A number of arguments have been put forward by D. Z. Phillips which purportedly establish that the problems that lie at the heart of the theological realism/nonrealism controversy are confused, and that realism itself is incoherent and may be refuted. These arguments are assessed and several different theories of realism are considered. The questions of the nature of religious belief and whether God is an object are addressed. Phillips' arguments are shown to fail to supply a substantial objection to any (...) interesting variety of theological realism. (shrink)

Pleiotropy, in which one mutation causes multiple phenotypes, has traditionally been seen as a deviation from the conventional observation in which one gene affects one phenotype. Epistasis, or gene–gene interaction, has also been treated as an exception to the Mendelian one gene–one phenotype paradigm. This simplified perspective belies the pervasive complexity of biology and hinders progress toward a deeper understanding of biological systems. We assert that epistasis and pleiotropy are not isolated occurrences, but ubiquitous and inherent properties of biomolecular networks. (...) These phenomena should not be treated as exceptions, but rather as fundamental components of genetic analyses. A systems level understanding of epistasis and pleiotropy is, therefore, critical to furthering our understanding of human genetics and its contribution to common human disease. Finally, graph theory offers an intuitive and powerful set of tools with which to study the network bases of these important genetic phenomena. (shrink)

This book draws together a distinguished group of philosophers and theologians to present new thinking on realism and religion.

Epistasis plays an important role in the genetic architecture of common human diseases and can be viewed from two perspectives, biological and statistical, each derived from and leading to different assumptions and research strategies. Biological epistasis is the result of physical interactions among biomolecules within gene regulatory networks and biochemical pathways in an individual such that the effect of a gene on a phenotype is dependent on one or more other genes. In contrast, statistical epistasis is defined as deviation from (...) additivity in a mathematical model summarizing the relationship between multilocus genotypes and phenotypic variation in a population. The goal of this essay is to review definitions and examples of biological and statistical epistasis and to explore the relationship between the two. Specifically, we present and discuss the following two questions in the context of human health and disease. First, when does statistical evidence of epistasis in human populations imply underlying biomolecular interactions in the etiology of disease? Second, when do biomolecular interactions produce patterns of statistical epistasis in human populations?Answers to these two reciprocal questions will provide an important framework for using genetic information to improve our ability to diagnose, prevent and treat common human diseases. We propose that systems biology will provide the necessary information for addressing these questions and that model systems such as bacteria, yeast and digital organisms will be a useful place to start. BioEssays 27:637–646, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Literary and philosophical reflections combine with true-life farm anecdotes to offer commentary on seeking the good life in the modern age.

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several (...) countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization. (shrink)

I investigate the normative status of an unexamined category of emotions: ‘lyrical’ emotions about the transience of things. Lyrical emotions are often accused of sentimentality—a charge that expresses the idea that they are unfitting responses to their objects. However, when we test the merits of that charge using the standard model of emotion evaluation, a surprising problem emerges: it turns out that we cannot make normative distinctions between episodes of such feelings. Instead, it seems that lyrical emotions are always fitting. (...) Although this claim is counterintuitive, the price of denying it is to hold that such emotions are never fitting—an equally strange result. If this is correct, then the commonplace discourse of sentimentality surrounding lyrical emotions lacks normative moorings. (shrink)

Introduction to the Two Volumes xi PART ONE: G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1 CHAPTER 1 Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3 CHAPTER 2 Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12 CHAPTER 3 Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34 CHAPTER 4 The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore’s Ethics 71 Suggested Further Reading 89 PART TWO: BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91 CHAPTER 5 Logical Form, Grammatical Form, (...) and the Theory of Descriptions 93 CHAPTER 6 Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132 CHAPTER 7 Logical Constructions and the External World 165 CHAPTER 8 Russell’s Logical Atomism 182 Suggested Further Reading 194 PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS 195 CHAPTER 9 The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197 CHAPTER 10 Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214 CHAPTER 11 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234 Suggested Further Reading 254 PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255 CHAPTER 12 The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257 CHAPTER 13 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271 CHAPTER 14 Emotivism and Its Critics 300 CHAPTER 15 Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320 Suggested Further Reading 346 PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349 CHAPTER 16 The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351 CHAPTER 17 Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378 Suggested Further Reading 406 Index 409. (shrink)

