This long-awaited study of the most enigmatic figure of Greek philosophy reclaims Socrates' ground-breaking originality. Written by a leading historian of Greek thought, it argues for a Socrates who, though long overshadowed by his successors Plato and Aristotle, marked the true turning point in Greek philosophy, religion and ethics. The quest for the historical figure focuses on the Socrates of Plato's earlier dialogues, setting him in sharp contrast to that other Socrates of later dialogues, where he is used as a (...) mouthpiece for Plato's often anti-Socratic doctrine. At the heart of the book is the paradoxical nature of Socratic thought. But the paradoxes are explained, not explained away. The book highlights the tensions in the Socratic search for the answer to the question 'How should we live?' Conceived as a divine mandate, the search is carried out through elenctic argument, and dominated by an uncompromising rationalism. The magnetic quality of Socrates' personality is allowed to emerge throughout the book. Clearly and forcefully written, philosophically sophisticated but entirely accessible to non-specialists, this book will be of major importance and interest to all those studying ancient philosophy and the history of Western thought. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all connection (...) with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as.. (shrink)

The Ethics of War is an indispensable collection of essays addressing issues both timely and age-old about the nature and ethics of war. Features essays by great thinkers from ancient times through to the present day, among them Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Russell, and Walzer Examines timely questions such as: When is recourse to arms morally justifiable? What moral constraints should apply to military conduct? How can a lasting peace be achieved? Will appeal to a broad range of (...) readers interested in morality and ethics in war time Includes informative introductions and helpful marginal notes by editors. (shrink)

Strict moderate invariantism is the ho-hum, ‘obvious’ view about knowledge attributions. It says knowledge attributions are often true and that only traditional epistemic factors like belief, truth, and justification make them true. As commonsensical as strict moderate invariantism is, it is equally natural to withdraw a knowledge attribution when error possibilities are made salient. If strict moderate invariantism is true, these knowledge-denials are often false because the subject does in fact know the proposition. I argue that strict moderate invariantism needs (...) an explanation of this phenomenon, but it does not have one. That is significant, for if strict moderate invariantism does not square with ordinary intuition, then it cannot rely on ordinary intuition for support. Section 1 introduces the concept of epistemic relevance blindness, which says ordinary subjects are generally insensitive to whether or not error possibilities are relevant to knowledge attributions. Section 2 focuses on Patrick Rysiew’s influential strict moderate invariantist pragmatic explanation of knowledge-denials and argues that such pragmatic explanations of knowledge-denials depend on attributors being epistemic relevance blind. Section 3 targets psychological explanations of epistemic relevance blindness offered separately by Jennifer Nagel and Mikkel Gerken. I argue that strict moderate invariantists lack a plausible explanation of epistemic relevance blindness. (shrink)

This introduction to modern work in analytic philosophy uses the example of the proper name to give a clear explanation of the logical theories of Gottlob Frege, and explain the application of his ideas to ordinary language. McCulloch then shows how meaning is rooted in the philosophy of mind and the question of intentionality, and looks at the ways in which thought can be "about" individual material objects.

Vocal affect is a subcomponent of emotion programs that coordinate a variety of physiological and psychological systems. Emotional vocalizations comprise a suite of vocal behaviors shaped by evolution to solve adaptive social communication problems. The acoustic forms of vocal emotions are often explicable with reference to the communicative functions they serve. An adaptationist approach to vocal emotions requires that we distinguish between evolved signals and byproduct cues, and understand vocal affect as a collection of multiple strategic communicative systems subject to (...) the evolutionary dynamics described by signaling theory. We should expect variability across disparate societies in vocal emotion according to culturally evolved pragmatic rules, and universals in vocal production and perception to the extent that form–function relationships are present. (shrink)

That a philosophical thesis entails a vicious regress is commonly taken to be decisive evidence that the thesis is false. In this paper, I argue that the existence of a vicious regress is insufficient to reject a proposed analysis provided that certain constraints on the analysis are met. When a vicious regress is present, some further consequence of the thesis must be established that, together with the presence of the vicious regress, shows the thesis to be false. The argument is (...) provided largely through the examination of Michael Bergmann's vicious regress argument against strong awareness internalism and a partial defense of that thesis against Bergmann. (shrink)

Certain representations are bound in special ways to our sensory capacities; consider, for instance, pictures, sound recordings, and the various forms of mental sensory imagery. What do these representations have in common, and what makes them different from representations of other kinds? Dominic Gregory employs novel ideas on perceptual states and sensory perspectives to explain the special nature of the contents of distinctively sensory representations. The book contains extensive discussions of e.g. perceptual imagination, pictorial representation, and memories.

