This book includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the "nationalist" focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings ; and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case (...) of material variants and in the case of formal variants ”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy. (shrink)

Seeing objective thought as passive, Diefenbeck seeks to develop a theory of thought or of reason “appropriate to the subject as an active agent or first cause.” His system would illuminate and render more effective the creation of values that guide lives. George Kimball Plochmann in his foreword describes the book as “a sus­tained inquiry into the character of knowledge, one seeking to prove that our exclusive cognitive allegiance to the so-called objective sciences is misplaced, not so much because they (...) are faulty in detail or deficient in humanitarian feel­ing, as because they cannot enjoy the epistemological support that they would require were they allowed the hegemony over other branches of cognition that is traditionally accorded them.” Diefenbeck would not destroy objec­tive knowledge, but would allow each philosophy to confront subjective phi­losophy and from the results of that confrontation build a better system of values. (shrink)

Unless restricted to explicitly held, sharable beliefs that control and justify a person's behavior, the notion of a rule has little value as an explanatory concept. Similarity-based processing is a general characteristic of the mind-world interface where internal processes (including explicitly represented rules) act on the external world. The distinction between rules and similarity is therefore misconceived.

This dissertation does not argue for a particular theory of realism. It seeks to clear the ground for such a theory by clarifying the distinction between realism and reality. Realism is not reality. 'Realism' stands for theories that describe reality and how it exists mind-independently. I argue that much recent writing on realism misses the import of this distinction and proceeds "anti-philosophically." While some statements refer uncontroversially to an accepted state of affairs, others amplify, vouchsafe, or explain a philosophical compunction (...) about the received notion of reality. Philosophy consists, in accounting for what one does, says exists, or knows. So, the mere acceptance of the supposed "facts" is anti-philosophical. ;Philosophy should accept at least some "facts." But it has to rise above first order obviousness in order to dismiss or accept received views. The effort to proceed "antiphilosophically," insists that some statements or material be accepted uncritically or neutrally as explaining or settling important philosophical issues without philosophical assistance. ;Accordingly, I reject Devitt's "proposal" that we can "settle the realism issue before any epistemic or semantic issue" . Issues of reference cant help but pertain to settling that "Tokens of most current common-sense and scientific objects objectively exist independently of the mental" . The "constructivist turn" in realism holds that "realism" describes mind-independent entities, but not in a way that is itself independent of knowledge or meaning. Realism and much else, including our "facts," is "constructed" ; reality isn't. Hence, I also reject John Searle's attempt to "construct" all of social reality from non-social or "brute" reality alone. It is only by the social that we know the "non-social." I reject Michael Dummett's theory that the theory of meaning "underlies" metaphysics. Regardless, statements still refer to entities, without which they mean nothing. I favor Hilary Putnam's attempt to reject metaphysical realism despite his leanings toward idealism and a "limit concept" of reason and truth. Finally, I argue that Rorty's arguments for the "pointlessness" of realist and antirealist discussion are self-contradictory and nearly irrelevant. (shrink)

Bastiat emphasized the institutional infrastructure of a market economy and the principle of spontaneous order. He began with first principles — the primacy of property and consent — and derived the legitimate functions of government. As a pioneer in constitutional political economy, he examined the relation between economics and politics, employed methodological individualism, and extended the exchange paradigm to collective choice. He showed that the attenuation of economic liberty in the pursuit of distributive justice under majoritarian government would lead to (...) rent-seeking, corruption, and politicization of economic life.Bastiat met l’accent sur l’aménagement institutionnel de l’économie de marché et sur le principe de l’ordre spontané. Son analyse débute avec les principes premiers — la primauté de la propriété et du consentement — et il infère de ces principes les fonctions légitimes du gouvernement. En tant que pionnier de l’économie politique constitutionnelle, il examine les liens entre la sphère économique et la sphère politique, a recours à l’individualisme méthodologique et étend le paradigme de l’échange aux choix collectifs. Il montre que l’érosion de la liberté économique qu’entraîne la recherche d’une justice distributive sous un gouvernement majoritaire mène à la recherche de rentes, à la corruption et à la politisation de la vie économique. (shrink)

William James indicated a “middle path” according to which religious experience yields something like knowledge for the mystic, but not a kind that others, who do not share his experience, are compelled to accept. Such a middle way is initially appealing, but how is it to be developed? Here I suggest three leading ideas—the epistemic analogue of “agent-relative permissions,” the complementary relationship between the Jamesian virtues of bold exploration and sober caution, and the kind of special access the lover (...) may claim with respect to knowledge of his beloved—with an eye to such development. Each is found helpful, but in ascending order of importance. (shrink)

This essay examines the evolutionary development of the “rights” concept. It argues that the concept is both relatively recent and fundamentally economic rather than abstractly philosophical. The essay is unique, not only in its explication of the concept, but also in the use of ngram data to visualize the correspondence between the evolving rights concept and growing aggregate prosperity.

I argue that Mencius puts forth a defensible form of ethical naturalism, according to which moral properties, moral motivation, and moral deliberation can be accounted for within the parameters of a naturalistic worldview. On this position, moral properties are the subjectively real properties which acts have in virtue of their corresponding to our most coherent set of shared desires. I give a naturalistic definition of 'right' which, I argue, is implicit in Mencius' philosophy. I address the objection that some of (...) the contemporary-sounding views which I attribute to Mencius are positions which are alien to the ancient thinker, and I argue that the version of Mencius given here is not only quite faithful to Mencius but also a true metaethical theory. (shrink)

Scientists generally record their laboratory activities and experimental results in notebooks, from which they construct scientific papers. The Johns Hopkins physiologist William Henry Howell kept a laboratory notebook from 1913 to 1914, in which he recorded experiments on the blood clotting factor prothrombin. In 1914 he published a paper using this notebook, to justify his theory of prothrombin activation. Howell's paper is reconstructed, in terms of its narrative and argument elements, from the laboratory activities and experimental results recorded in the (...) notebook. This reconstruction reveals an intimate connection between the two texts and the process by which Howell constructed a scientific paper. The generation of scientific knowledge by Howell is then evaluated, especially in terms of theory formation and justification. (shrink)

The motto of the Royal Society—Nullius in verba—was intended to highlight the members’ rejection of received knowledge and the new place they afforded direct empirical evidence in their quest for genuine, useful knowledge about the world. But while many studies have raised questions about the construction, reception and authentication of knowledge, Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences is the first to examine the problem of evidence at this pivotal moment in European intellectual history. What constituted evidence—and for whom? (...) Where might it be found? How should it be collected and organized? What is the relationship between evidence and proof? These are crucial questions, for what constitutes evidence determines how people interrogate the world and the kind of arguments they make about it. In this important new collection, Lancaster and Raiswell have assembled twelve studies that capture aspects of the debate over evidence in a variety of intellectual contexts. From law and theology to geography, medicine and experimental philosophy, the chapters highlight the great diversity of approaches to evidence-gathering that existed side by side in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, the volume makes an important addition to the literature on early science and knowledge formation, and will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students in these fields. (shrink)

This original and thought-provoking volume examines organic life as subjective activity. It shows that organic life operates differently from objective thought and truth. The volume considers topics such as: the origin of life, the absorption of food, the operation of heredity, and the possible control of further evolutionary development.