Alan Bailey offers a clear exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism.

Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 189-205, December 2021.

ABSTRACT Both Constant and Spencer are moralists who want to encourage individual human perfection. But for Constant, politics has moral value even in a laissez-faire state, whereas for Spencer political participation has no moral value in itself. For Constant, from a moral perspective the historical change from an ancient to a modern conception of liberty is not absolute, and he wishes to retain, in a subordinate role, certain aspects of ancient liberty in modern societies. For Spencer, the historical evolution from (...) militant to industrial society involves the complete separation of politics from any positive moral good. In an industrial society, altruism has no connection with politics, and attempt to bring altruism into politics are not only doomed to failure but iare unjust and therefore immoral. Spencer is a leading figure in the separation of classical liberal thought from perfectionist morality that flourishes in the twentieth century. The separation between classical and modern liberalism that takes place in the fin de siècle is not just a matter of economics – as is shown by the fact that both Spencer and Constant are ardent apostles of laissez-faire – it is above all a question of different attitudes to morality. (shrink)

The idea that moral virtues form some sort of “unity” has received considerable attention from virtue theorists. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of unity among intellectual virtues has been wrongly overlooked. My approach has two main components. First, I work to distinguish the variety of different views that are available under the description of a unity thesis. I suggest that these views can be categorised depending on whether they are versions of standard unity or of strong unity. (...) Standard unity claims that the possession of one virtue implies possession of all the others. Strong unity claims that the virtues are, in some sense, all the same thing. By exploring what these different versions of unity would look like when applied to intellectual virtues, I aim to provide a menu of options for future work in virtue epistemology. I then develop and defend one of these options in more detail, arguing that the initially less plausible strong unity has merit when applied to the intellectual sphere. In these two ways, I aim to show that the possibility of unity among the intellectual virtues is deserving of serious consideration. (shrink)

We present asecond-personalaccount of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to thefirst-personalapproach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the relevance (...) of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment. (shrink)

This paper assumes that success on false-belief tasks requires a kind of folk psychological know-how, i.e. gradable knowledge how to perform skilful social cognitive acts. Following Ryle, it argues the folk psychological know-how required for success on a false-belief task cannot be reduced to conceptual knowledge as this would lead to an infinite regress. Within the skilled performance literature, Intellectualists have attempted to solve Ryle’s regress by appealing to automatic mechanisms similar in kind to some Theory-of-Mind explanations of folk psychology. (...) Exploring this similarity, the paper examines the epistemic commitments of two recent pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts of cross-cultural false-belief task data. By drawing on Fridland’s argument against Intellectualist explanations of know-how, it is argued that neither of these pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts can adequately explain gradable folk psychological know-how and escape Ryle’s infinite regress objection if these accounts are indeed committed to Intellectualism. The paper ends by supplementing Fenici’s account with the enactive framework to both bolster Fenici’s explanation of false-belief task know-how and avoid Ryle’s regress objection. (shrink)

Originally published in 1988, this book discusses if moral knowledge exists, and if so, if it is similar to other forms of knowledge. This book approaches the issues from both historical and contemporary perspectives and in order to determine whether there is a real property of rightness, looks to the ethical theories of Hobbes, Hume and Kant. This historical analysis leads to a systematic comparison of three theories of the nature of ethics: realism, emotivism and coherentism. The nature of coherence (...) is explained using legal reasoning as a model. Moral reasoning is compared and contrasted with reasoning both in science and law, showing how ethics differs from science and empirical disciplines. (shrink)

Some philosophical accounts imply that masturbation is inferior sexual activity. Against this, Soble argues that masturbation is central. Relying on the physical-anatomical indistinguishability of sexual act-types, he derives a Zeno-style paradox about sexual activity: either all sexual activity (even ordinary coitus) is masturbatory or none of it is (not even solitary masturbation). Soble argues for the first horn of the dilemma, thus ensuring that solitary masturbation is a member of the continuum of sexual activities. Going beyond anatomy, Soble also argues (...) that the central psychological features of paired sexual activity are normally exhibited also by solitary masturbation, which further establishes that solitary masturbation is on the continuum of sexual activity. Altogether, Soble's arguments support a "unary" model of sexuality, compelling us to take seriously the genuine sexual nature of solitary masturbation, a result that is important for the philosophy of sex, the scientific study of sexuality, and the politics of human sexuality. (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

Originally published in 1968 The Founders of Psychical Research is centred upon prominent members in the Society for Psychical Research - during its early years. It passes over important aspects of the S.P.R.'s story and deals at some length with outside matters.

