Anscombe guides us through the Tractatus and, thereby, Wittgenstein's early philosophy as a whole. She shows in particular how his arguments developed out of the discussions of Russell and Frege. This reprint is of the fourth, corrected edition.

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

The intentionality of sensation -- The first person -- Substance -- The subjectivity of sensation -- Events in the mind -- Comments on Professor R.L. Gregory's paper on perception -- On sensations of position -- Intention -- Pretending -- On the grammar of "Enjoy" -- The reality of the past -- Memory, "experience," and causation -- Causality and determination -- Times, beginnings, and causes -- Soft determinism -- Causality and extensionality -- Before and after -- Subjunctive conditionals -- "Under a (...) description" -- Analysis competition--tenth problem -- A reply to Mr. C.S. Lewis's argument that "naturalism" is self-refuting. (shrink)

I IT is often declared or evidently assumed that causality is some kind of necessary connexion, or alternatively, that being caused is — non-trivially ...

"Der vorliegende Band hebt sich aus der wachsenden Zahl der Publikationen zur Spatantike und namentlich zur spatantiken Philosophie schon durch die Originalitat des behandelten Themas hervor, das eine Forschungsluecke schlieat. Die Beitrage von Wissenschaftlern verschiedener europaischer Nationen, die als Spezialisten fuer die Spatantike gelten konnen, bieten sowohl einzeln als auch in der Zusammenstellung einen echten Forschungsfortschritt." Plekos "a a valuable contribution. The volume also shows, as the product of predominantly young scholars, that the future of scholarship in the area of (...) ancient and Patristic philosophy is in good hands." Vigiliae Chritianae Inhalt: S. Follinger: Philosophische Theorien in Arnobius' apologetischer Argumentation J. Althoff: Zur Epikurrezeption bei Laktanz C. Riedweg: Philosophische Argumentationsstrukturen in Julians Contra Galilaeos D. J. O'Meara: Epicurus Neoplatonicus R. Thiel: Stoische Ethik im neuplatonischen System (Simplikios' Kommentar zu Epiktets Enchiridion) M. Erler: Hellenistische Philosophie im Platonismus der Spatantike M. Bettetini: Ai limiti della materia, tra neoplatonismo e cristianesimo K. Schlapbach: Ciceronisches und Neuplatonisches in den Proomien von Augustin, Contra Academicos 1 und 2 S. Harwardt: Die Gluecksfrage der Stoa in Augustins De beata vita C. Horn: Augustinus ueber Tugend, Moralitat und das hochste Gut T. Fuhrer: Zum wahrnehmungstheoretischen Hintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff C. Oser-Grote: Virtus Romana und Virtus Christiana - ein romischer Wertbegriff bei Prudentius J. Opsomer / C. Steel: Proclus' Doctrine on the Origin of Evil K. Pollmann: Fiktionalitat in der Philosophie des Hellenismus und in der Spatantike U. Eigler: Strukturen und Voraussetzungen zum Erhalt von philosophischem Wissen in der Spatantike Stellenregister. (shrink)

Higher order cognitive processes, including ethical decision making (EDM), are influenced by the experiencing of discrete emotions. Recent research highlights the negative influence one such emotion, anger, has on EDM and its underlying processes. The mechanism, however, by which anger disrupts the EDM has not been investigated. The current study sought to discover whether cognitive appraisals of an emotion-evoking event are the driving mechanisms behind the influence of anger on EDM. One primary (goal obstacle) and one secondary (certainty) appraisal of (...) anger were examined. Study results suggest that appraisals of certainty are the driving mechanism behind the negative relationship between anger and EDM. Certainty appraisals led to less application of EDM-promoting strategies and more unethical social motives. Findings further highlight the value of investigating appraisals of emotional events, given their cognitive nature, for their potential effects on cognitive operations, such as EDM. Future directions and implications are discussed. (shrink)

One of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about the human condition in the realms of politics, society, and religion–from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Gertrude Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy of the British and the wisdom (...) and foresight of thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, who established its unique character and historic importance. It is this Enlightenment, she argues, that created a moral and social philosophy–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more so than in Europe. This is an illuminating contribution to the history of ideas. (shrink)

-- v. 2. Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

Parmenides, mystery and contradiction -- The early theory of forms -- The new theory of forms -- Understanding proofs : Meno, 85d₉-86c₂, continued -- Aristotle and the sea battle -- The principle of individuation -- Thought and action in Aristotle -- Necessity and truth -- Hume and Julius Caesar -- "Whatever has a beginning of existence must have a cause" : Hume's argument exposed -- Will and emotion -- Retraction -- The question of linguistic idealism.

