The Introduction to the special issue on Scott Walker briefly highlights the different disciplinary engagements of the essays that follow and offers its own analysis of Walker’s last songs from the...

Toward the end of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Philo catalogues the ‘frivolous observances’, ‘rapturous ecstasies’ and ‘bigotted credulity’ of ‘vulgar superstition’, concluding that ‘true religion, I allow, has no such pernicious consequences: But we must treat of religion, as it has com monly been found in the world’. This would be a mild enough sort of caveat were it not nigh on impossible to determine exactly what counts as true religion, and how it figures in Hume's argument. Typically, answers (...) to this puzzle have required identifying the positions of the discussants, and then arguing that one of them represents Hume's views. A catalogue of the options may prove instructive. (shrink)

In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the (...) sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it. He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

Scott Sturgeon presents an original account of mental states and their dynamics. He develops a detailed story of coarse- and fine-grained mental states, a novel perspective on how they fit together, an engaging theory of the rational transitions between them, and a fresh view of how formal methods can advance our understanding in this area. In doing so, he addresses a deep four-way divide in literature on epistemic rationality. Formal epistemology is done in specialized languages--often seeming a lot more (...) like mathematics than Plato--and so can alienate philosophers who are drawn to more traditional work on thought experiments in epistemic rationality. Conversely, informal epistemology appears to be a lot more like Plato than mathematics and, as such, it tends to deter philosophers drawn to formal models of the phenomena. Similarly, the epistemology of coarse-grained states boils down everything to a discussion of rational belief--making the area appear a lot more like foundations of knowledge than anything useful for the theory rational decision, such as decision-making under uncertainty. The Rational Mind unifies work in all of these areas for the first time. (shrink)

What sorts of things are there in the world? Clearly enough, there are concrete, material things; but are there other things too, perhaps nonconcrete or non-material things? Some people believe that there are such things, which are often called abstract ; purported examples of such objects include numbers, properties, possible but non-actual states of affairs, propositions, and sets. Following a long-standing tradition, I shall describe persons who believe that there are abstract objects as ‘platonists’. In this paper, I shall not (...) directly address the plausibility of platonism, as compared with its rivals; instead, I shall confine my attention to one way in which some people have tried to combine platonism and theism. More specifically, I shall concentrate upon the claim that abstract objects depend upon God ontologically ; I shall argue that platonistic theists should reject DEP in favour of the claim that abstract objects exist independently of God . In order to evaluate the relative merits of DEP versus IND, it will be helpful to examine in some detail a particular articulation of DEP. When it comes to recent work on DEP, we can do no better in this regard than to examine the recent work of Thomas V. Morris and Christopher H. Menzel. According Morris and Menzel, there is a sense in which God literally creates such abstracta through engaging in intellective activities. (shrink)

Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

This book analyses the straw man fallacy and its deployment in philosophical reasoning. While commonly invoked in both academic dialogue and public discourse, it has not until now received the attention it deserves as a rhetorical device. Scott Aikin and John Casey propose that straw manning essentially consists in expressing distorted representations of one's critical interlocutor. To this end, the straw man comprises three dialectical forms, and not only the one that is usually suggested: the straw man, the weak (...) man and the hollow man. Moreover, they demonstrate that straw manning is unique among fallacies as it has no particular logical form in itself, because it is an instance of inappropriate meta-argument, or argument about arguments. They discuss the importance of the onlooking audience to the successful deployment of the straw man, reasoning that the existence of an audience complicates the dialectical boundaries of argument. Providing a lively, provocative and thorough analysis of the straw man fallacy, this book will appeal to postgraduates and researchers alike, working in a range of fields including fallacies, rhetoric, argumentation theory and informal logic. (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)