write to correct errors in Christopher Pincock’s review of my discussion of IRussell. First, according to Pincock, I attempt to “undermine Moore’s views on ethics in Part One, [and] Russell’s conception of analysis in Part Two” by charging them with a pre-Kripkean conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity. Not so. Although I do show that such conflation had negative consequences for the views of several philosophers, Moore and Russell are not among them. Moore’s error—which marred the (...) defence of his thesis that conclusions about goodness are never consequences of purely descriptive premisses—was in tacitly assuming that all necessary/a priori relations among concepts arise from definitions (see my : –). A similar problem occurs in Russell, but only tangentially in connection with one possible route to his problematic principle () in Our Knowledge of the External World, the critique of which was not as part of any attack on his general conception of analysis (. (shrink)

Widescopism, as I call it, holds that names are synonymous with descriptions that are required to take wide scope over modal adverbs. Scott Soames has recently argued that Widescopism is false. He identifies an argument that is valid but which, he claims, a defender of Widescopism must say has true premises and a false conclusion. I argue, first, that a defender of Widescopism need not in fact say that the target arguments conclusion is false. Soames argument that she must (...) confuses, I claim, modal adverbs and modal predicates. I then argue that even if she did reject the conclusion, she could nonetheless hold that the target arguments first premise is ambiguous as between a true reading, on which the argument is invalid, and a false reading, on which the argument is valid. I conclude that Soames argument against Widescopism fails. (shrink)

Volume 1 examines the initial phase of the analytic tradition through the major contributions of three of its four founding giants—Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore. Soames describes and analyzes their work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. He explains how by about 1920 their efforts had made logic, language, and mathematics central to philosophy in an unprecedented way. But although logic, language, and mathematics were now seen as powerful (...) tools to attain traditional ends, they did not yet define philosophy. As volume 1 comes to a close, that was all about to change with the advent of the fourth founding giant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the 1922 English publication of his Tractatus, which ushered in a “linguistic turn” in philosophy that was to last for decades. (shrink)

In “Two Minds, One Patient: Clearing Up Confusion About ‘Ambivalence,’” Moore and colleagues provide a sophisticated and subtle taxonomy of ambivalence. As they explain, clinical ethicists a...

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected (...) by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

Heintz & Scott-Phillips's account of human expression leaves a number of central issues unclear – not least, whether the lack of expression in nonhuman species is attributable to their lack of the relevant metarepresentational abilities, an absence of trust, or a consequence of other factors. In place of their view, we propose a gradualistic account of the origins of human expression.

The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century may not have been Wittgenstein, or Russell, or Quine (and he certainly wasn’t Heidegger), but he may have been a somewhat obscure and conservative Australian named David Stove (1927-94). If he wasn’t the greatest philosopher of the century, Stove was certainly the funniest and most dazzling defender of common sense to be numbered among the ranks of last century’s thinkers, better even—by far—than G. E. Moore and J. L. Austin. The twentieth century (...) was not a period in which philosophers distinguished themselves as essayists, or even as capable of writing interestingly on any subject outside their speciality (or even within it). Stove, though, was an essayist, polemicist, and wit of the highest order, rather like a super-intelligent H. L. Mencken. A heavyweight admirer was once led to write that “Reading Stove is like watching Fred Astaire dance. You don’t wish you were Fred Astaire, you are just glad to have been around to see him in action.”. (shrink)

In this study, Charles M. Sherover argues that there is a single, substantial line of development that can be traced from the work of Leibniz through Kant and Royce to Heidegger. Sherover traces a movement from deep within the roots of German idealism through Royce's insights into American pragmatism to the ethical ramifications of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and then provides an analysis of the neglected ethical and political implications of Heidegger's Being and Time. The essays lead finally to Sherover's own (...) view of the self as a member of a moral and political community. Charles M. Sherover is Professor Emeritus of philosophy, Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Heidegger, Kant and Time and Time, Freedom and the Common Good. Gregory R. Johnson is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pacific School of Religion. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "Sherover combines solid and original scholarship with well-argued conclusions of his own, seeking to lead us in the direction of a higher and fuller mode of authentic being in the world. This collection of essays is an excellent addition to the series, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, edited by Jude P. Dougherty." -- Eugene Thomas Long, Review of Metaphysics. (shrink)