Physics matters less than we once thought to the making of Mendel. But it matters more than we tend to recognize to the making of Mendelism. This paper charts the variety of ways in which diverse kinds of physics impinged upon the Galtonian tradition which formed Mendelism’s matrix. The work of three Galtonians in particular is considered: Francis Galton himself, W. F. R. Weldon and William Bateson. One aim is to suggest that tracking influence from physics can bring into focus (...) important but now little-remembered flexibilities in the Galtonian tradition. Another is to show by example why generalizations about what happens when ‘physics’ meets ‘biology’ require caution. Even for a single research tradition in Britain in the decades around 1900, these categories were large, containing multitudes. (shrink)

Justin Stover has recently edited a collection of Platonic placita, organized by individual dialogue, which he identifies as the lost third book of Apuleius’ De Platone. The work is preserved only in a thirteenth-century manuscript, Vatican BAV Reg. lat. 1572. The manuscript is filled with trivial errors, including a large number of one-word or two-word lacunae. Stover has worked ably to clean up the text and many of his emendations are uncontroversial. But any editio princeps is likely to be susceptible (...) of improvement. I offer here some notes on a few points where I think either the text or Stover's translation and commentary can be bettered. I am not primarily concerned here with the ascription to Apuleius, although one or two points may have some relevance to this question. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic account of morphological number marking, specifically in the presence of numerals. In addition to accounting for number marking on basic nouns like _book_ in English, the account handles variation in patterns of number marking along two dimensions: cross-linguistically, between languages that either necessitate or prohibit singular morphology in the presence of numerals greater than ‘one’; and within one and the same language on the various nominal elements in English. Building off the presuppositional approach to morphological (...) number from Sauerland (Proc SALT 13:258–275, 2003), the proposed semantics accounts for both sorts of variation by assuming flexibility in the selection of the measure relevant to the one-ness presupposition of the morphological singular form. (shrink)

Groups of people are commonly said to be collectively responsible for what has happened. Sometimes the groups claimed to be responsible are vast in size, as when collective responsibility is ascribed to the class of all Americans or the class of all white males. In this book the concept of collective responsibility is analyzed. It is examined not only in the light of what philosophical proponents have said about it, but a genuine attempt is made to make sense of what (...) ordinary people say about responsibility when it is ascribed to groups of people. Accordingly, it is distinguished from related concepts such as shared responsibility and moral taint. Parallels are examined between the actions of an individual and the actions of a group or collective, parallels which seem to make ascriptions of collective responsibility more plausible. Some philosophers oppose collective responsibility and argue for an individualist type of position; in this regard the positions of Lewis and Sverdlik are critically examined. The final chapter contains the author's own position, a position which affirms that collective responsibility is possible but which also preserves some of the central intuitions of the individualist. (shrink)

We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this information, in addition to context, when interpreting the utterances. People were presented with spontaneously produced ironic and nonironic utterances from radio talk shows in (...) written or auditory form, with or without written contextual information. When the utterances were read without written contextual information, all utterances were rated as equally ironic. But when they were heard as opposed to read, or when they were presented in irony-biasing contexts, originally ironic utterances were rated as more sarcastic than originally nonironic utterances. This evidence suggests both acoustic and contextual information are used when inferring ironic intent in spontaneous speech, and validates previous manipulations of intonation in studies of irony understanding. (shrink)

there has been a recent resurgence of pragmatism1 in sociopolitical theory, one in which pragmatism is presented as offering an alternative and promising approach to nonideal theories of justice. This may seem ironic since the record of the classical pragmatists on being explicit about justice or the injustices of their time in their philosophical corpus is a mixed one at best. However, this has not stopped recent philosophers from continuing to draw from the philosophical resources in this tradition to address (...) the injustices of today. The title of the 2014 SAAP presidential address by Ken Stikkers was “Toward a.. (shrink)

Hilbert’s unpublished 1917 lectures on logic, analyzed here, are the beginning of modern metalogic. In them he proved the consistency and Post-completeness (maximal consistency) of propositional logic -results traditionally credited to Bernays (1918) and Post (1921). These lectures contain the first formal treatment of first-order logic and form the core of Hilbert’s famous 1928 book with Ackermann. What Bernays, influenced by those lectures, did in 1918 was to change the emphasis from the consistency and Post-completeness of a logic to its (...) soundness and completeness: a sentence is provable if and only if valid. By 1917, strongly influenced by PM, Hilbert accepted the theory of types and logicism -a surprising shift. But by 1922 he abandoned the axiom of reducibility and then drew back from logicism, returning to his 1905 approach of trying to prove the consistency of number theory syntactically. (shrink)

The first part of the book investigates Nietzsche's knowledge and understanding of specific disciplines and the influence of particular scientists on Nietzsche ...

One argument that Leibniz employed to rule out the possibility of a world soul appears to turn on the assumption that the very notion of an infinite number or of an infinite whole is inconsistent. This argument was considered in a series of three papers published in The Leibniz Review: in the first, by Laurence Carlin, the argument was delineated and analyzed; in the second, by myself, the argument was criticized and rejected; in the third, by Richard Arthur, an attempt (...) was made to defend Leibniz’s argument against my criticisms. In the present paper, I take up the matter again in an attempt to clarify the issues involved and to defend my original criticisms of the argument against the objections raised by Arthur. (shrink)

This paper is a restatement of my earlier analysis of this argument (1954), Revised in the light of critical comments by other scholars and of closer study of the text. It includes a critical discussion of an alternative formalization of the argument, First offered by wilfrid sellars (1955) and retained (with modifications) by colin strang (1963), Which eliminates successfully the inconsistency of the premises of the argument but has dubious support from plato's text.