This book prints for the first time two remarkable interlocking sequences of letters between Paris and the Netherlands: 40 letters from Gilles Ménage in Paris to Johann-Georg Grævius in Utrecht, and 30 from the printer Henrik Wetstein, in Amsterdam, to Ménage. Their principal focus is the publication of a considerable number of Ménage’s works outside France, above all his monumental edition of Diogenes Laertius’s _Lives of the Philosophers._ The letters give an engaging picture of mutual help within the community of (...) scholars, Dutch, German, English, and French, including Huguenot exiles like Le Clerc and Bayle. Ménage’s are full of information from Paris; while Wetstein’s, forthright and humorous, concentrate on publishing details in a sometimes stormy relationship. The great Diogenes edition encountered an extraordinary range of problems: difficulties at every stage of publication, hazardous wartime communications, and, not least, a bizarrely eccentric collaborator in Marcus Meibomius. The two correspondences provide a fascinating case-study of the practical working of international scholarly publishing in time of war, and the European network of learned correspondence in the later seventeenth century. Each letter is printed in full, accompanied by a summary, detailed commentary, and extensive annotations. (shrink)

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

Thinking through the body: educating for the humanities -- The body as background -- Self-knowledge and its discontents: from Socrates to somaesthetics -- Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life -- Somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom: a practical approach -- Somaesthetics and the limits of aesthetics -- Somaesthetics and Burke's sublime -- Pragmatism and cultural politics: from textualism to somaesthetics -- Body consciousness and performance -- Somaesthetics and architecture: a critical option -- Photography as performative process -- Asian (...) ars erotica and the question of sexual aesthetics -- Philosophy as awakened life : everyday aesthetics of embodiment in American transcendentalism and Japanese Zen practice -- Somatic style. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.

Most individuals realise that we have a moral obligation to avoid the evils of war. But this realization raises a host of difficult questions when we, as responsible individuals, witness harrowing injustices such as ""ethnic cleansing"" in Bosnia or starvation in Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, is war ever justified? And, if so, for what purpose? In this book, Richard J. Regan confronts these controversial questions by first considering the basic principles of just-war theory and then applying (...) those principles to historical and ongoing conflicts. Part One presents two opposing viewpoints: first, that war is not subject to moral norms and, second, that war is never morally permissible. The author rejects both perspectives, and moves to define the principles of just-war theory. He evaluates the roles of the president, Congress and, most importantly, the UN Security Council in determining when long-term US military involvement is justified. The moral limits of war conduct and the moral problem of using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons are also discussed. On the just cause to wage war, Regan argues that defense of nations and nationals - whether in self-defense or in defense of others - remains the ""only"" classical cause that in the modern world would justify resorting to war. With respect to military intervention in secessionist and revolutionary wars, he contends that such intervention might be justified, but that prudence dictates extreme caution. In considering acceptable war conduct, Regan elaborates the specific principle of discrimination and proportionality; he maintains that civilians uninvolved in the enemy's war should not be directly targeted and that the costs of military action must be proportionate to the anticipated benefits of destroying military targets. The second part of the book presents case studies of eight historical wars - World War I, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the revolution and civil war in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, and the Bosnian War - and poses several provocative questions about each. It invites readers and students to apply just-war principles to complex war-related situations and to understand the factual contingencies involved in moral judgements about war decisions. The book should be of particular interest to students of the moral issues of international relations and to readers interested more generally in philosophy, theology and political science. (shrink)

This book gives a descriptive analysis of specific Madhyamika texts. It compares the ideology of Kumarajiva (a translator of the four Madhyamika treatises 400 A.D.) with the ideologies of the three Chinese contemporaries - HuiYuan, Seng-Jui and Seng-Chao. It envisages an intercultural transmission of religious and philosophical ideas from India to China.

This is the third edition of a classic book first published in 1960, which has sold thousands of copies in two paperback edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. Popkin's work ha generated innumerable citations, and remains a valuable stimulus to current historical research. In this updated version, he has revised and expanded throughout, and has added three new chapters, one on Savonarola, one on Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, and one on Pascal. This authoritative treatment of the (...) theme of scepticism and its historical impact will appeal to scholars and students of early modern history now as much as ever. (shrink)

If aesthetics is both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one ...