Rights of Women attracted much UK media attention in late 2014 by bringing a judicial review that challenged the reduced provisions for family law legal aid available for victims of domestic violence: R v The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice [2015] EWHC 35. In June 2015, within Rights of Women’s 40th anniversary year, Hannah Camplin interviewed the organisation’s Director Emma Scott about the decision to bring the judicial review, the advantages and challenges of the judicial review (...) process, and the experience of strategic litigation within the context of Rights of Women’s long history of campaigning for women’s rights. What emerged is a portrait of a feminist organisation in 2015, and, in a fast changing political and financial landscape, the dual importance of collaborative working and the need for flexibility in service provision and campaigning tools. (shrink)

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Do we have free will and moral responsibility? Is free will compatible with determinism? Scott Sehon argues that we can make progress on these questions by focusing on an underlying issue: the nature of action explanation. When a person acts, or does something on purpose, we explain the behavior by citing the agent's reasons. The dominant view in philosophy of mind has been to construe such explanations as a species of causal explanation. Sehon proposes and defends a non-causal account (...) of action and agency, according to which reason explanation of human behavior is teleological rather than causal, before applying the teleological account of action to free will and responsibility. He argues that the non-causal compatibilist account works well in practice: it is in accord with our clear intuitions about cases, and it both explains and provides guidance in the cases where our intuitions are murkier. (shrink)

Introduction: working together on individuality / Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard -- The work of biological individuality: concepts and contexts / Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart -- Cells, colonies, and clones: individuality in the volvocine algae / Matthew D. Herron -- Individuality and the control of life cycles / Beckett Sterner -- Discovering the ties that bind: cell-cell communication and the development of cell sociology / Andrew S. Reynolds -- Alternation of generations and individuality, 1851 / (...) Lynn K. Nyhart and Scott Lidgard -- Spencer's evolutionary entanglement: from liminal individuals to implicit collectivities / Snait Gissis -- Biological individuality and enkapsis: from Martin Heidenhain's synthesiology to the völkisch national community / Olivier Rieppel -- Parasitology, zoology, and society in France, ca. 1880-1920 / Michael A. Osborne -- Metabolism, autonomy, and individuality / Hannah Landecker -- Bodily parts in the structure-function dialectic / Ingo Brigandt -- Commentaries: historical, biological, and philosophical perspectives -- Distrust that particular intuition: resilient essentialisms and empirical challenges in the history of biological individuality / James Elwick -- Biological individuality: a relational reading / Scott F. Gilbert -- Philosophical dimensions of individuality / Alan C. Love and Ingo Brigandt. (shrink)

An in-depth history of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, from a leading philosopher of language This is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philosopher of language and historian of analytic philosophy, provides the fullest and most detailed account of the analytic tradition yet published, one that is unmatched in its chronological range, topics covered, (...) and depth of treatment. Focusing on the major milestones and distinguishing them from detours, Soames gives a seminal account of where the analytic tradition has been and where it appears to be heading. Volume 2 provides an intensive account of the new vision in analytical philosophy initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its assimilation by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, and the subsequent flowering of logical empiricism. With this “linguistic turn,” philosophical analysis became philosophy itself, and the discipline’s stated aim was transformed from advancing philosophical theories to formalizing, systematizing, and unifying science. In addition to exploring the successes and failures of philosophers who pursued this vision, the book describes how the philosophically minded logicians Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing discovered the scope and limits of logic and developed the mathematical theory of computation that ushered in the digital era. The book’s account of this pivotal period closes with a searching examination of the struggle to preserve ethical normativity in a scientific age. (shrink)

This study compares college students with other adults in terms of the Muncy–Vitell (1992) consumer ethics scale. Further, the study updates the Muncy–Vitell consumer ethics scale with modifications that include rewording and the addition of new items. These new items can be grouped into three distinct categories – (1) downloading/buying counterfeit goods, (2) recycling/environmental awareness and (3) doing the right thing/doing good. The study also compares these two groups in terms of their attitude toward business. Results show that there is (...) indeed a significant difference between these two groups in terms of ethical perceptions, but not in terms of the “recycling” items and the “doing good” items. There was also little difference between the groups in terms of their attitude toward business indicating that attitude toward business does not explain their different ethical perspectives. (shrink)

