In a recent book, J. R. Lucas presents an argument to show that if God has infallible knowledge of the future, our will is not free. Thus, Lucas concludes, like the medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides, that God in creating beings with genuinely free will, abdicates some of his omniscience as well as some of his omnipotence. God could, but will not, determine our choices, since such an exercise of his power would rob us of free will. Similarly, Lucas holds, God (...) could but does not foreknow our future choices since this also would rob us of free will. This argument, from so formidable a foe of determinism as Lucas, merits our most serious attention. However, I believe that there is a way to evade its conclusion, a way which Lucas considers but rejects. (shrink)

One of the most difficult problems for a student of religion is the problem of how to relate different religious views of life. It is not difficult to say, ‘My religious orientation has the only truth,’ but the art of giving evidence and argument to support a view on how they should be compared is almost nonexistent. Because of this, the recent work that John Hick has done in this area deserves thoughtful consideration. Since I am working on a book (...) which is concerned with this issue, I am not only going to discuss Hick's views but also defend an alternative way of relating religious views of life. I hope this article will stimulate reactions which will be of help in my work on the book. (shrink)

"Intuition" has perhaps been the least understood and the most abused term in philosophy. It is often the term used when one has no plausible explanation for the source of a given belief or opinion. According to some sceptics, it is understood only in terms of what it is not, and it is not any of the better understood means for acquiring knowledge. In mathematics the term has also unfortunately been used in this way. Thus, intuition is sometimes portrayed as (...) if it were the Third Eye, something only mathematical "mystics", like Ramanujan, possess. In mathematics the notion has also been used in a host of other senses: by "intuitive" one might mean informal, or non-rigourous, or visual, or holistic, or incomplete, or perhaps even convincing in spite of lack of proof. My aim in this book is to sweep all of this aside, to argue that there is a perfectly coherent, philosophically respectable notion of mathematical intuition according to which intuition is a condition necessary for mathemati cal knowledge. I shall argue that mathematical intuition is not any special or mysterious kind of faculty, and that it is possible to make progress in the philosophical analysis of this notion. This kind of undertaking has a precedent in the philosophy of Kant. While I shall be mostly developing ideas about intuition due to Edmund Husser! there will be a kind of Kantian argument underlying the entire book. (shrink)

In a recent paper Anthony Flew gives an argument which can be outlined as follows: 1. Any attempt to give a ‘free will defence’ must be based either on a compatibilist notion of free will or a libertarian, incompatibilist, notion of free will. 2. A free will defence based on a compatibilist notion of free will must fail, for on a compatibilist view of free will, God could make creatures who were free but never chose evil. 3. A free will (...) defence based on a libertarian notion of free will might have other difficulties, but on a libertarian view of free will God could not both leave men free and bring it about that they never chose evil. 4. But a free will defence based on an incompatibilist, libertarian notion of free will can be rejected, since: It is not clear that the ordinary use of such key terms as ‘action’ and ‘choice’ carry any implications of libertarian free will. If such terms did carry the implication of libertarian free will it becomes hard to see how anyone could be in a position to know that a choice had been made or an action performed. The possession of libertarian free will by created beings seems to be incompatible with the essential theistic doctrine that all created beings are always utterly dependent on God as their sustaining cause. 5. Therefore the free will defence fails. (shrink)

This book grew out of my confusion. If logic is objective how can there be so many logics? Is there one right logic, or many right ones? Is there some underlying unity that connects them? What is the significance of the mathematical theorems about logic which I've learned if they have no connection to our everyday reasoning? The answers I propose revolve around the perception that what one pays attention to in reasoning determines which logic is appropriate. The act of (...) abstracting from our reasoning in our usual language is the stepping stone from reasoned argument to logic. We cannot take this step alone, for we reason together: logic is reasoning which has some objective value. For you to understand my answers, or perhaps better, conjectures, I have retraced my steps: from the concrete to the abstract, from examples, to general theory, to further confirming examples, to reflections on the significance of the work. (shrink)

The enterprise of state punishment requires the use of limited resources for which there are other competitors, such as national defense, market regulation, and social welfare. How resource-demanding retributive justice will turn out to be depends on how retributivists answer a series of questions concerning the theory’s structure. After elaborating these questions and the varieties of retributive justice that answers to them might generate, I consider the resource demands of retributive justice in the context of competing theories of distributive justice. (...) Various tensions and outright conflicts between the pursuit of retributive and distributive justice are then explored. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the distinction between "negative" and "positive" duties. Special attention will be given to certain criticism raised against this distinction by Michael Tooley.