The debate on the foundations of knowledge and meaning has gained particular attention in recent philosophical discourse. A number of commentators, including Richard Rorty, have categorized leading contemporary philosophers such as Wittgenstein as being 'anti-foundationalist". In this comprehensive analysis of Wittgenstein's concept of the form of life and its implications, Professor Conway takes issue with this characterization of Wittgenstein. Instead, the author interprets Wittgenstein as continuing the discussion of foundations, while radically transforming the very understanding of foundations.

On 5 May 1957, Leopold Löwenheim passed away in a Berlin hospital following a short but severe illness, unnoticed by the community of mathematical logicians who believed that he had perished in a Nazi concentration camp in or shortly after 1940 (the year of publication in the Journal of Symbolic Logic of his last paper before the end of World War II). The 50th anniversary of his death seems an appropriate date for the posthumous publication of a paper that was (...) supposed to appear in Fundamenta Mathematicae in 1939, the galley proofs of which Löwenheim had already seen and corrected when German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Löwenheim managed to save the proofs through the War, despite the loss of most of his possessions during the bombing of Berlin in 1943 and 1944. By another lucky chance, a copy of the proofs survived in the present author's possession, when the originals were lost during a flat clearing in Berlin as part of the estate of Johannes Teichert (1904?1994), Löwenheim's step-son, when his widow moved into a nursing-home in May 1999. Later, I will expand these short remarks slightly but seize the present opportunity to resume (and in some places add to) the extant data on Löwenheim's life and writings. (shrink)

Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Lebens in all ihrer Lückenhaftigkeit läßt doch schon ersehen, wie sich der Intellekt kraft ununterbrochenen Fortschritts in aufsteigender Linie, über die Reihe der Wirbeltiere hin bis zum Menschen, herausgebildet hat. Sie zeigt uns in der Fähigkeit des Verstehens einen Ausläufer der Fähigkeit des Handelns, eine immer schärfere, immer mehrgliedrigere, immer geschmeidigere Anpassung des Lebewesens an die gegebenen Existenzbedingungen. Woraus zu folgern wäre, daß unser Intellekt im engeren Sinn des Worts dazu bestimmt sei, die vollkommene Verwebung unseres Körpers (...) in seine Umgebung zu sichern, die Beziehungen der äußeren Dinge aufeinander vorzustellen, kurz: dazu, die Materie zu denken. Und tatsächlich wird dies einer der Schlüsse unserer Arbeit sein. (shrink)

People who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess a specific form of moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside the said practice. To achieve this goal, we need a legitimate way to balance moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. In the present contribution, we describe a version of the model of Reflective (...) Equilibrium, which we call the Normative-Empirical Reflective Equilibrium . RE provides a framework for ethical thinking that includes both moral experience and normative theory.After an outline of the model, we focus on the role of empirical research and illustrate how empirical data on moral intuitions can add to the comprehensiveness of the set of moral beliefs in NE-RE. Subsequently, we describe how coherence among the elements of an NE-RE can be understood and measured. Finally, we address an important question for any method of moral reasoning: what is the status of the outcome of the reasoning process? This is a matter of justification. We argue for a so-called good reasoning-justified outcome strategy in NE-RE. This strategy is built on a reasoning process in which the reason-giving force of each element is tested and weighed. The thinker has to work towards a coherent view in which only the elements with sufficient justificatory power are retained. If the thinker decides that the elements fit together into a coherent view, a reflective equilibrium is reached. NE-RE is an attempt to describe a model for moral reasoning that can profit from the moral wisdom present among experienced agents through the use of empirical research. (shrink)

