_ Source: _Volume 95, Issue 3, pp 368 - 413 Frege famously maintained that concepts are not objects. A key argument of Frege’s for this view is, in outline, as follows: if we are to account for the unity of thought, concepts must be deemed _unsaturated_; since objects are, by contrast, saturated entities, concepts cannot be objects. The author investigates what can be made of this argument and, in particular, of the unsaturated/saturated distinction it invokes. Systematically exploring a range of (...) reconstructions suggested by Frege’s writings, and drawing on contemporary work, the author illustrates that no plausible reconstruction is forthcoming. In essence, it is altogether unclear how to simultaneously substantiate, on the one hand, the claim that unsaturated entities must be recognized in order to account for unity and, on the other, the claim that unsaturatedness is incompatible with objecthood. (shrink)

impermissibly favorable to Jews? -- Humanist origins -- Humanism at court -- Discovery of Hebrew -- Johannes Pfefferkorn and the campaign against Jews -- Who saved the Jewish books? -- Inquisition -- Trial at Rome and the Christian debates -- The Luther affair -- As if the first martyr of Hebrew letters.

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation (...) of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come. (shrink)

Are there ethics justifying anti-colonial violence? How and why did the violence and visions of nationalist movements become incorporated by colonial and neo-colonial rule? Using the insurrection by the Malayan Communist Party (1948–1960) as an example, this book argues that resorting to violence sped up the decolonisation of British Malaya by forcing its colonial administration to invent Malay nationalism and pursue ameliorative social policy among the Chinese diaspora community in a manner clearly derived from the Party’s platform. Yet this was (...) not the same as giving the country economic emancipation from the expectations of neo-colonial rule. Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology entertains no warm colonial memories of the cold war years. Confirming Price’s reputation as a plain speaking critic of Empire apologia, this book asks how colonial ideology was considered to be beneath Europe yet desperately needed by it. He faces down nostalgic communities defending an outdated view that “might was right” in South East Asia and that communism failed to contribute to the world that came to be. Using an Althusserian assumption, the book begs the question: if a late colonial state was subjective, then how did it claim a sufficiently objective mantle to rule and how did ideological techniques enable this? (shrink)

impermissibly favorable to Jews? -- Humanist origins -- Humanism at court -- Discovery of Hebrew -- Johannes Pfefferkorn and the campaign against Jews -- Who saved the Jewish books? -- Inquisition -- Trial at Rome and the Christian debates -- The Luther affair -- As if the first martyr of Hebrew letters.

Different questions generate different forms of practical reasoning. A contextually unrestricted ‘What shall I do?’ is too open to focus reflection. More determinately, an agent may ask, ‘Shall I do X, or Y?’ To answer that, he may need to weigh things up—as fits the derivation of ‘deliberation’ fromlibra(Latin for ‘scales’). Ubiquitous and indispensable though this is, I mention it only to salute it in passing. Or he may ask how to achieve a proposed end: if his end is to (...) do X, he may ask ‘How shall I do X?’ Or he may ask how to apply a universal rule or particular maxim. Aristotle supplies examples inDe Motu Animalium(7.701a7 ff.), whose wording I freely adapt to my own purposes:A1 reasons to a necessary means to achieving an end:I will make a cloak.To make a cloak I must do A.So, I will do A. (shrink)