The article consists of a brief biographical account of Immanuel Kant’s life and career, followed by a discussion of his basic philosophy, and a brief discussion of his pivotal point in the history of Rhetoric and Communicology. A major figure in the European Enlightenment period of Philosophy, his Collected Writings were first published in 1900 constituting 29 volumes. He wrote three major works that are foundational to the development of Western philosophy and the human sciences. Often just referred to as (...) the “Three Critiques” informally, the First, the Second, and the Third. These are respectively: The Critique of Pure Reason focused on issues in logic, The Critique of Practical Reason relating ethical guidelines, and The Critique of Judgment exploring issues of aesthetics. He is most famous for his philosophy of transcendental idealism. This version of idealism argues that in logic statements are analytic or synthetic. He further argues that statements are a priori or a posteriori. Models of rhetoric, phenomenological methodology, and the contemporary Perspectives Model of interpersonal communicology are included as the Kantian legacy in the US. Notes provide a guide to edition and philological issues in the Kantian corpus, especially for the hermeneutics of Vorstellung versus Darstellung. (shrink)

Theories of Truth provides a clear, critical introduction to one of the most difficult areas of philosophy. It surveys all of the major philosophical theories of truth, presenting the crux of the issues involved at a level accessible to nonexperts yet in a manner sufficiently detailed and original to be of value to professional scholars. Kirkham's systematic treatment and meticulous explanations of terminology ensure that readers will come away from this book with a comprehensive general understanding of one of philosophy's (...) thorniest set of topics. -/- Included are discussions of the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, semantic, performative, redundancy, appraisal, and truth-as-justification theories. There are also chapters or sections of chapters on the liar paradox, three-valued logic, Field's critique of Tarski, Davidson's program, Dummett's theory of linguistic competence, satisfaction, recursion, the extension/intension distinction, and an explanation of how theories of justification, properly understood, differ from theories of truth. -/- A persistent theme is that philosophers have too often failed to recognize that not all theories of truth are intended to answer the same question. When the various questions are made distinct, it is apparent that many of the "debates" in this field are really cases of philosophers talking past one another. There is much less disagreement within the field than has commonly been thought. (shrink)

This book presents modern logic as the formalization of reasoning that needs and deserves a semantic foundation. Chapters on propositional logic; parsing propositions; and meaning, truth and reference give the reader a basis for establishing criteria that can be used to judge formalizations of ordinary language arguments. Over 120 worked examples illustrate the scope and limitations of modern logic, as analyzed in chapters on identity, quantifiers, descriptive names, and functions. The chapter on second-order logic shows how different conceptions of predicates (...) and propositions do not lead to a common basis for quantification over predicates, as they do for quantification over things. Notable for its clarity of presentation and supplemented by many exercises, this volume will be invaluable for philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, and computer scientists who wish to better understand the tools they use in formal reasoning. (shrink)

The critics of Schleiermacher's hermeneutic are legion and its defenders few – due, to a great extent, to the popularity of Gadamer's Truth and Method and its attack on Schleiermacher. I believe that the critics of Schleiermacher have not understood him very well and the failure of his hermeneutics to gain very much respect lies, at least partially, to a lack of understanding of what he had to say. Besides, if we look at contemporary scholars who focus on the study (...) of language and how it functions we will find that they often have views very much like those found in Schleiermacher's discussion of hermeneutics. (shrink)