A recurrent issue in the vast amount of literature on reasoning models in ethics is the role and nature of moral intuitions. In this paper, we start from the view that people who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess specific moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and (modest) theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside the practice. Reflective equilibrium (RE) (...) provides a framework for balancing moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. Nevertheless, persisting problems associated with the use of intuitions need to be addressed. One is the objection that moral intuitions lack the credibility necessary to guide moral reasoning. Ethicists have tried to solve this problem by formulating criteria to separate the “bad” intuitions from the “good” ones at the beginning of the reasoning process. We call this the credible input-justified outcome strategy. An example is the appeal to the common morality by Beauchamp and Childress. We think this approach is unsuccessful. As an alternative, we outline the good reasoning-justified outcome strategy. It connects to a variant of RE in which intuitions from different sources are incorporated. We argue that the elements of RE have different levels of justificatory power at the start of reasoning. In our strategy, each element can gain or lose justificatory power when it is tested in a reasoning process that meets several criteria. (shrink)

Respect for autonomy is well known as a core element of normative views on good care. Most often it is interpreted in a liberal way, with a focus on independence and self-determination. In this article we argue that this interpretation is too narrow in the context of care in nursing homes. With the aim of developing an alternative view on respect for autonomy in this setting we described four interpretations and investigated the moral intuitions (i.e. moral judgements) of caregivers regarding (...) these approaches. We found that these caregivers seemed to value different notions relating to respect for autonomy under different circumstances. There was no significant difference in moral judgements between men and women or between doctors and nurses. We conclude that a multidimensional understanding of this principle would best fit this context. We end this article with a description of a modest theory of respect for autonomy in nursing homes. (shrink)

This chapter explores Gottlob Frege's contribution to logic. Frege has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, but he failed to gain influence on the mathematical community of his time and the depth and pioneering character of his work was acknowledged only after the collapse of his logicist program due to the Zermelo–Russell antinomy in 1902. Frege, by proving his theorem χ without recourse to Wertverläufe, exhibited an inconsistency (or at least an incoherence) in the traditional notion of the extension (...) of a concept. He prompted our awareness of a situation the future analyses of which will hopefully not only deepen our systematic control of the interplay of concepts and their extensions but also improve our understanding of the historical development of the notion of “extension of a concept” and its historiographical assessment. (shrink)

People who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess a specific form of moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside the said practice. To achieve this goal, we need a legitimate way to balance moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. In the present contribution, we describe a version of the model of Reflective (...) Equilibrium, which we call the Normative-Empirical Reflective Equilibrium . RE provides a framework for ethical thinking that includes both moral experience and normative theory.After an outline of the model, we focus on the role of empirical research and illustrate how empirical data on moral intuitions can add to the comprehensiveness of the set of moral beliefs in NE-RE. Subsequently, we describe how coherence among the elements of an NE-RE can be understood and measured. Finally, we address an important question for any method of moral reasoning: what is the status of the outcome of the reasoning process? This is a matter of justification. We argue for a so-called good reasoning-justified outcome strategy in NE-RE. This strategy is built on a reasoning process in which the reason-giving force of each element is tested and weighed. The thinker has to work towards a coherent view in which only the elements with sufficient justificatory power are retained. If the thinker decides that the elements fit together into a coherent view, a reflective equilibrium is reached. NE-RE is an attempt to describe a model for moral reasoning that can profit from the moral wisdom present among experienced agents through the use of empirical research. (shrink)

Sustainability science seeks to extend scientific investigation into domains characterized by a distinct problem-solving agenda, physical and social complexity, and complex moral and ethical landscapes. In this endeavor it arguably pushes scientific investigation beyond its usual comfort zones, raising fundamental issues about how best to structure such investigation. Philosophers of science have long scrutinized the structure of science and scientific practices, and the conditions under which they operate effectively. We propose a critical engagement between sustainability scientists and philosophers of science (...) with respect to how to engage in scientific activity in these complex domains. We identify specific issues philosophers of science raise concerning current sustainability science and the contributions philosophers can make to resolving them. In conclusion we reflect on the steps philosophers of science could take to advance sustainability science. (shrink)

In the Netherlands, the legalization of assisted suicide for persons with a death wish without severe illness, often referred to as persons with “completed life” or “tiredness of life,” is intensel...