How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

The subject of my lecture is an appropriate one for several reasons. The first is purely chronological. Hume's first and greatest work, the Treatise of Human Nature, was published in 1739, two hundred years ago. Its illustrious author was then quite unknown in the world, and as he tells us himself the book “fell dead-born from the press.” But by the end of the eighteenth century its reputation was securely established, and it has long been regarded as one of the (...) masterpieces of European thought, and as the classical statement of the Empiricist Philosophy. It is true that, like other classics, it has had its ups and downs. During the Absolute Idealist period, which ended early in the present century, Hume was the great bogey-man, and the duty of all self-respecting philosophers was to refute him. In our own day things are different. Empiricism, despite many obituary notices, is very much alive again. And this time it is in close alliance with Natural Science, and has equipped itself with all the technique of modern Symbolic Logic; it is more vigorous in construction and more formidable in criticism than it has ever been before. Consequently Hume is no longer the bogey-man. People now read the Treatise not as an awful warning, but as a source of stimulus and illumination. Incidentally, we can now enjoy his admirable style without any qualms. It is no longer thought that if a philosopher writes in clear and entertaining English, what he writes must therefore be either superficial or false. We regard obscurity and turgidity as demerits, not as signs of profound thinking. Moreover, we have learned to appreciate the eighteenth century, of which Hume was one of the most characteristic products. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 30-42 [Access article in PDF] How Can Music Seem to be Emotional? Kingsley Price Johns Hopkins University Preliminary Let me make some preliminary remarks about my question. First, the distinction employed in it, the distinction between seeming and reality, comes in two forms. The first is inclusive. A thing that really is so-and-so also seems to be so-and-so. The butler really (...) is guilty and seems guilty as well. The second is exclusive. A thing that is really not so-and-so seems to be so-and-so. The butler is really not guilty but seems to be guilty. The distinction that underlies my question is of the exclusive form.Second, the music I ask about is not music as read from scores on paper or held in memory. Nor is it music that contains linguistic elements-words or gestures as in song, opera, ballet, etc. Rather, it is purely instrumental music, and that as perceived or heard.Third, the emotions I refer to are not physiological conditions that may cause them, nor the behavior that may express them, but the conscious feelings we find in ourselves when we are undergoing emotion. [End Page 30] The Problem Persons (perhaps even the lower animals) can seem to be, without really being, emotional. They are pretending, or we perceive mistakenly. There is no difficulty, in principle, in explaining the situation. But there would be if they were sculptured persons only-that is, if they could not possibly be emotional. A sculpture cannot seem to be emotional by pretending it; nor can we perceive mistakenly that it is emotional when we know that it is a sculpture only.Much music is like sculpture. Not personal, we know that it cannot really be emotional. None-the-less, we hear the wedding march from Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream as joyful, the second movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor as sorrowful, "The Great Fugue" as grimly resigned, the first movement of the first Razumowski as hopeful, etc. How can this be so? How can music seem to be emotional?I look for an answer to this question, first, within the perception, the hearing of music, and then, without it in its meaning. If seeming emotionality is found in either place, I shall have answered the question. And now, for the first place. The Perception In sense perception there are two major constituents.1 One is awareness; the other is the object of awareness. Awareness occurs in all the kinds of consciousness-in remembering, imagining, dreaming, and thinking, for example, as well as in sense perception. In this last, it is brought about by operation of the senses; while in the others, that operation plays no direct part. But although it differs in its cause, awareness in sense perception is precisely the same, considered in itself, as it is in all the other kinds of consciousness, considered in themselves.What is awareness? It cannot be explained, as many notions can, by eliciting its parts. To understand what squareness is, for example, we need only bring forward the parts that constitute it: four straight lines equal in length, four right angles, and closed plane figure. But awareness has no parts and cannot be explained in this way. To call attention to its simplicity and its identity in all kinds of consciousness, indeed, is all that can be done to explain it though we might add the simile that likens awareness to the light that brings things before our minds out of the dark that conceals them in its absence.Now, hearing is a kind of sense perception-the kind that occurs by virtue of operation of the auditory organs; and music heard is one of the objects of auditory awareness. Can we understand how this object can seem to be emotional by appeal to the awareness of it? If that awareness seemed to exist and did not really do so, the answer would be that we cannot since the awareness of it... (shrink)

The founder of Psychical Research, though he has not yet received the honour due to him, seems to have been King Croesus of Lydia, who reigned from 560 to 546 B.C. He carried out an interesting experiment, recorded in detail by Herodotus,2 to test the clairvoyant powers of a number of oracles. He sent embassies to seven oracles, six Greek and one Egyptian. They all started on the same day. On the hundredth day each embassy was instructed to ask its (...) oracle, “What is King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, now doing?” The answer was to be written down and brought back. The oracle of Delphi replied as follows, in hexameters, as its custom was: “I know the number of the sands and the measures of the sea. I understand the dumb, and I hear him who does not speak.” Then it went on: “There comes to my mind the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise, which is being cooked along with lamb's flesh in a brazen vessel; brass is spread beneath it, and with brass it is covered.” As a matter of fact, this answer was perfectly correct. Herodotus tells us that “having considered what would be the most difficult thing to discover and to imagine,” Croesus “cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and himself boiled them together in a brazen pot.” What happened afterwards illustrates the difficulties of this sort of investigation, difficulties which still perplex us to this day. Croesus argued, reasonably enough, that if the Delphic priestess had clairvoyant powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers which she claimed to have. But when he consulted the oracle later about his forthcoming expedition against the Persians, he received two answers, one of which was ambiguous—“When Croesus crosses the Halys he shall destroy a great empire”—and the other correct, but too obscure to be easily interpreted. (shrink)

Professor Ayer's lecture is not only a most auspicious inauguration; it is also an important contribution to philosophy. It is perhaps the best and the most exciting work he has written, and that is saying a good deal. There is a certain theory about thought and its objects which is often hinted at in the utterances and the writings of contemporary empiricist philosophers, but so far as I know it has never before been stated in print. Mr. Ayer has stated (...) it, clearly and in detail, with all his well-known force and felicity of style. It is a strange and rather shocking theory, very different from the one which most philosophers hitherto have believed. But if we are shocked by it, the shock will be salutary. The dragon has at last come clearly into view. If we resolve to accustom ourselves to it and treat it kindly, we may hope that it will transform itself by degrees into a nice gentle domestic pet, as other philosophical dragons have before. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Richard Rorty begins by telling us why pragmatists such as himself are inclined to identify truth with justification: ‘Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the distinction between justification and truth, for that distinction makes no difference to my decisions about what to do.’ (1995, p. 19) Rorty goes on to discuss the claim, defended by Crispin Wright, that truth is (...) a normative constraint on assertion. He argues that this claim runs foul of this principle of no difference without a practical difference: ‘The need to justify our beliefs to ourselves and our fellow agents subjects us to norms, and obedience to these norms produces a behavioural pattern that we must detect in others before confidently attributing beliefs to them. But there seems to be no occasion to look for obedience to an additional norm – the commandment to seek the truth. For – to return to the pragmatist doubt with which I began – obedience to that commandment will produce no behaviour not produced by the need to offer justification.’ (1995, p. 26) Again, then, Rorty appeals to the claim that a commitment to a norm of truth rather than a norm of justification makes no behavioural difference. This is an empirical claim, testable in principle by comparing the behaviour of a community of realists (in Rorty’s sense) to that of a community of pragmatists. In my view, the experiment would show that the claim is unjustified, indeed false. I think that there is an important and widespread behavioural pattern that depends on the fact that speakers do take themselves to be subject to such an additional norm. Moreover, it is a.. (shrink)