Logical Forms explains both the detailed problems involved in finding logical forms and also the theoretical underpinnings of philosophical logic. In this revised edition, exercises are integrated throughout the book. The result is a genuinely interactive introduction which engages the reader in developing the argument. Each chapter concludes with updated notes to guide further reading.

The book begins with an overview that introduces the Theorem and the issues surrounding it, and explores how the essays that follow contribute to our understanding of those issues.

"Ce livre propose une enquête philosophique explorant le rapport à la mort dans nos sociétés. C’est une invitation à penser les liens humains à la fin de la vie. On évoque les liens intimes, mais également les liens sociaux encadrés par la loi. Dans un tel contexte, comment discerner les raisons anciennes et nouvelles convenant au bien de la cité? L’ouvrage s’adresse aux accompagnants en soins palliatifs. Il concerne également toute personne soucieuse pour elle-même et ses proches de réfléchir à (...) son voyage au bout de la vie. Nous sommes mortels, nous le savons et le fil de nos existences provoque des occasions de nous le rappeler. Dans la solitude de mourir s’inscrit l’appel à la compassion. Ainsi, pour les Grecs de l’Antiquité, l’image de la cigogne symbolisait la prise en charge des vieux par les jeunes, un signe de l’amitié politique. L’émergence de la culture palliative est intimement liée aux changements qui ont affecté l’évolution récente de la vie démocratique. Cette culture est née et s’est développée dans des circonstances politiques particulières. À l’observer, on peut déchiffrer certains codes de notre vie civique, ses aspirations, mais aussi ses ambiguïtés. Louis-André Richard propose d’examiner les questions actuelles en compagnie de Platon, d’Aristote, d’Augustin ou de Tocqueville. Grâce à eux, la philosophie, symbolisée par la sagesse de Minerve, est mise à contribution pour explorer la genèse et les métamorphoses de concepts comme la dignité et l’autonomie. Comment se déploie la dynamique de la raison et de la liberté à l’heure de notre mort? Tel est l’enjeu pour les roseaux pensants que nous sommes. Si notre frêle espèce appelle à la sollicitude de la cigogne, elle ne saurait négliger de convoquer aussi la sagesse de Minerve."--Résumé de l'éditeur. (shrink)

This paper discusses Frege's account of definition by induction in Grundgesetze and the two key theorems Frege proves using it.

Les périodes de confinement sont des moments éprouvants. On a la sensation de perdre nos repères. Nous nous sentons déboussolés. On peut cependant saisir l’occasion de faire le point. Sous le regard de la réflexion philosophique, ce petit livre est une tentative pour éviter de perdre le nord. L’auteur propose de courtes réflexions puisées à même la littérature philosophique. Sans prétention, il s’agit de fournir des pistes rendant intelligibles nos conditions d’êtres confinés.

Strangers, Gods and Monster is a fascinating look at how human identity is shaped by three powerful but enigmatic forces. Often overlooked in accounts of how we think about ourselves and others, Richard Kearney skillfully shows, with the help of vivid examples and illustrations, how the human outlook on the world is formed by the mysterious triumvirate of strangers, gods and monsters. Throughout, Richard Kearney shows how strangers, gods and monsters do not merely reside in myths or fantasies (...) but constitute a central part of our cultural unconscious. Above all, he argues that until we understand better that the Other resides deep within ourselves, we can have little hope of understanding how our most basic fears and desires manifest themselves in the external world and how we can learn to live with them. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

Much of the history of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century has been written with a sharp focus on a few key figures and a handful of notable events. Einstein’s Generation offers a distinctive new approach to the origins of modern physics by exploring both the material culture that stimulated relativity and the reaction of Einstein’s colleagues to his pioneering work. Richard Staley weaves together the diverse strands of experimental and theoretical physics, commercial instrument making, and the (...) sociology of physics around 1900 to present a complete view of the collective efforts of a group whose work helped set the stage for Einstein’s revolutionary theories and the transition from classical to modern physics that followed. Collecting papers, talks, catalogues, conferences, and correspondence, Staley juxtaposes scientists’ views of relativity at the time to modern understandings of its history. Ultimately, Einstein’s Generation tells the story of a group of individuals whose work engendered some of the most significant advances of the twentieth century—and challenges our celebration of Einstein’s era above all others. (shrink)

