The eighteenth century was a time of brilliant philosophical innovation in Britain. In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the period's discussion of what remains a central problem of philosophy, the question of the freedom of the will. He offers new interpretations of contributions to the free will debate made by canonical figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid, and also discusses in detail the arguments of some less familiar writers. Harris (...) puts the eighteenth-century debate about the will and its freedom in the context of the period's concern with applying what Hume calls the "experimental method of reasoning" to the human mind. His book will be of substantial interest to historians of philosophy and anyone concerned with the free will problem. (shrink)

The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healthcare have immense potential to improve the care of patients. While there are some emerging practices surro...

My point of departure in this essay is Smith’s definition of government. “Civil government,” he writes, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” First I unpack Smith’s definition of government as the protection of the rich against the poor. I argue that, on Smith’s view, this is always part of (...) what government is for. I then turn to the question of what, according to Smith, our governors can do to protect the wealth of the rich from the resentment of the poor. I consider, and reject, the idea that Smith might conceive of education as a means of alleviating the resentment of the poor at their poverty. I then describe how, in his lectures on jurisprudence, Smith refines and develops Hume’s taxonomy of the opinions upon which all government rests. The sense of allegiance to government, according to Smith, is shaped by instinctive deference to natural forms of authority as well as by rational, Whiggish considerations of utility. I argue that it is the principle of authority that provides the feelings of loyalty upon which government chiefly rests. It follows, I suggest, that to the extent that Smith looked to government to protect the property of the rich against the poor, and thereby to maintain the peace and stability of society at large, he cannot have sought to lessen the hold on ordinary people of natural sentiments of deference. In addition, I consider the implications of Smith’s theory of government for the question of his general attitude toward poverty. I argue against the view that Smith has recognizably “liberal,” progressive views of how the poor should be treated. Instead, I locate Smith in the political culture of the Whiggism of his day. (shrink)

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued that the modifier effect arises primarily (...) from a general lack of confidence in generic statements about the typical properties of unfamiliar concepts. Neither prototype nor classical models of concept combination receive support from the phenomenon. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Lindquist et al. provide a compelling summary of the brain bases of the onset of emotion. Their conclusions, however, are constrained by typical fMRI techniques that do not assess a key ingredient in emotional experience – timing. We discuss the importance of timing in theories of emotion as well as the implications of neural temporal dynamics for psychological constructionism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics by Paul SagarJames A. HarrisPaul Sagar. Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xii + 229. Hardback, $37.00.Paul Sagar's invigorating book is a reconsideration of Adam Smith in the sense that it challenges much that is received wisdom in current scholarship. First and foremost, it rejects (...) the idea that Smith was preeminently a moral philosopher concerned with the threat to civic virtue posed by commercial society, and yet intent on giving commercial society a moral vindication nevertheless. Sagar—rightly, in my view—wants us to recognize Smith as having been a political thinker. Too much work on Smith still assumes that there is not much to say [End Page 323] about his political thought because he regarded all but the most minimal government as an obstacle to the proper functioning of markets. Smith is supposed to be a "classical liberal" bent on preserving as much natural liberty as possible in the face of government's relentless overextension of its powers of regulation. In Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), Donald Winch rejected that approach to Smith in favor of a portrait of the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations as an eighteenth-century thinker with an eighteenth-century thinker's concerns. Sagar's project is quite different. This is a book on Smith's political thought that does not once deploy the term 'Whig.' Sagar's Smith does not wholly float free of his historical situation—the questions he addresses are those posed by the end of feudalism and the advent of modernity—but situating him in the particular circumstances of Britain in the age of revolutions is not Sagar's concern. As Sagar sees it, the fundamental issues addressed by Smith's political thought concern the distinctive form taken by commercial society in the modern era. Smith, according to Sagar, held that all advanced societies are commercial societies. Commercial society as such needed no vindication. The question, rather, was what kind of commercial society a modern state wanted to be. That was a political question insofar as it was a question about the kind of freedom that mattered and about the kind of institutions needed to make that freedom a reality.Defined in maximally general terms, freedom for Smith was the absence of domination, where domination is understood as a lack of security in respect of one's physical safety and possessions. The condition of the poor and powerless had always been one of subjection to the will of the rich and powerful. What changed that, according to Smith, was implementation of the rule of law. This is in itself not a new reading of Smith, but what distinguishes Sagar's version of it is the care with which he examines both the place of the rule of law in Smith's historical account of the emergence of liberty in modern Europe and the precise nature of the connection between the rule of law and freedom. First, on Sagar's view, there needed to be a comprehensive picture of domination and slavery, which had been the normal condition of almost everyone for almost all of human history. Then there needed to be an explanation of how it was that, at one particular historical moment, domination was slowly but surely challenged by the emergence of law and law courts considered as independent of political power. In England, this was the story of the common law and of judges who held office for life, rather than at the pleasure of traditional possessors of power. It was the story of security in property, of the backing of property by law, and it was a largely urban story, of burghers who managed to enlist monarchs on their side in the battle against the barons. It was, in other words, in large part a medieval story, and one consequence is that there was more to say about the rise of liberty in the modern age than that it was caused inadvertently by... (shrink)