I distinguish three views, a defence of any one of which would go some way towards vindicating the view that there is something objective about the passage of time: the view that the present moment is objectively distinguished; the view that time has an objective direction – that it is an objective matter which of two non-simultaneous events is the earlier and which the later; the view that there is something objectively dynamic, flux-like, or "flow-like" about time. I argue that (...) each of these views is not so much false as doubtfully coherent. In each case, it turns out to be hard to make sense of what the view could be, at least if it is to be non-trivial, and of use to a friend of objective passage. I conclude with some remarks about avenues that seem worth exploring in the philosophy of time, when we are done with trying to make sense of passage. (shrink)

This is an unpublished piece from July 1998. It discusses the use of semantic notions such as reference in the Canberra Plan, the question whether this use creates a problematic circularity if the Canberra Plan is applied to the semantic notions themselves, and the relation of this question to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. I used some of the ideas in later papers such as (Price 2004, 2009) and (Menzies & Price, 2009), but the bulk of discussion of the relation (...) of my concern to Putnam’s argument (and to responses to Putnam by others) never made it into print. (shrink)

Epistemologists have not usually had much to say about believing ‘in’, though ever since Plato's time they have been interested in believing ‘that’. Students of religion, on the other hand, have been greatly concerned with belief ‘in’, and many of them, I think, would maintain that it is something quite different from belief ‘that’. Surely belief ‘in’ is an attitude to a person, whether human or divine, while belief ‘that’ is just an attitude to a proposition? Could any difference be (...) more obvious than this? And if we over-look it, shall we not be led into a quite mistaken analysis of religious belief, at any rate if it is religious belief of the theistic sort? On this view belief ‘in’ is not a propositional attitude at all. (shrink)

John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect‐switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I respond that cases of aspect‐switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also argue that even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect‐switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural‐kind properties, such as being a (...) tomato. (shrink)

Should moods be regarded as intentional states, and, if so, what kind of intentional content do they have? I focus on irritability and apprehension, which I examine from the perspective of a teleosemantic theory of content. Eric Lormand has argued that moods are non-intentional states, distinct from emotions; Robert Solomon and Peter Goldie argue that moods are generalised emotions and that they have intentional content of a correspondingly general kind. I present a third model, on which moods are regarded, not (...) as generalised emotions, but as states of vigilance; and I argue that, on this model, moods should be regarded as intentional states of a kind quite distinct from emotions. An advantage of this account is that it allows us to distinguish between a mood of apprehension and an episode of objectless fear. (shrink)

Donald Gustafson has argued that grief centres on a combination of belief and desire:The belief that the subject has suffered an irreparable loss.The desire that this should not be the case.And yet, as Gustafson points out, if the belief is true, the desire cannot be satisfied. Gustafson takes this to show that grief inevitably implies an irrational conflict between belief and desire.I offer a partial defence of grief against Gustafson's charge of irrationality. My defence rests on two elements. First, I (...) offer an alternative model of emotion, which presents emotions as complex episodes, initiated by emotional appraisals. Secondly, I appeal to John Bowlby's account of grief to argue that grief involves two forms of sadness (anguish and desolation) which Gustafson's analysis runs together. I concede that anguish does characteristically involve an element of irrationality. But the irrationality of anguish does not arise from an apparently gratuitous clash between belief and desire, but from a conflict between emotion and belief—a form of irrationality that is both familiar and easily explained. Moreover, desolation need not involve any irrationality. (shrink)

A 2015 experiment by Hanson and Delft colleagues provided further confirmation that the quantum world violates the Bell inequalities, being the first Bell test to close two known experimental loopholes simultaneously. The experiment was also taken to provide new evidence of ‘spooky action at a distance’. Here we argue for caution about the latter claim. The Delft experiment relies on entanglement swapping, and our main claim is that this geometry introduces an additional loophole in the argument from violation of the (...) Bell inequalities to action at a distance: the apparent action at a distance may be an artifact of ‘collider bias’. In the absence of retrocausality, the sensitivity of such experiments to this ‘Collider Loophole’ depends on the temporal relation between the entanglement swapping measurement C and the two measurements A and B between which we seek to infer a causal connection. CL looms large if the C is in the future of A and B, but not if C is in the past. The Delft experiment itself is the intermediate case, in which the separation is spacelike. We argue that this leaves it vulnerable to CL, unable to establish conclusively that it avoids it. (shrink)

[1] Imagine a well-trained mid-century American philosopher, caught in a rare traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike one warm summer afternoon in the early 1950s. He dozes in his warm car ... and awakes in the same spot on a chill Fall evening in the late 1990s, remembering nothing of the intervening years. It is as if he has been asleep at the wheel for almost half a century!