In “Conceptual Diversity in Epistemology,” Richard Foley reflects on such central topics in epistemology as knowledge, warrant, rationality, and justification, with the purpose of distinguishing such concepts in a general theory. Foley uses “warrant” to refer to that which constitutes knowledge when added to true belief and suggests that rationality and justification are not linked to knowledge by necessity. He proceeds to offer a general schema for rationality. This schema enables a distinction between “rationality” and “rationality all things considered.” (...) Foley proposes how these concepts can work together in a system that “provides the necessary materials for an approach to epistemology that is clarifying, theoretically respectable, and relevant to our actual lives.”. (shrink)

The end of aesthetic experience -- Don't believe the hype -- The fine art of rap -- Affect and authenticity in country musicals -- The urban aesthetics of absence : pragmatist reflections in Berlin -- Beneath interpretation -- Somaesthetics and the body/media issue -- The somatic turn : care of the body in contemporary culture -- Multiculturalism and the art of living -- Genius and the paradox of self-styling.

Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument; arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe; from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness; and from miracles and religious experience. He claims that while (...) none of these arguments are deductively valid, they do give inductive support to theism and that, even when the argument from evil is weighed against them, taken together they offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. The overall structure of the discussion and its conclusion have been retained for this new edition, but much has been changed in order to strengthen the argumentation and to take account of Swinburne's subsequent work on the nature of consciousness and the problem of evil, and of the latest philosophical and scientific writing, especially in respect of the laws of nature and the argument from fine-tuning. This is now the definitive version of a classic in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Effective altruism sounds so innocuous—who could possibly be opposed to doing good more effectively? Yet it has inspired significant backlash in recent years. This paper addresses some common misconceptions and argues that the core “beneficentric” ideas of effective altruism are both excellent and widely neglected. Reasonable people may disagree on details of implementation, but all should share the basic goals or values underlying effective altruism.

The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims (...) swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. (...) We end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

Scientific theories are hard to find, and once scientists have found a theory, H, they often believe that there are not many distinct alternatives to H. But is this belief justified? What should scientists believe about the number of alternatives to H, and how should they change these beliefs in the light of new evidence? These are some of the questions that we will address in this article. We also ask under which conditions failure to find an alternative to H (...) confirms the theory in question. This kind of reasoning is frequently used in science and therefore deserves a careful philosophical analysis. 1 Introduction2 The Conceptual Framework3 The No Alternatives Argument4 Discussion I: A Quantitative Analysis of the No Alternatives Argument5 Discussion II: The Number of Alternatives and the Problem of Underdetermination6 ConclusionsAppendix AAppendix B. (shrink)

The definitive life of John Stuart Mill, one of the heroic giants of Victorian England Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography can be read as an attempt to do justice to this eminent thinker, and it succeeds triumphantly. He reveals Mill as a man of action--a philosopher and radical MP who profoundly shaped Victorian society and whose thinking continues to illuminate our own. The product of an extraordinary and unique education, Mill would become in time the most significant English thinker (...) of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty, and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off weekly articles demanding Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech, and opposed slavery--and, in his private life, for two decades pursued a love affair with another man's wife. To understand Mill and his contribution to his time and ours, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. The result is both a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised by his father to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all. (shrink)

The discussion of good and evil must not be confined to the sterile lecture halls of academics but related instead to ordinary human feelings, needs, and desires, says noted philosopher Richard Taylor. Efforts to understand morality by exploring human reason will always fail because we are creatures of desire as well. All morality arises from our intense and inescapable longing. The distinction between good and evil is always clouded by rationalists who convert the real problems of ethics into complex (...) philosophical puzzles. In the first part of Good and Evil, Taylor looks for a more meaningful conception by reexamining and rejecting the whole rationalistic tradition that dominates philosophical ethics. The second part provides an empirical explanation of good and evil, noting that one does not have to look too far to find prime examples of the failure of fixed moral rules. Including important commentary on Joseph Fletcher's groundbreaking situation ethics, and Aristotle's virtues (e.g., magnanimity and pride), Taylor rounds out the book by developing a philosophy of aspiration--personal worth as an ethical ideal--to replace the morality of duty. He offers a modified form of situation ethics to fit the contemporary problems we face. (shrink)

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, including Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted, and shows us how religion needs to be redescribed along the lines of cultural studies.