Notwithstanding requirements for scientific/social value and risk/benefit proportionality in major research ethics policies, there are no widely accepted standards for these judgments in Phase 1 trials. This paper examines whether the principle of clinical equipoise can be used as a standard for assessing the ratio of risk to direct-benefit presented by drugs administered in one category of Phase 1 study—first-in-human trials involving patients. On the basis of the supporting evidence for, and architecture of, Phase 1 studies, the articles offers two (...) provisional conclusions: (1) the risks of drug administration in such trials cannot generally be justified on therapeutic grounds but by appeal to the social value of the research; and (2) a framework for adjudicating the ratio of risk/social-value must be developed. (shrink)

This paper describes how Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was read in Britain from Josiah Tucker to Peter Laslett. It focuses in particular upon how Locke’s readers responded to his detailed and...

How is one to distinguish a true lover of peace from a mere appeaser, a pacifist, and a warmonger? Distinguishing them can be sometimes confusing, as they will often appropriate each other’s language. The criterion for the above distinction does not only lie in outward behavior, as knowledge of inward attitudes is also required. A right understanding of these attitudes and motivations involve at least an implicit grasp of the true nature of peace, which is investigated as something more than (...) the mere absence of war, insofar as peace is primarily a work of two moral virtues: justice and charity. It is in the spirit of justice and charity that the true lover of peace must then distinguish—both in one’s own life and with nations—between what can be ignored and / or forgiven, and what must be redressed. Furthermore, the distinction between the lover of peace and the pacifist, with the possibility of pacifism being a distinct tradition from just war philosophy, is investigated. The argument is made that pacifism should not be considered outside the context of just war because one needs that context to address if and who demands restitution. (shrink)

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple (...) lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license. (shrink)

This article describes a debate about the basis of allegiance to government that is obscured from view by the historiographical controversy about whether it is liberalism or republicanism that is the key to understanding eighteenth-century Anglophone political thought. This debate is between those who subscribe, more or less, to the principles of Locke, and those who subscribe, more or less, to the principles of Filmer. Taking the Hanoverian succession as my point of departure, I present an outline account of what (...) I take to be the mainstream eighteenth-century argument about the origin of government, up to and including the aftermath of the French Revolution. It played out largely in sermons and occasional pamphlets, written by individuals who, for the most part, did not acquire significant reputations, even in their own age. I then turn to a succession of more familiar writers, from Hume to Burke, who sought to transform argument about the source of political legitimacy by abandoning the question of the origins of government in favour, usually, of considerations of utility. Yet, as they attempted to change the terms of debate about the principles of government, these writers made constructive use of ideas and arguments usually associated with Filmer. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Catherine Jones, Andrew Sabl, and Mikko Tolonen for taking the trouble to read my book Hume: An Intellectual Biography so carefully, and for responding to it so thoughtfully and constructively. I thank the editors of Hume Studies for the honour of having the book discussed in the journal that matters most to any Hume scholar. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the organisers of the 2017 Hume Society Conference in Providence, and (...) especially Aaron Garrett and André Willis, for inviting me to take part in a discussion of the book there. My critics on that occasion were James Moore and Dario Perinetti, both of whom gave me much to think about. Before I begin my responses to Jones... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is the place of Hume in Nicholas Phillipson's account of the Scottish Enlightenment. I begin with Phillipson's reading of Hume as ‘civic moralist’. I then turn to his account of Hume the author of The History of England. And from there I proceed to the place of Hume in his intellectual biography of Adam Smith. I conclude with a brief description of Phillipson's understanding of Hume's place in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment as (...) it mutated in the late eighteenth century and came to an end in the early nineteenth. I show how just as Phillipson's Hume cannot be understood apart from the Scottish Enlightenment, so also Phillipson's Scottish Enlightenment cannot be understood without Hume. (shrink)