In the first chapter of From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson begins, as he puts it, ‘by explaining how serious metaphysics by its very nature raises the location problem.’ (1998, p. 1) He gives us two examples of location problems. The first concerns semantic properties, such as truth and reference: Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true (...) ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physical or naturalistic account of the sentence?’ (1998, p. 2) Jackson notes two possible answers to questions of this kind. The first denies that there are any such semantic properties. (shrink)

Causalists and Evidentialists can agree about the right course of action in an (apparent) Newcomb problem, if the causal facts are not as initially they seem. If declining $1,000 causes the Predictor to have placed $1m in the opaque box, CDT agrees with EDT that one-boxing is rational. This creates a difficulty for Causalists. We explain the problem with reference to Dummett's work on backward causation and Lewis's on chance and crystal balls. We show that the possibility that the causal (...) facts might be properly judged to be non-standard in Newcomb problems leads to a dilemma for Causalism. One horn embraces a subjectivist understanding of causation, in a sense analogous to Lewis's own subjectivist conception of objective chance. In this case the analogy with chance reveals a terminological choice point, such that either (i) CDT is completely reconciled with EDT, or (ii) EDT takes precedence in the cases in which the two theories give different recommendations. The other horn of the dilemma rejects subjectivism, but now the analogy with chance suggests that it is simply mysterious why causation so construed should constrain rational action. (shrink)

Empirical realist ecologists, such as C. S. Holling, face significant methodological contradictions; for instance, they must cope with the problem that ecological models and theories of climate change, resilience and succession cannot make predictions in open systems. Generally, they respond to this problem by supplementing their empirical realism with transcendental idealism: they therefore say that their models are simply metaphorical or heuristic, that is, 'not true' in that they are not empirical. Thus, they explicitly deny an ontology for what their (...) models are about. Nevertheless, in their practice, ecologists act as if their theories do have an ontology and thus tell us something truthful about the real world. This discrepancy leaves ecology vulnerable to unnecessary critique, such as that climate science is not real science. Transcendental realism offers a solution because it releases ecologists from the requirement to make predictions; but it does so without denying ontology. This provides several advantages to ecologists. (shrink)

The first half of Mr. Burgener's article is a very clear and very just exposition of my views. There is, however, one point which he may not have appreciated fully, and that is the "climate of opinion" in which I was writing, and against which I was reacting. One of my main aims was to protest against the transformation of the empiricist epistemology into a linguistic epistemology, a transformation initiated by the Logical Positivists of the 1930's, and completed by Wittgenstein (...) and his disciples. Hence the amount of space devoted to sign-cognition, to the intelligence of animals, and to image-thinking, all of which are non-verbal or pre-verbal. But, as he has surmised, I am really just an old-fashioned British empiricist. I am fighting on two fronts, as it were, throughout the book: against a purely linguistic conception of thinking on one side, and against the "classical" inspective conception of it on the other. And in this two-fold battle, I am taking just the line which Locke, Berkeley, and Hume would have taken if they had been alive today: one which they do in fact suggest in their writings, though of course they could not anticipate the lengths to which the purely linguistic or verbalistic conception of thinking would go, or how it would ally itself with a behavioristic conception of human personality. One of the things I most object to in current British philosophy is the attack which is made on all sides of the "inner life," the attempt to show that there is no such thing, or that it is a mere muddle to suppose there is, or that to the extent that it does exist it is of no importance. Perhaps there is some connection between this attack on the inner life and the attack on private life which is made by the politicians, social reformers, and economic planners. Perhaps they are only two aspects of the same thing. Anyway, between them they have gone a long way towards a kind of "dehumanisation" of man; and this seems to me one of the darkest features of the very dark age in which we live. I feel concerned about it not only as an epistemologist, but also as a religious person, or at least as a person who is interested in religion in a very undenominational way. Religion, as I view it, is very closely connected with the "inner life"; and if one is forbidden to take an interest in the "inner life," religion will wither away from sheer inanition. At any rate, the most mystical types of religion will, and these are the ones which seem to me the most important. (shrink)

In the first chapter of From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson begins, as he puts it, ‘by explaining how serious metaphysics by its very nature raises the location problem.’ (1998, p. 1) He gives us two examples of location problems. The first concerns semantic properties, such as truth and reference: Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true (...) ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physical or naturalistic account of the sentence?’ (1998, p. 2) Jackson notes two possible answers to questions of this kind. The first denies that there are any such semantic properties. (shrink)