In her recent, provocative essay “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Elizabeth Anderson argues against a common ideal of egalitarian justice that she calls “ luck egalitarianism” and in favor of an approach she calls “democratic equality.”1 According to the luck egalitarian, the aim of justice as equality is to eliminate so far as is possible the impact on people’s lives of bad luck that falls on them through no fault or choice of their own. In the ideal luck egalitarian (...) society, there are no inequalities in people’s life prospects except those that arise through processes of voluntary choice or faulty conduct, for which the agents involved can reasonably be held responsible. Anderson asserts that the adherents of luck egalitarianism, which can be elaborated in many different ways, include John Roemer, Erik Rakowski, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Gerald Cohen, Richard Arneson, and Philippe Van Parijs.2 In contrast, according to the democratic equality conception, justice as equality requires an end to oppressive social relationships. In the ideal society of democratic equality, the social conditions of everyone’s freedom are secured, each stands to every other in a relationship of fundamental equality, including equal respect, and all have real freedom to participate in democratic self-government. (shrink)

Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, widely known classical rationalists in the Arabic/Islamic philosophical tradition and strongly infl uential sources for Latin philosophy in the High Middle Ages, all thought themselves to be following Aristotle’s lead regarding the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles in the formation of necessary and unchanging scientific knowledge. For Aristotle it is clear that sensation is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be individual sensed objects found in the world exterior to the human soul. This takes place by (...) way of a separation of the forms of sensibles from matter and a reception of them as an actualization of the senses of the soul. 1 In an analogous fashion, intellectual knowing is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be in act non-individuated intellectual forms that are somehow in individuated particular sensible things. Although Aristotle says that “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms”, the analogy with sensation breaks down when it comes to the objects intellectually known. The reason for this is that the nonindividuated or universal forms of human knowledge are not in the sensibles in act as they must be in the intellect. 2 Again following Aristotle De Anima 3.4 and 3.5, these thinkers hold for a part of intellect that is passive or receptive of all things and another part that is active in making all things, this latter described as a disposition like light, this as well describing the active agent as acting like light. This second part, which the Arabic tradition called the Agent Intellect, sometimes describing it also as Active Intellect, al-‘aql al-fa‘il, was understood per Aristotelem to be an eternal cause of the intellectual forms in the human intellect. It was accepted that, without a grounding in separate eternal intellect, there may well be generalization or abstraction – in some sense of the 57term? but scientific knowledge understood as true, necessary and unchanging will not be achieved. 3 Of course, in Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle writes of sensory experience and provides the image of a retreat gradually coming to a halt, saying, “The soul is so constituted that it is capable of the same sort of process”. This process somehow establishes the universal in the soul even though perception is of the particular. He describes this as taking place by induction, writing, “Clearly then it must be by induction that we acquire knowledge of the primary principles, because this is also the way in which general concepts are conveyed to us by sense-perception.” These are “first things” or primary principles or premises required by demonstration. And the Arabic tradition understood Aristotle to hold for the necessity of demonstration in the formation of scientific knowledge, something that stringently requires not only proper syllogistic form but also first premises that are known to be true, not just supposed or simply generalized on the basis of experience. 4 For the Arabic tradition, Aristotle?s doctrine of intellectual understanding required the involvement of that separate Agent Intellect to provide a solid foundation for human scientific knowledge by way of intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

Judicial review by constitutional courts is often presented as a necessary supplement to democracy. This book questions its effectiveness and legitimacy. Drawing on the republican tradition, Richard Bellamy argues that the democratic mechanisms of open elections between competing parties and decision-making by majority rule offer superior and sufficient methods for upholding rights and the rule of law. The absence of popular accountability renders judicial review a form of arbitrary rule which lacks the incentive structure democracy provides to ensure rulers (...) treat the ruled with equal concern and respect. Rights based judicial review undermines the constitutionality of democracy. Its counter-majoritarian bias promotes privileged against unprivileged minorities, while its legalism and focus on individual cases distort public debate. Rather than constraining democracy with written constitutions and greater judicial oversight, attention should be paid to improving democratic processes through such measures as reformed electoral systems and enhanced parliamentary scrutiny. (shrink)