Mammalian cells frequently depend on homologous recombination (HR) to repair DNA damage accurately and to help rescue stalled or collapsed replication forks. The essence of HR is an exchange of nucleotides between identical or nearly identical sequences. Although HR fulfills important biological roles, recombination between inappropriate sequence partners can lead to translocations or other deleterious rearrangements and such events must be avoided. For example, the recombination machinery must follow stringent rules to preclude recombination between the many repetitive elements in a (...) mammalian genome that share significant but imperfect homology. This paper takes a conceptual approach in addressing the homology requirements for recombination in mammalian genomes as well as the general strategy used by cells to reject recombination between similar but imperfectly matched sequences. A mechanism of heteroduplex rejection that involves the unwinding of recombination intermediates that may form between mismatched sequences is discussed. BioEssays 30:1163–1171, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ regards both Hobbes and Constant as supporting the negative version. Both took a favourable view of the freedom to live as one pleases. But this shared preference arose from radically different overall philosophies. Hobbes’s support for freedom as ‘the silence of the laws’ reflected his view of happiness as preference-satisfaction. Constant’s support for freedom as a sphere of absolute rights was supplemented by support for active citizenship and connected with belief in ‘perfectibility’ that (...) was itself linked to religion. These theories involve altogether different understandings of the image of an ‘area’ preserved from interference. Berlin takes over from Constant an appeal to human nature without the idea of progress that had supported it. (shrink)

We propose that the ontic understanding of quantum mechanics can be extended to a fully realistic theory that describes the evolution of the wavefunction at all times, including during a measurement. In such an approach the wave equation should reduce to the standard wave equation when there is no measurement, and describe state reduction when the system is measured. The general wave equation must be nonlinear and nonlocal, and we require it to be time-symmetric; consequently, this approach is not a (...) new interpretation but a new theory. The wave equation is an integrodifferential equation (IDE). The time symmetry requirement leads to a retrocausal approach, in which the wave equation is solved subject to initial and final conditions to determine history at intermediate times. We propose that different outcomes from (apparently) identically prepared experiments may result from uncontrolled parameters; both the nonlocality and the retrocausality of the theory imply that Bell’s Theorem cannot rule out such “hidden variables.” Beginning with Hamilton’s principle, we demonstrate the construction of such a theory by replacing the action with a functional designed to give rise to a nonlinear, nonlocal IDE as the wave equation. This IDE reduces to the standard wave equation (a differential equation) in the absence of a measurement, but exhibits state reduction to a single eigenvalue when the system interacts with another system with the properties of a measurement apparatus. We demonstrate several desirable features of this theory; for other properties we indicate their plausibility and possible avenues to a proof. (shrink)

Relying on a sexual encounter that he had once while in graduate school, Soble explores in this essay two important and under-explored ideas in sexual ethics. The first is whether there are sexual duties to others (including, even especially, to strangers), and what the source of such duties might be. He provides good reasons, rooted in both religious and secular thought, for believing that such duties exist. The second is whether there are supererogatory sexual actions—sexual actions that go beyond the (...) demands of duty—and what conditions an act needs to satisfy in order to be supererogatory. Soble uses the sexual encounter that opens the essay to test our intuitions about these two ideas and his own arguments, and to underscore the complications involved in attempting to find secure answers as to whether some sexual acts are dutiful, done from duty, or supererogatory. (This is a revised version of the essay in the 7th edition of The Philosophy of Sex.). (shrink)

In this essay, Soble addresses the various attempts in the philosophical literature to solve the "Kantian sex problem"—people's mere instrumental use of each other (and allowing themselves to be used as such by others) during sexual activity and the diminishing of one's sexual rationality and autonomy when experiencing sexual desire. The problem won't be solved by denying Kant's account of sexuality or the validity of his Formula of Humanity, but by fashioning a sexual ethics consistent with Kant's views. Soble critically (...) discusses and rejects various proposed solutions to this problem, from behavioral and psychological internalist solutions to minimalist and extended externalist solutions. Soble also scrutinizes the writings of Kant to make sense of the passages in which Kant himself tries to solve the problem that he created. Soble concludes that Kant's restriction of sex to marriage derives as much, if not more, from the duty to protect one's own personhood from the noxious objectifying nature of sexual desire, as from the duty to protect the personhood of those whom one sexual desires and interacts with. (This is a revised version of the essay from previous editions of the book.). (shrink)