In this collection of recent and unpublished essays, leading analytic philosopher Scott Soames traces milestones in his field from its beginnings in Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through its subsequent growth in the United States, up to its present as the world's most vigorous philosophical tradition. The central essay chronicles how analytic philosophy developed in the United States out of American pragmatism, the impact of European visitors and immigrants, the midcentury transformation of the (...) Harvard philosophy department, and the rapid spread of the analytic approach that followed. Another essay explains the methodology guiding analytic philosophy, from the logicism of Frege and Russell through Wittgenstein's linguistic turn and Carnap's vision of replacing metaphysics with philosophy of science. Further essays review advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics that laid the foundation for a rigorous, scientific study of language, meaning, and information. Other essays discuss W.V.O. Quine, David K. Lewis, Saul Kripke, the Frege-Russell analysis of quantification, Russell's attempt to eliminate sets with his "no class theory," and the Quine-Carnap dispute over meaning and ontology. The collection then turns to topics at the frontier of philosophy of language. The final essays, combining philosophy of language and law, advance a sophisticated originalist theory of interpretation and apply it to U.S. constitutional rulings about due process. (shrink)

An examination of the history and arguments behind W.K. Clifford and William James's landmark essays and subsequent impact on the importance of knowledge-based evidence.

This volume offers a critical appreciation of the work of 16 leading curriculum theorists through critical expositions of their writings. Written by a leading name in Curriculum Studies, the book includes a balance of established curriculum thinkers and contemporary curriculum analysts from education as well as philosophy, sociology and psychology. With theorists from the UK, the US and Europe, there is also a spread of political perspectives from radical conservatism through liberalism to socialism and libertarianism. Theorists included are: John Dewey, (...) Lev Vygotsky, Ralph Tyler, Joseph Schwab, Jerome Bruner, Maxine Greene, Basil Bernstein, Micheal Foucault, Paul Hirst, Donald Schon, Lawrence Stenhouse, Elliott Eisner, John White, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux and Robin Usher. This book is ideal for students looking for an introduction to some of the key educational thinkers of our time. It can also be used as a companion volume to the Routledge four-volume set on Curriculum Theory , 2003, which is also edited by David Scott. (shrink)

How philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in Philosophical investigation is the root of all human knowledge. Developing new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing fundamental questions, philosophy has progressed—and driven human progress—for more than two millennia. In short, we live in a world philosophy made. In this concise history of philosophy's world-shaping impact, Scott Soames demonstrates that the modern world—including its science, technology, and politics—simply would not be possible without the accomplishments of philosophy. Firmly rebutting (...) the misconception of philosophy as ivory-tower thinking, Soames traces its essential contributions to fields as diverse as law and logic, psychology and economics, relativity and rational decision theory. Beginning with the giants of ancient Greek philosophy, The World Philosophy Made chronicles the achievements of the great thinkers, from the medieval and early modern eras to the present. It explores how philosophy has shaped our language, science, mathematics, religion, culture, morality, education, and politics, as well as our understanding of ourselves. Philosophy's idea of rational inquiry as the key to theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom has transformed the world in which we live. From the laws that govern society to the digital technology that permeates modern life, philosophy has opened up new possibilities and set us on more productive paths. The World Philosophy Made explains and illuminates as never before the inexhaustible richness of philosophy and its influence on our individual and collective lives. (shrink)

Dominic Scott compares the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics from a methodological perspective. He argues that Plato and Aristotle distinguish similar levels of argument in the defence of justice, and that they both follow the same approach: Plato because he thinks it will suffice, Aristotle because he thinks there is no need to go beyond it.