We propose a framework for including information‐processing bounds in rational analyses. It is an application of bounded optimality (Russell & Subramanian, 1995) to the challenges of developing theories of mechanism and behavior. The framework is based on the idea that behaviors are generated by cognitive mechanisms that are adapted to the structure of not only the environment but also the mind and brain itself. We call the framework computational rationality to emphasize the incorporation of computational mechanism into the definition of (...) rational action. Theories are specified as optimal program problems, defined by an adaptation environment, a bounded machine, and a utility function. Such theories yield different classes of explanation, depending on the extent to which they emphasize adaptation to bounds, and adaptation to some ecology that differs from the immediate local environment. We illustrate this variation with examples from three domains: visual attention in a linguistic task, manual response ordering, and reasoning. We explore the relation of this framework to existing “levels” approaches to explanation, and to other optimality‐based modeling approaches. (shrink)

What are termed the ‘collateral legal consequences’ (or CLCs) of criminal conviction have been defended in a variety of ways. The focus in this article is on efforts to justify the burdens and restrictions they involve as nonpenal measures designed to secure public safety. Zachary Hoskins' careful defense of such public‐safety CLCs is utilized as a point of departure. Although it is granted that such measures might be defensible, the many complications and problems of ensuring that they do not amount (...) to further legal punishment and are kept within reasonable bounds are explored. I argue that the state is unlikely to deploy such public safety measures wisely and with sufficient restraint. (shrink)

The claim that visually masked, unidentifiable words are analyzed at the level of whole word meaning has been challenged by recent findings indicating that instead, analysis occurs mainly at the subword level. The present experiments examined possible limits on subword analysis. Experiment 1 obtained semantic priming from pleasant- and unpleasant-meaning subliminal words in which no individual letter contained diagnostic information about a word’s evaluative valence; thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that contained in individual letters. Experiments 2 (...) and 3 showed that analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by individual bigrams or trigrams . These findings suggest that while subliminal priming is driven by subword analysis, the effective units of analysis are distributed widely across at least short words. (shrink)

Nature, God and Humanity clarifies the task of forming an ethics of nature, thereby empowering readers to develop their own critical, faith-based ethics. Calling on original, thought-provoking analyses and arguments, Richard L. Fern frames a philosophical ethics of nature, assesses it scientifically, finds support for it in traditional biblical theism, and situates it culturally. Though defending the moral value of beliefs affirming the radical Otherness of God and human uniqueness, this book aims not to compel the adoption of any (...) particular ethic but rather illumine the contribution diverse forms of inquiry make to an ethics of nature. How does philosophy clarify moral conviction? What does science tell us about nature? Why does religious faith matter? Rejecting the illusion of a single, rationally-compelling ethics, Fern answers these questions in a way that fosters both agreement and disagreement, allowing those holding conflicting ethics of nature to work together for the common good. (shrink)

This comparative field study evaluated the choices made by U.S., Portuguese, and Hong Kong Chinese evening MBA and graduating university business students when resolving business-related moral dilemmas. The authors developed hypotheses at the country level based on Hofstede’s ratings of each country’s national culture dimensions of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. The more individualistic U.S. respondents resolved the dilemmas with choices indicating less self-interest and more concern for unidentified others than did their Portuguese and Hong Kong Chinese counterparts, (...) who are from more collectivist societies. The authors discuss implications for future cross-cultural research on business dilemmas and for cooperative interactions among managers from these and other countries. (shrink)

In the century between the creation of the first large, European astronomical observatory by Tycho Brahe in the 1580s and the national observatories of France and England in the 1660–1670s, astronomers constructed ever more sets of tables, derived from various geometrical and physical models, to compute planetary positions. But how were these tables to be evaluated? What level of precision or accuracy should be expected from mathematical astronomy? In 1644, the Stetin astronomer and calendar-maker Lorenz Eichstadt published a new set (...) of tables, mostly cobbled together from earlier tables, which include a running commentary on how his tables might be expected to match ‘observed’ planetary positions. His earlier works also often display a rhetoric of ‘exactitude’ and ‘error’. Eichstadt thus offers a case study of explicit discussions of ‘precision’ in mid-seventeenth astronomy. Although some tables could generate positions to arcseconds, Eichstadt argued that a regime of five arcminutes should be enough for most table users who were, presumably, computing horoscopes. (shrink)