My purpose in Hume: An Intellectual Biography was to write the first comprehensive account of Hume's career as an author, beginning with what we know about his education at Edinburgh, and ending with "My Own Life," the brief autobiography that Hume wrote shortly before he died. Where Ernest Mossner, in his classic The Life of David Hume, was explicitly concerned with the man rather than with the ideas, I was concerned with the ideas, and the arguments, rather than with the (...) man. Hume's biography was of interest to me insofar as, but no further than, it shed light on Hume's intellectual development. In many respects, Mossner's achievement as a biographer remains deeply impressive, and anyone wanting to gain a full... (shrink)

Three issues are raised in this commentary. First, the mapping of semantic information into the different layers could be done in a more realistic way by using the Context layer to represent situational contexts. Second, a way to differentiate category membership information from other property information needs to be considered. Finally, the issue of modal knowledge is raised.

To approach the many challenges involved in the notion of engineering concepts, it is important to have a clear idea of the starting point – the concepts that people use in their everyday lives, in conversations and in expressing beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth. The first Section of this chapter introduces evidence that I have accumulated over the last many years concerning the flexibility, context-dependence, and vagueness of such common concepts. The concept engineer needs to understand the structure of (...) the “raw material” with which she is working. In Section 2, I summarise some results concerning the amount of individual variation that exists within a single relatively homogenous population of individuals, both in what examples are considered most typical of a category, and in what properties are considered most central to a category (Hampton & Passanisi, 2016). The demonstration of a significant degree of reliable variation in responses to these questions, that is stable over time, illustrates the potential for conceptual engineering interventions to affect individuals’ concepts. Concepts are rarely fixed or uniformly understood in the same way. I then discuss the different ways in which concepts track the world, and I speculate about how different conceptual domains are governed by different criteria of validity or acceptability. This reflection will lead to Section 3 in which I summarise some results from recent research (Thorne, Quilty-Dunn, Smortchova, Shea, & Hampton, 2021), investigating for the first time how people view the value of different familiar concepts. Knowing how people appraise concepts will be a key to developing ideas for improving the reliability and validity of the concepts that they commonly use. A final section contains some (largely speculative) discussion about the implications of work in psychology of concepts for the project of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

The inherence heuristic is too broad as a theoretical notion. The authors are at risk of applying their own heuristic in supporting itself. Nonetheless the article provides useful insight into the ways in which people overestimate the coherence and completeness of their understanding of the world.

For John Skorupski, as of course for many historians of Western thought, the end of the eighteenth century was a moment of radical transformation. European cult.

Three questions are raised: First, when did the eighteenth century in British philosophy begin and end? Secondly, is there a reason to talk in terms of British philosophy in this period, as different and distinct from English, Scottish, Welsh, and possibly also Irish and American philosophy? Thirdly, how should philosophy be defined in an eighteenth-century British context? The structure of the volume is then explained, and a brief indication given of the content of each chapter.

Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence: A Case Study Using the Integrated Readiness Matrix builds on the 2015 text, Integrating Pedagogy and Technology: Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with a focus on teaching in higher education. Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence is premised on our contention in the first book that, while individual faculty members can independently begin to use the IRM to improve their pedagogical and technological skills in their content areas, an organizational structure is needed (...) to sustain ongoing improvement. In addition, while the first book provided a primer on learning theory as it relates to pedagogy, Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence plumbs this topic more deeply from the perspective of the college instructor. Further, the second book is dedicated to demonstrating how the IRM can be institutionalized as the foundation for providing the structure and support to faculty and how they can help shape centers for teaching excellence by becoming more familiar with relevant learning theories and related pedagogical and technological approaches. (shrink)

The purpose of this engaging book is twofold: to explain and justify the primary objects and methods of the discipline of philosophy, and to show how philosophy ...

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Cicero to British—and not only British—philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the most part, interest appears to have been much greater in De Officiis, De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum, De Natura Deorum, Academica, De Legibus, and so on, than in the works of Plato or of Aristotle. Yet Cicero was different things to different people. To many, he was the paradigmatic moderate Stoic, critical of the paradoxical excesses of Zeno (...) and Chrysippus, but unwilling to follow the Epicureans in their reduction of the goods of life to the merely useful and agreeable. In this rich and rewarding study of British moral philosophy from Locke to Hume, Tim... (shrink)

It would appear, judging from the evidence provided by Jonathan Rée in the first chapter of this extraordinary book, that the first work of philosophy in the English language was The Rule of Reason...