There has been a flood of scholarship over the years on whether there is a “right to privacy” in the Constitution of the United States. Griswold v. Connecticut was, of course, the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to this river of commentary. A subject search for “privacy, right of” in the College of William and Mary's on-line library catalog located 360 book titles. A perusal of the leading law review bibliographic indices turned up still more. Whether the Constitution (...) contains some sort of “right to be let alone” is plainly one of the central questions of contemporary constitutional discourse. (shrink)

"F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics is an exploration of an important problem that has largely been ignored: the problem of policymaker ignorance, and the limits of political epistemology. Scott Scheall explores Hayek's attitude to the philosophy of science and political philosophy, arguing that Hayek defended a philosophy of science that implied certain potential dangers of politicized science, and that his political philosophy established the potential dangers of misapplying scientific methods and results to matters of public policy. (...) The book offers an explanation for why policymaking often fails and why constituents, whatever their political affiliations, are so often disappointed with political leaders. In this primarily philosophical examination of his work, Hayek's ideas are not merely discussed, analysed, and contextualized, but extended; the book both draws and defends previously unrecognized implications from the Hayekian canon. The book also explores the historical context within which these ideas flourished. The book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of the works of F.A. Hayek, policymakers, and to those of all political, philosophical, and social-scientific persuasions"--. (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

In _Character Compass_, Scott Seider offers portraits of three high-performing urban schools in Boston, Massachusetts that have made character development central to their mission of supporting student success, yet define character in three very different ways. One school focuses on students’ moral character development, another emphasizes civic character development, and the third prioritizes performance character development. Drawing on surveys, interviews, field notes, and student achievement data, _Character Compass _highlights the unique effects of these distinct approaches to character development as (...) well as the implications for parents, educators, and policymakers committed to fostering powerful school culture in their own school communities. (shrink)

This book confronts Plato's many enigmas in his philosophical text Meno.

In the last decade, the familiar problem of the regress of reasons has returned to prominent consideration in epistemology. And with the return of the problem, evaluation of the options available for its solution is begun anew. Reason’s regress problem, roughly put, is that if one has good reasons to believe something, one must have good reason to hold those reasons are good. And for those reasons, one must have further reasons to hold they are good, and so a regress (...) of reasons looms. In this new study, Aikin presents a full case for infinitism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. Infinitism is the view that one must have a non-terminating chain of reasons in order to be justified. The most defensible form of infinitism, he argues, is that of a mixed theory – that is, epistemic infinitism must be consistent with and integrate other solutions to the regress problem. (shrink)

One of the most innovative and brilliant philosophers of his generation, but largely neglected until he was brought to public attention by Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon presents a challenge to nearly every category and method of traditional philosophy. Psychic and Collective Individuation is undoubtedly Simondon's most important work and its influence, clearly felt in Stiegler and DeLanda, has continued to grow. David Scott provides the first full introduction to this work, which will inspire as well as instruct philosophers working (...) in Continental thought, philosophy of science, social theory and political philosophy. (shrink)

While Immanuel Kant is an epochal figure in a variety of fields, he has not figured prominently in the study of rhetoric and communication. This book represents the most detailed examination available into Kant's uneasy but often misunderstood relationship with rhetoric. By explicating Kant's complex understanding of rhetoric, this book advances the thesis that communicative practices play an important role in Kant's account of how we become better humans and how we create morally cultivating communities.

Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often too, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on the complexities of development, and in Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution Jason Scott Robert explores the nature of development against current trends in (...) biological theory and practice and looks at the interrelations between development and evolution, an area of resurgent biological interest. Clearly written, this book should be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

[David Charles] Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being with one activity, sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics, intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life available for (...) humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation. /// [Dominic Scott] In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods. (shrink)

In ‘Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence’ E. J. Lowe defends “serious essentialism”. Serious essentialism is the position that everything has an essence, essences are not themselves things, and essences are the ground for metaphysical necessity and possibility. Lowe's defence of serious essentialism is both metaphysical and epistemological. In what follows I use Lowe's discussion as a point of departure for, first, adding some considerations for the plausibility of essentialism and, second, some work on modal epistemology.

_An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions._.