Cases have been employed across multiple disciplines, including ethics education, as effective pedagogical tools. However, the benefit of case-based learning in the ethics domain varies across cases, suggesting that not all cases are equal in terms of pedagogical value. Indeed, case content appears to influence the extent to which cases promote learning and transfer. Consistent with this argument, the current study explored the influences of contextual and personal factors embedded in case content on ethical decision-making. Cases were manipulated to include (...) a clear description of the social context and the goals of the characters involved. Results indicated that social context, specifically the description of an autonomy-supportive environment, facilitated execution of sensemaking processes and resulted in greater decision ethicality. Implications for designing optimal cases and case-based training programs are discussed. (shrink)

Cognitive values like simplicity, broad scope, and easy handling are properties of a scientific representation that result from the idealization which is involved in the construction of a representation. These properties may facilitate the application of epistemic values to credibility assessments, which provides a rationale for assigning an auxiliary function to cognitive values. In this paper, I defend a further rationale for cognitive values which consists in the assessment of the usefulness of a representation. Usefulness includes the relevance of a (...) representation regarding the investigation of a given problem and its practicability for the users. This rationale builds on the claim that any evaluation of scientific representations should pursue two aims: providing information about their credibility and providing information about their usefulness. Cognitive values relating to the usefulness of a representation and epistemic values relating to its credibility both perform a first-order function. Cognitive values are abstract, and several values with first-order functions may conflict in their application. Thus, in order for cognitive values to account for the sort of problem that is to be investigated by means of a representation, they need to be appropriately specified and weighed. Comprehensiveness, complexity, high resolution, and easy handling, for instance, may be required in a first-order function for model-based prediction of regional climate impacts but not for explaining how the global climate system works. Specifying and weighing cognitive and epistemic values relative to a given problem is a legitimate second-order function of social values. (shrink)

Based on a framework that distinguishes several types, roles and functions of values in science, we discuss legitimate applications of values in the validation of computer simulations. We argue that, first, epistemic values, such as empirical accuracy and coherence with background knowledge, have the role to assess the credibility of simulation results, whereas, second, cognitive values, such as comprehensiveness of a conceptual model or easy handling of a numerical model, have the role to assess the usefulness of a model for (...) investigating a hypothesis. In both roles, values perform what we call first-order functions. In addition, cogni¬tive values may also serve an auxiliary function by facilitating the assessment of credibility. As for a third type of values, i.e. social values, their legitimate role consists in specifying and weighing epistemic and cognitive values with respect to practical uses of a simulation, which is considered a second-order function. Rational intersubjective agreement on how to specify and weigh the different values is supposed to ensure objectivity in simulation validation. (shrink)

In 1783 John Michell published a note entitled ‘On the Means of Discovering the Distance, Magnitude etc. of the Fixed Stars, in Consequence of the Diminution of the Velocity of their Light’, but it was Christian Doppler who in 1842 for the first time formulated the principle : If a source of sound or light is in motion relative to an observer, or an observer in motion relative to a source, the period of the waves received by the observer will (...) be different from the period of the waves emitted by the source. The acoustical Doppler principle was verified in 1845 by Buys-Ballot's experiments and by Ernst Mach ). H. Fizeau proposed to verify the optical Doppler principle by measuring the shift of lines in the spectra of stars . This was carried out by William Huggins , and H. C. Vogel and led to exact results in 1892. The Doppler effect with canal rays was shown by Johannes Stark in 1905. (shrink)

A nonfoundationalist reading of Fides et Ratio, both in its negative regard for Enlightenment reasoning and its implicit understanding of the philosophical task of justifying belief, enables an appreciation of the encyclical as a particular kind of post-Enlightenment Roman Catholic stance. A nonfoundationalist perspective, understood as a philosophical position on the justification of belief, can be instructive in the encyclical’s articulation of Credo ut intelligam. Fides et Ratio offers a contextualized understanding of justification in its treatment of universality that can (...) only be recognized, affirmed and confessed within the particularity of faith. (shrink)