Mixed theories of legal punishment treat both crime reduction and retributive concerns as irreducibly important and so worthy of inclusion in a single justificatory framework. Yet crime reduction and retributive approaches employ different assumptions about the necessary characteristics of those liable to punishment. Retributive accounts of legal punishment require offenders to be more responsive to moral considerations than do crime reduction accounts. The tensions these different assumptions create are explored in the mixed theories of John Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, (...) and Andrew von Hirsch. It is argued that none of these theories successfully resolve the tensions. The prospects for resolving them are then discussed. (shrink)

The question addressed here is whether evidence concerning defendants' past criminal records should be introduced at their trials because such evidence reveals their character and thus reveals whether they are the kinds of persons likely to have committed the crimes with which they are currently charged. I strongly caution against the introduction of such evidence for a number of reasons. First, the link between defendants' past criminal records and claims about their standing dispositions to think and act is tenuous, at (...) best. Second, noncharacter, or trace, evidence should have primacy in determining the guilt or innocence of defendants. Third, character evidence will vary in its freshness and specificity. Other things being equal, only relatively fresh and specific character evidence has probative value. Moreover, such evidence will have greater probative value in criminal cases where the issue before the court is whether a crime has been committed than in cases where the issue is whether it was the defendant who committed the crime. Finally, we might be more sanguine about the introduction of fresh and specific character evidence under conditions likely to work against its misuse or misinterpretation. However, the relevant conditions may not often be satisfied in the real world of criminal trials and defendants. (shrink)

The physical and relational structure of the biologic continuum (both internal and external to the organism) creates the information signature that is the basis for the origination of meaning in the living system. A meaning metric can be grounded in the significance of that information to the stability of the system during the process of adaptive reconciliation of divergences from the steady state condition. From this perspective, an information-theoretic formulation of the process for translating incident information into adaptive action is (...) proposed that can be practically used in defining and quantifying the meaning of that information for the living system. (shrink)

In a recent paper in Psychological Science, Kouider and Dupoux reported obtaining unconscious Stroop priming only when subjects had partial awareness of the masked distractor words . Kouider and Dupoux conjectured that semantic priming occurs only when such partial awareness is present. The present experiments tested this conjecture in an affective categorization priming task that differed from Kouider and Dupoux’s in using masked distractors that subjects had practiced earlier as visible words. Experiment 1 showed priming from practiced words when subjects (...) had no partial awareness of those words. Experiment 2 showed that, in the absence of partial awareness, practiced words yielded priming but not-practiced words did not. Experiment 3 corroborated Experiment 1 and 2s results using a different test of partial awareness. These results suggest that unconscious processing of subword elements drives masked semantic priming by practiced words. (shrink)

In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question.

The dominant approach to the analysis of issues in business ethics consists in the articulation and use of a set of mid-level moral principles. This approach is geared to business practitioners who are not interested in the difficult problems of moral and political theory. I argue that this "practitioner model" is philosophically suspect. I show how the theoretical frameworks prominent business ethicists employ are insufficiently developed. I also show how many of their analyses presuppose substantive views about issues of social (...) justice which they rarely defend or acknowledge. Since no neutral position on these issues is available, I argue that the only alternative is to address the problems such issue's raise for the analysis of institutions and the conduct of persons acting under those institutions. I offer suggestions about how we can develop a more philosophically defensible approach to business ethics. (shrink)

A promising approach to more refined models consistent with the Caplan & Waters hypothesis is based on similarity-based interference, a general principle that applies across working memory domains. This may explain both the fine details of syntactic working memory phenomena and the gross fractionation for which Caplan & Waters have found evidence. Detailed models of syntactic processing that embody similarity-based interference fare well cross-linguistically.