The issue of directed donation of organs from deceased donors for transplantation has recently risen to the fore, given greater significance by the relatively stagnant rate of deceased donor donation in the UK. Although its status and legitimacy is explicitly recognized across the USA, elsewhere a more cautious, if not entirely negative, stance has been taken. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Human Tissue Act 2004, and in Scotland the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006, are both silent in this (...) regard. Although so-called conditional donation, donation to (or perhaps withheld from) a specific class, has been outlawed as a product of guidance issued by the Secretary of State for Health issued in the wake of the controversial incident occurring in the North of England in 1998, its intended application to ‘directed’ donation is less certain. Directed and conditional donations challenge the traditional construct of altruistic donation and impartial (equitable) allocation in a very immediate and striking fashion. They implicitly raise important questions as to whether the body or parts of the body are capable of being owned, and by whom. This paper attempts to explore the notion of donor ownership of body parts and its implications for both directed and conditional donation. (shrink)

In recent work Allan Gibbard claims to be both a local quasi-realist, in Blackburn’s sense, and a global expressivist. His local quasi-realism rests on an argument that for naturalistic discourse but not ethical discourse, the semantic relation of denotation and the causal relation of tracking can and should be identified; that denoting simply is tracking, for naturalistic vocabulary. I argue that Gibbard’s case for this conclusion is unconvincing, and poorly motivated by his own expressivist standards. I also argue that even (...) if it were successful, it is doubtful whether the resulting position would count as global expressivism, as Gibbard and I both use that term. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Professor R. W. Sleeper for his critical comments on my article, as also for the kind way in which he has expressed them. I should now like to make a few comments on his comments. May I first say that I have no objection to being metaphysical? I do not like the word ‘metaphysics’ very much, and wish that we could find a less provocative one. But still, I do think that the difference between the (...) reducible and the irreducible belief-in is a difference which there really is . Moreover, I fully admit that when we believe in God we are making a factual claim. It is, of course, a factual claim of rather a special kind. If it is a fact that there is a supreme Being, ‘The Lord of All’, this is not just one fact among others. It is not quite like the fact that there is a stormy north-westerly wind this morning. One could not just give a list of facts and add at the end, ‘There is also another fact which I had forgotten to mention: there is a God’. All the same, this factual claim, like others, does need to be justified; and how is it to be justified? I am afraid that the brief hint which I offered elsewhere on this subject is indeed ‘not good enough’ as it stands . To be even half good enough, it needs much more elaboration, and I agree that there is much force in Mr Gunderson's criticisms. (shrink)

We tend to assume that progress in answering the ‘hard question’ of consciousness will be accompanied by a subjective feeling of greater understanding. However, in order to feel we understand how one state of affairs arises from another, we have to deceive ourselves into thinking we have found a type of causal link which in reality may not exist . I draw from and expand upon Rosch's model, which specifies the conditions under which this self-deceptive kind of causal attribution arises. (...) I argue that the mind-body relationship may not meet these conditions, especially because of its potential novelty and uniqueness. We should not therefore expect to subjectively feel we understand consciousness. (shrink)

Are inferences, theoretical and practical, subject to requirements of rationality? If so, are these of the form 'if … ought …' or 'ought … if …'? If the latter, how are we to understand the 'if'? It seems that, in all cases, we get unintuitive implications if 'ought' connotes having reason. It is difficult to formulate such requirements, and obscure what they explain. There might also be a requirement forbidding self-contradiction. It is a good question whether self-contradiction constitutes, or evidences, (...) irrationality; but talk of a rational requirement causes trouble. (shrink)

Hume maintained that, philosophically speaking, there is no difference between exiting a room out of the first-floor window and using the door. Nevertheless, Hume’s reason and common sense prevailed over his scepticism and he advocated that we should always use the door. However, we are currently living in a world that is more seriously committed to the Humean philosophy of empiricism than he was himself and thus the potential to act inappropriately is an ever-present potential. In this paper, I explore (...) how Hume’s two versions of causality have detrimentally affected our ability both to arrive at and to use research to improve human well-being. I illustrate my argument with an example of what I think is an incorrect yet supposedly scientifically sound assumption: that absenteeism causes poor school attainment. Instead I make the interdisciplinary argument that absenteeism is better understood as an aggravating symptom of a number of other causes of poor attainment, such as poverty and individual psychological factors. I suggest that an instrumental, punitive policy against parents whose children tend to be absent from school may be ineffectual or even counterproductive if the objective is to improve the well-being of those children. To support my argument, I introduce the critical realist idea of transfactuality. Using the example of research into moon rocks, I show how mainstream science uses transfactuality despite its empiricist aversion to it. I also suggest that it is our honesty, integrity, and stoicism that lead us to the extreme overthrow of reason and common sense that we see today in many of the UK’s social policies; an overthrow that Hume himself did not achieve. Metaphorically speaking, British professionals, stoically and honestly believing in the ability of their trusted research correlations to guide their action, are exiting out of the first-floor window rather than using the door. This is a significant barrier to our ability to devise and implement social policy. (shrink)

In 'General Propositions and Causality' Ramsey rejects his earlier view that universal generalizations are infinite conjunctions, arguing that they are not genuine propositions at all. We argue that his new position is unstable. The issues about infinity that lead Ramsey to the new view are essentially those underlying Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. If they show that generalizations are not genuine propositions, they show that there are no genuine propositions. The connection raises interesting historical questions about the direction of influence between Ramsey (...) and Wittgenstein, the origin of the rule-following argument, and the influence of writers such as Brouwer. (shrink)

