to me to be the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time." 4Focusing my presentation chiefly on the aspects concerning science, one may well rephrase Berlin's question: how did it come about that we have passed again in many areas into what Susan Haack calls an "Age of Preposterism?" 5 -- that, for example, scientists, who are now in a period of spectacular advances of knowledge across the board, find a whole array of highly placed academics and journalists asserting that scientists' hopes to reach objective truths (two highly suspect words now) are in vain because there is no difference between the laws scientists find in nature and the arbitrary rules that govern baseball games; that science is "just one language game among others"; that we must "abolish the distinction between science and fiction"; that "The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge"; and in any case, as the title of a current bestseller has it, we are at The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." 6These are only a few glimpses, indicators of a stream of derogations, issuing from academe and the media. But happily, my concern here is not with the details of the current manifestation of what has been called the war on science but rather with examples of its historic lineage, with earlier phases of what Isaiah Berlin called the "Romantic Revolt." 7 Here we must begin our analysis by recognizing that any such multifaceted movement is best understood as a reaction against what went before, against what became so unsatisfactory or even intolerable as to cause the revolt.Historically, the most obvious and early reaction of this sort was the response to the breakthroughs in the seventeenth century that formed science and simultaneously signaled the great rupture from the ancient worldview, in which the individual, in principle, had been able to be both intellectually and spiritually comfortable. As one of the direct ancestors of romanticism, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744... (shrink)

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative (...) labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, "Can a human being be free of human nature?" _On Ceasing to Be Human_ examines philosophical as well as literary texts and contexts, in which various senses of Cavell's question might be explored and developed. During the past thirty or so years, the very concept of "being human" has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, analytic philosophy. This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between (...) freedom and nonidentity that Cavell's question implies, and which turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up in this book: Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. Each of these is, in different ways, a philosopher of the "singular" for whom the singular cannot be reduced to concepts, categories, distinctions, or the rule of identity. (shrink)

The general perception of how innovative assisted reproductive technologies are introduced is through a carefully controlled series of experiments in an animal model, such as the mouse. Only after the technique has been proven can one consider confirmatory studies on mammals closely related to humans, such as rhesus monkeys or other nonhuman primates. With this background of a peer-reviewed body of well-established published data, there is sufficient foundation and rationale to propose a clinical investigation to a responsible human subjects institutional (...) review board. IRBs weigh the benefits and risks of the new methods to human subjects, and then consider the appropriate informed consent procedures for the particular case. Only after a large number of clinical studies are performed at multiple sites and are peer reviewed can the efficacy and safety of the innovative approach be clearly evaluated. At that time, the potential therapy can be responsibly offered to suitable beneficiaries. (shrink)

The general perception of how innovative assisted reproductive technologies are introduced is through a carefully controlled series of experiments in an animal model, such as the mouse. Only after the technique has been proven can one consider confirmatory studies on mammals closely related to humans, such as rhesus monkeys or other nonhuman primates. With this background of a peer-reviewed body of well-established published data, there is sufficient foundation and rationale to propose a clinical investigation to a responsible human subjects institutional (...) review board. IRBs weigh the benefits and risks of the new methods to human subjects, and then consider the appropriate informed consent procedures for the particular case. Only after a large number of clinical studies are performed at multiple sites and are peer reviewed can the efficacy and safety of the innovative approach be clearly evaluated. At that time, the potential therapy can be responsibly offered to suitable beneficiaries. (shrink)

Initially found in population studies designed to discover a link between child abuse and population categories, risk has been institutionalized in British Columbia through the use of a risk assessment tool presumed to measure danger to particular children. Recruitment of the risk speech genre reflects a need for government child protection workers to clearly articulate which children are in need of protection from “risks as they really are” while avoiding the accusation of “intervening too much.” Moreover, risk assessment tools are (...) both audit systems and auditable systems connected through an audit chain. Auditors who represent potential blaming procedures track errors in risk valuation to specific decisions. This entrenches a separation between what we want to know about risk from what we want to do about risk. The apparently objective use of numeric values within risk assessments obscures the continuing role of subjective moral values in the practice of child protection. (shrink)

Deep questions of identity are always at play in war and peacemaking, sometimes hidden yet always decisive. Thus, for Christians, peace activism needs peace theology and, indeed, peace theology needs peace ecclesiology. Efforts to transcend classic debates between just war theory and Christian pacifism by developing a just peace ethic will falter if they fail to address more basic questions of how Christians are to sustain a primary loyalty to Jesus Christ in relationship to other identities of family, tribe, nation, (...) and global citizen. Attention to the biblical trajectory of Abrahamic community, the patristic embrace of life in exile, and Vatican II calls for the Church to be the “sacrament of human unity” by recognizing itself as a “pilgrim people” suggests that the Catholic Church can truly be a “peace church” only if it embraces life in diaspora. (shrink)

STANLEY HAUERWAS HAS FAMOUSLY TAKEN TO THE MENNONITES BEcause they constitute what appears to be an oxymoron—a tradition of dissent. He launched his career endeavoring to restore the stuff of continuity to the Christian life. In contrast, John Howard Yoder launched his career arguing against the assumption that traditions and organic communal life could carry practices of authentic discipleship forward across generations. Here lies a fundamental difference between Hauerwas and Yoder that runs deeper than whether one of them is more (...) "for" or "against" the nations. (shrink)