Speaks defends the view that propositions are properties: for example, the proposition that grass is green is the property being such that grass is green. We argue that there is no reason to prefer Speaks's theory to analogous but competing theories that identify propositions with, say, 2-adic relations. This style of argument has recently been deployed by many, including Moore and King, against the view that propositions are n-tuples, and by Caplan and Tillman against King's view that propositions are (...) facts of a special sort. We offer our argument as an objection to the view that propositions are unsaturated relations. (shrink)

It is some 900 years before Christ that we find the most ancient traces of two innovations which were to have incalculable consequences for the future of mankind. The evolution of civilization has, in fact, been marked by a clean break located at the era when man discovered the rudiments of agriculture and animal husbandry and began to produce his own food. Whereas for the three million years during which he had to provide for his needs exclusively through hunting, fishing (...) and gathering, his progress was extremely slow, the adoption of a new way of life based on agriculture and animal husbandry allowed man to transform himself in less than twelve thousand years from deer hunter into astronaut. (shrink)

The Precis explains the aims of my multi-volume work THE ANALYTIC TRADITION IN PHILOSOPHY and summarizes the contents of Volume 1.

I discuss Soames's proposal that Moore could have avoided a central problem in his moral philosophy if he had utilized a method he himself pioneered in epistemology. The problem in Moore's moral philossophy concerns what it is for a moral claim to be self-evident. The method in Moore's epistemology concerns not denying the obvious. In view of the distance between something's being self-evident and its being obvious, it is suggested that Soames's proposal is mistaken.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52  Reviews REPLY TO PINCOCK S S Philosophy / U. of Southern California Los Angeles,  -,  @. write to correct errors in Christopher Pincock’s review of my discussion of IRussell. First, according to Pincock, I attempt to “undermine Moore’s views on ethics in Part One, [and] Russell’s conception of analysis in Part Two” by charging them with a (...) pre-Kripkean conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity. Not so. Although I do show that such conflation had negative consequences for the views of several philosophers, Moore and Russell are not among them. Moore’s error—which marred the defence of his thesis that conclusions about goodness are never consequences of purely descriptive premisses —was in tacitly assuming that all necessary/a priori relations among concepts arise from definitions (see my : –). A similar problem occurs in Russell, but only tangentially in connection with one possible route to his problematic principle () in Our Knowledge of the External World, the critique of which was not a part of any attack on his general conception of analysis (: –). () If the occurrence of sense-data constitutes verification of S, then S must be (at least partly) about sense-data.  Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. : The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton: Princeton U. P., ), pp. –.  Russell, n.s.  (winter –): – (at ).  Except when otherwise indicated, all references to OKEW will be to the revised,  Allen and Unwin edition. Although this was the edition I used in writing my chapter on OKEW, my bibliographical citation was a confused amalgam of different editions. The work was originally published in  by Open Court; there was a second printing in ; and in  Allen and Unwin re-issued it by purchasing extra sheets of the  printing, and binding them. In , Russell revised the work, which Allen and Unwin then published as a revised edition. That edition is identical to the Routledge paperback edition now in print and used by students. (Russell revised the  edition again for Norton’s  edition, which was reset for the Mentor paperback.) Except at one point, which I will identify later, the difference between the  and the  editions doesn’t affect my dispute with Pincock. Thanks to the editor, Kenneth Blackwell, for kindly sharing his extensive knowledge of the bibliographical history with me, and to Ross Scimeca, the head librarian at the incomparable Hoose Philosophy Library at , for furnishing me with copies of the editions I needed to sort this out. _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  Evidently, Pincock has confused the error about definition, which I expose, with a pre-Kripkean conflation of necessity with apriority and analyticity, which is not mentioned in Parts One and Two. This is a blunder. The advances in our understanding of crucial logical, semantic, epistemological, and modal notions which I identify as paramount achievements of the analytic tradition are not limited to those made by Kripke. To suggest otherwise is a distortion. Second, Pincock errs when he objects that in citing () as a source for the view that sense-data statements give the content of material-object statements, I ascribe “some form of latent verificationism” to Russell. If the objection is that Russell was no verificationist—since he didn’t hold that S is meaningful only if S is verifiable—the reply is that I never suggested otherwise. What I said is that () together with () Verification always consists in the occurrence of sense-data constituted a historical precursor to verificationism (: ). Perhaps, then, Pincock objects to my reconstruction of Russell’s argument: since (i) truths of physics and common sense are known by being verified, (ii) it follows from () and () that our knowledge of them is knowledge of sense-data. Perhaps, Pincock thinks that Russell would reject (i). Citing Russell … if there is any knowledge of general truths at all, there must be some knowledge of general truths which is independent of empirical evidence, i.e. does not depend upon the data of sense. (OKEW, pp. –; OKEW, p. ) Pincock concludes that scientific knowledge, for Russell, is justified partly by sense-data, and partly by associated logical principles about relations... (shrink)