Are inferences, theoretical and practical, subject to requirements of rationality? If so, are these of the form 'if … ought …' or 'ought … if …'? If the latter, how are we to understand the 'if'? It seems that, in all cases, we get unintuitive implications if 'ought' connotes having reason. It is difficult to formulate such requirements, and obscure what they explain. There might also be a requirement forbidding self-contradiction. It is a good question whether self-contradiction constitutes, or evidences, (...) irrationality; but talk of a rational requirement causes trouble. (shrink)

John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect‐switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I respond that cases of aspect‐switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also argue that even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect‐switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural‐kind properties, such as being a (...) tomato. (shrink)

It has been suggested that some of the puzzles of QM are resolved if we allow that there is retrocausality in the quantum world. In particular, it has been claimed that this approach offers a path to a Lorentz-invariant explanation of Bell correlations, and other manifestations of quantum "nonlocality", without action-at-a-distance. Some writers have suggested that this proposal can be supported by an appeal to time-symmetry, claiming that if QM were made "more time-symmetric", retrocausality would be a natural consequence. Critics (...) object that there is complete time-symmetry in classical physics, and yet no apparent retrocausality. Why should QM be any different? In this note I call attention to a respect in which QM is different, under some assumptions about quantum ontology. Under these assumptions, the option of time-symmetry without retrocausality is not available in QM, for reasons intimately connected with the fundamental differences between classical and quantum physics (especially the role of discreteness in the latter). (shrink)

In the opening line of his essay ‘On Truth’, Francis Bacon ticks off Pontius Pilate for not giving the subject its due time and gravity—‘“What is truth?”, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’ If Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have been waiting a long time—four centuries after Bacon, and twenty after Christ, the jury is still out. But things do seem to have been moving along quite nicely, this past century or so; and (...) as Pilate might note with satisfaction, he himself has been getting a better press. Perhaps Nietzsche’s extravagant compliment was a mixed blessing: Nietzsche declared (‘as offensively as possible’, as Will Durant [1929: 25] put it) that.. (shrink)

If we cannot agree that evaluations are judgements that both describe things and express sentiments, we lack any shared understanding of a common topic. If we ever come to agree how the describing and expressing relate, we shall lose a debate. Suppose that evaluation is a mode of description essentially expressive of sentiment, and that some evaluations can be known to be true: then there must exist properties of such a kind that they can be apprehended only from appropriately affective (...) points of view. Alternatively, it may be that evaluation involves some element distinct from description, so that, in principle, one could always accept the descriptive core of an evaluation while distancing oneself from a non-descriptive element that makes it evaluative. We may distinguish the two kinds of view as lumping, or descriptivist-cum-expressivist, and splitting, or descriptivist-plus-expressivist. Both ascribe to evaluations an expressive aspect as well as a descriptive content; what is at issue is whether the former is integral to the latter, or detachable from it. (shrink)

Two main questions are addressed: (1) What standard defines the nonmoral good for humans, the prudentially rational life? (2) How is this standard applied in guiding and in assessing lives? The standard presented is “The Worthwhileness Principle,” which asserts that if one’s life situation is sufficiently fortunate, the aim is to maximize worthwhileness, the net balance of benefits over costs; but if one’s life situation is chronically, and substantially unfortunate, the aim is to minimize nonworthwhileness, the net balance of costs (...) over benefits. The principle is based on a two-sided, positivity and negativity, or cost-and-benefit-centered viewpoint, rather than a one-sided, good-centered viewpoint. Specifically, it includes negative ends, harms to be avoided, negative means, resource costs to be minimized, and negative luck, misfortune, unfortunate lives.Regarding the second question, the standard is applied prospectively in guiding lives and activities by means of prudential deliberation, prudential habits, and prudential spontaneity. It is applied retrospectively in assessing whole or partial lives using the Worthwhileness Scale. (shrink)

Two main questions are addressed: (1) What standard defines the nonmoral good for humans, the prudentially rational life? (2) How is this standard applied in guiding and in assessing lives? The standard presented is “The Worthwhileness Principle,” which asserts that if one’s life situation is sufficiently fortunate, the aim is to maximize worthwhileness, the net balance of benefits over costs; but if one’s life situation is chronically, and substantially unfortunate, the aim is to minimize nonworthwhileness, the net balance of costs (...) over benefits. The principle is based on a two-sided, positivity and negativity, or cost-and-benefit-centered viewpoint, rather than a one-sided, good-centered viewpoint. Specifically, it includes negative ends, harms to be avoided, negative means, resource costs to be minimized, and negative luck, misfortune, unfortunate lives.Regarding the second question, the standard is applied prospectively in guiding lives and activities by means of prudential deliberation, prudential habits, and prudential spontaneity. It is applied retrospectively in assessing whole or partial lives using the Worthwhileness Scale. (shrink)

As we await the Second Coming of President Donald Trump, it is important to understand that his conservative Evangelical supporters view him not as a new Christ but as a new Constantine, a guardian of Western Civilization in a crucial period when we face threatened conquest by foreign enemies and infiltrators, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, and Militant Islam Thus he should be seen also as a new Charles Martel. He need not be a Bible-reading pietist to fulfill these roles, so Christians need (...) not be ashamed of him if he isn’t. (shrink)

Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" raised a great many questions, and I should like to deal with lesser matters before going on to those of more consequence. He has found in my work the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. To commit this unnatural act is to assume "that the novel possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature." Let me say at the outset that I am not (...) trying to frame a restrictive definition of the novel. Novels are whatever most critics agree to call novels, and if I speak of "the novel" I can only hope that the phrase will be taken as convenient shorthand rather than an attempt to define an essence. And of course the novel has a history of its own, just as the state of Connecticut has a history even as it remains one of the fifty states, just as literature has a history although it is only one of the arts or institutions of our culture. Mr. Wilson wants a theory of characters that "will necessarily account for - go to the heart of - all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric." To that I can only reply with E.M. Forster's sentence: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." In this essay Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of English at Yale University, responds to Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" which raised objections to Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 30-42 [Access article in PDF] How Can Music Seem to be Emotional? Kingsley Price Johns Hopkins University Preliminary Let me make some preliminary remarks about my question. First, the distinction employed in it, the distinction between seeming and reality, comes in two forms. The first is inclusive. A thing that really is so-and-so also seems to be so-and-so. The butler really (...) is guilty and seems guilty as well. The second is exclusive. A thing that is really not so-and-so seems to be so-and-so. The butler is really not guilty but seems to be guilty. The distinction that underlies my question is of the exclusive form.Second, the music I ask about is not music as read from scores on paper or held in memory. Nor is it music that contains linguistic elements-words or gestures as in song, opera, ballet, etc. Rather, it is purely instrumental music, and that as perceived or heard.Third, the emotions I refer to are not physiological conditions that may cause them, nor the behavior that may express them, but the conscious feelings we find in ourselves when we are undergoing emotion. [End Page 30] The Problem Persons (perhaps even the lower animals) can seem to be, without really being, emotional. They are pretending, or we perceive mistakenly. There is no difficulty, in principle, in explaining the situation. But there would be if they were sculptured persons only-that is, if they could not possibly be emotional. A sculpture cannot seem to be emotional by pretending it; nor can we perceive mistakenly that it is emotional when we know that it is a sculpture only.Much music is like sculpture. Not personal, we know that it cannot really be emotional. None-the-less, we hear the wedding march from Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream as joyful, the second movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor as sorrowful, "The Great Fugue" as grimly resigned, the first movement of the first Razumowski as hopeful, etc. How can this be so? How can music seem to be emotional?I look for an answer to this question, first, within the perception, the hearing of music, and then, without it in its meaning. If seeming emotionality is found in either place, I shall have answered the question. And now, for the first place. The Perception In sense perception there are two major constituents.1 One is awareness; the other is the object of awareness. Awareness occurs in all the kinds of consciousness-in remembering, imagining, dreaming, and thinking, for example, as well as in sense perception. In this last, it is brought about by operation of the senses; while in the others, that operation plays no direct part. But although it differs in its cause, awareness in sense perception is precisely the same, considered in itself, as it is in all the other kinds of consciousness, considered in themselves.What is awareness? It cannot be explained, as many notions can, by eliciting its parts. To understand what squareness is, for example, we need only bring forward the parts that constitute it: four straight lines equal in length, four right angles, and closed plane figure. But awareness has no parts and cannot be explained in this way. To call attention to its simplicity and its identity in all kinds of consciousness, indeed, is all that can be done to explain it though we might add the simile that likens awareness to the light that brings things before our minds out of the dark that conceals them in its absence.Now, hearing is a kind of sense perception-the kind that occurs by virtue of operation of the auditory organs; and music heard is one of the objects of auditory awareness. Can we understand how this object can seem to be emotional by appeal to the awareness of it? If that awareness seemed to exist and did not really do so, the answer would be that we cannot since the awareness of it... (shrink)

Computer programs are used to obtain and store information about the online activities of users of the web. Many people are concerned about this practice because they believe that it can violate users' rights to privacy or result in violations of them. This belief is based on the assumption that the information obtained and stored with the use of the programs includes personal information. My main aim in this paper is to argue that this assumption is false. I discuss the (...) import of this result for computer ethics. If my thesis is correct, using the programs cannot violate a person's right to privacy and cannot result in violations of a right to privacy. Nevertheless it is prima facie morally wrong because, as I explain, it encourages people to perform actions that diminish the well-being of others. I discuss the implications of my thesis for the obligations of online businesses with regard to the relevant information. (shrink)