Since Voltaire’s caricature of him in Candide, Leibniz has had the unenviable reputation of representing the worst excesses of metaphysical rationalism. Bernard Williams once characterized Leibniz’s view that ours is the best of all possible worlds—defining “best” as maximum variety by the simplest laws—as “crass” and “untruthful.” Drawing on the character of Ivan in The Brothers Karamasov, A. W. Moore recently developed Williams’s view, claiming that Leibniz’s system lacks the resources to support a connection between what for Leibniz “matters (...) in the end, and what matters now, to us.” The author attempts to disarm Moore’s objection using Leibniz’s theory of truth and his principle of sufficient reason. More generally he argues that for Leibniz, when it comes to reconciling individual circumstance with the cosmic order of things, theodicy cannot provide any principled substitute for individual effort of will. This tempers the optimism typically associated with Leibniz’s philosophy. (shrink)

The paper opens by recounting the beginnings of Buddhism in Dawei as preserved in local chronicles and sustained in stupas marking the episodes of the chronicle narrative. The chronicles start with a visit of the Buddha whose arrival triggers a series of events bringing together pre-existing tutelary figures, weiza, a hermit and offspring born of a golden fish, culminating in the establishment of the first Buddhist kingdom circa the eighth to tenth century CE. The enshrinement of sacred hairs gifted by (...) the Buddha also includes patronage by a king of the ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ lineage. Associated with the monks Sona and Uttara from Sri Lanka sent by King Asoka's son Mahinda, ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ literally can refer to the archaeology of Thaton, a walled site in the present day Mon State, or, as is the case here, more widely to the missionary tradition associated with Asoka (Sao Saimong Mengrai 1976). The third story in the establishment of the Buddhist king at Thagara is the longest of the chronicle, the tale of a royal hunter who failed to capture a golden peacock for the queen. The hunter became a hermit living by a pond with a golden fish and as he urinated in the pond, two children were born from the fish. The boy becomes the first Buddhist king of Thagara, 11 km north of Dawei, where artefacts from survey and excavation confirm the chronology of the chronicle, with the closest archaeological parallels found not at the ancient sites of the Mon State but to the first millennium CE Buddhist ‘Pyu’ heritage of Upper Myanmar which is notably absent in the chronicle compilation. (shrink)

Scott Soames’s two volume work Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century1 won the American 2003 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy. It has been said to be ‘a marvellous introduction to analytic philosophy’, to deliver much ‘solid information on this dense and difficult subject’, and it has been predicted to become the standard history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.2 Professor Soames writes clearly and candidly. At the beginning of each volume he delineates his objectives and leitmotivs. He is concerned (...) with the development of analytic philosophy from 1900 to 1975. He aims ‘to explain what the most important analytic philosophers thought and why they thought it’ (I, xi). His method is ‘to provide clear, focused and intense critical examinations of some of the most important and representative works of each major philosopher discussed. ... to provide enough detail to allow one to understand and properly evaluate the main philosophical developments of the period’ (I, xvii). A book with such laudable objectives, which holds out such high promises, and which is predicted to become the standard history of modern analytic philosophy merits careful study and considered judgement. The questions that I shall pose are dictated by the author’s aims and methods. (i) Does Soames provide an illuminating overview of analytic philosophy from 1900 to 1975? (ii) Does he correctly explain what the most important analytic philosophers thought and why they thought it? (iii) Does he select ‘some of the most important and representative works of each major philosopher discussed’? (iv) Does he properly evaluate the main developments of the period? II The broad picture Soames paints is as follows. Analytic philosophy commenced with Moore’s defence of common sense, and was continued by Russell, whose theory of descriptions, conception of analysis, logicism and logical atomism are recounted. He was followed by Wittgenstein, who argued in the Tractatus that philosophical problems arise solely from misunderstandings of language and defended the view that all necessary truths are a priori, analytic, and hence true in virtue of the meanings of words.. (shrink)