One of the outstanding achievements of recent cosmology has been to offer some prospect of a unified explanation of temporal asymmetry. The explanation is in two main parts, and runs something like this. First, the various asymmetries we observe are all thermodynamic in origin – all products of the fact that we live in an epoch in which the universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Second, this thermodynamic disequilibrium is associated with the condition of the universe very soon after the (...) Big Bang – the essential point being that in the rapidly expanding universe of the time, gravity is able to create organisation much faster than other processes can destroy it. The stars, galaxies and other forms of organisation we find in the present universe are all products of this early period. Such concentrated energy sources themselves make possible the kinds of asymmetric phenomena with which we are most familiar, such as life itself. If this explanation proves to be right it will surely rank as one of the most impressive achievements in the whole of natural philosophy. Where else do we find this breathtaking scale, this extraordinary conjunction of fundamental physics, the first moments of Creation, the possibility of life and the basic character of human experience? And it is very much a contemporary achievement: even if its roots go back on one side to the investigation of time asymmetry in nineteenth century statistical mechanics, and on the other to Hubble's discovery in the 1920's of the expansion of the universe, the body of the picture has only begun to be filled in in the last twenty or thirty years. This fascinating story has recently been given some well-deserved publicity in Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time – well-deserved, not least, because Hawking himself is responsible for a considerable part of the story as it presently stands. (shrink)

If we cannot agree that evaluations are judgements that both describe things and express sentiments, we lack any shared understanding of a common topic. If we ever come to agree how the describing and expressing relate, we shall lose a debate. Suppose that evaluation is a mode of description essentially expressive of sentiment, and that some evaluations can be known to be true: then there must exist properties of such a kind that they can be apprehended only from appropriately affective (...) points of view. Alternatively, it may be that evaluation involves some element distinct from description, so that, in principle, one could always accept the descriptive core of an evaluation while distancing oneself from a non-descriptive element that makes it evaluative. We may distinguish the two kinds of view aslumping, or descriptivist-cum-expressivist, andsplitting, or descriptivist-plus-expressivist. Both ascribe to evaluations an expressive aspect as well as a descriptive content; what is at issue is whether the former is integral to the latter, or detachable from it. (shrink)

How are we to understand Aristotle's famous doctrine of the mean? "If ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds"... In fact, the relation of morality to physical health is more intimate than mere analogy. Emotions involve a bodily process (cp On the Soul 403al6ff): for example, 'Anger is productive of heat' (On the Parts ofAnimals 650b35), while 'Fear is, indeed, a kind (...) of chill' (Rhetoric 1389b32). The hot temper of youth and the cool temper of old age, to take two extremes, are corollaries of physical extremes, of literal heat and cold respectively (Rhetoric 1389a2ff). In general, moral as well as bodily excellences are supervenient upon physical states; specific to moral excellence is what it supervenes upon, viz bodily pleasures and plains (Physics 246b3-247a20, an early passage not relevantly superseded). Health and virtue are both grounded upon the physiological condition of a psycho-physical entity... Yet it is hard to view the physiology of virtue as more than a general precondition. It more satisfactorily identifies natural virtue than virtue proper. The blood of young men is heated by nature (as though by wine), so that they are hot-tempered and hopeful; this makes them less timorous and more confident, and so more courageous, than the old (Rhetoric 1389al8ff). But the properly brave man is one 'who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time' (11 5b1b7ff). (shrink)

This paper provides an evolutionary rationale for both interracial and intraracial wage differentials by examining the implications of white employers mediating their employer?employee relationships on the basis of genetic similarity. If in organized labor markets; relationships mediated through genetic similarity are optimal in terms of Darwinian fitness, a fundamental evolutionary implication is that the Marginal Rate of Substitution (MRS) in Darwinian fitness holding extended fitness constant equals the MRS in preferences holding utility constant. Given such an evolutionary equilibrium, results are (...) derived showing that the strength of tastes for discrimination depends upon the skin hue of non?white workers. The rationale established for racial wage differentials is that where skin hue serves to indicate genetic similarity between employer and employee, wage differentials emerge that are a function of skin hue. (shrink)

This paper discusses two debated questions about how best to interpret the contribution to the Symposium that Socrates pretends to derive from Diotima: Within the Lesser Mysteries, is the erōs that is being defined and characterized, with appeal to the notion of “generation in beauty”, a generic erōs that is equivalent to Socratic desire in general, or a specific erōs that is erotic in our sense? Within the Greater Mysteries, is interpersonal erōs maintained, or supplanted? I find that neither answer (...) to unproblematic, but argue that either can be reconciled with the text, and suggest that both leave open the really interesting questions. I then, in answer to, concede that there are radical shifts of focus, but conclude that it is most likely that interpersonal erōs has a continuing role in, eventually, making the lover worthy of “becoming dear to the gods and, if any man can, immortal himself also”. Here I appeal especially to the phrase “ungrudging philosophy”, taking it to signify an activity that is not kept to oneself, but shared with another. (shrink)

Does anybody know what love is? This question, the title of a love song by the Motown singer Irma Thomas, echoes through the series Black Mirror. This chapter seeks to answer this question by studying how love, as defined by both Thomas Aquinas and Irma Thomas, appears and disappears in the universe of the show. We learn that most people don't know that love is the total giving of the self to another. But if they did know what love is, (...) as a few characters in the show do, they'd be happier. (shrink)