In this paper I present a case study of mathematical explanation in science that is new to the philosophical literature, and that arises in the context of estimating the energetic costs of running in bipedal animals. I refer to this as the Bipedal Gait Costs explanation. I argue that it is important for examples of applied mathematics to be driven not just by philosophical and mathematical concerns but also by scientific concerns. After a detailed presentation of the BGC case study, (...) I discuss ways in which it is different from standard examples of MES. One distinctive aspect of BGC is that substantive mathematics occurs at two different levels. I argue for a distinction to be drawn between the mathematical modeling that occurs at one level, which is non-explanatory, and the mathematical theorem which is applied to results gleaned from these models, which is explanatory. I conclude by drawing some connections with broader indispensability-based arguments for platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Well-stated modern political or democratic theory is rights-based. Meaningful democracy rests as a precondition on the equal rights of citizens. This idea stems from Rousseau’s distinction between a general will*one which is impersonal and tends toward equality, that is, the equal basic rights of citizens*and a transitory will of all. For instance, absent equal basic rights, one might imagine a possible world in which what I have called a self-undermining series of wills of all, or the results of socalled majority (...) rule, disenfranchises the population. In the USA, one might think, contrahistorically, of a regime in which the women, as a majority, disenfranchise the men, the Black, Latin, and Asian women disenfranchise the White women, and by a series of reductions by further ‘majorities,’ three people still have the suffrage, two of whom disenfranchise one. Based on Rousseau, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice thus emphasizes the priority of the equal liberty principle over an economic difference principle.1 The difference principle permits those inequalities which also benefit the least advantaged. But the priority of the equal liberty principle rules out any inequality, otherwise beneficial to the least advantaged, which enables the rich to control the government. This priority makes equal basic rights the inescapable precondition for any decent majority rule or distribution of income. Note that in principle, such a regime may be international*even a democracy of demoi in James Bohman’s phrase - rather than national. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 55-70. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4854. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to do two things. The first is to discuss a method of doing philosophy, the method of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, as it is commonly and misleadingly called. (Its other common title: ‘Oxford Philosophy’ is even more misleading, since the roots of the method lie in Cambridge, and many of the most flourishing branches are in the United States rather than England.)If it needs a name, perhaps the best is—adapting Popper to our purpose—‘piecemeal philosophical engineering’. Such (...) a title would emphasise the attention to detail and the caution about conclusions that characterise the best of such work. The second aim of this paper is to apply the method thus discussed and defended to three questions connected with the concept of freedom. These problems arise out of three recent discussions of freedom—Thought and Action and Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom by Professor Hampshire, and Two Concepts of Liberty by Professor Berlin. (shrink)

Hal Draper was born in Brooklyn in 1914, to East European Jewish immigrant parents. In 1932 he became active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the Socialist Party youth section, the Young People's Socialist League. A leader of the Student Strikes Against War, he became an associate editor of Socialist Appeal in 1934. In 1937, the socialist youth, led by Draper and Ernest Erber, voted to support the Fourth International after Trotsky's followers entered the Socialist Party. Draper opposed (...) the subsequent split in the SP, which Trotsky and James P. Cannon deliberately provoked, but left with the Trotskyists and became the national secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party's youth group, a member of its first National Executive, and the secretary of the party's National Education Department. Irving Howe, a YPSL comrade, later recalled his admiration. Draper was, ‘genuinely learned in Marxism, with a mind that marched from one theorem to another as if God were clearing his way’, a youth leader who ‘would speak for us with a razored lucidity’ in debate with the Stalinists. Draper was part of the minority when the SWP split in 1940 over two issues, the ‘Russian question’ and the ‘bureaucratic conservatism’ of James P. Cannon's internal party regime. Draper became a founder member of the Workers’ Party, led by Max Shachtman, which developed an analysis of the Soviet Union as neither a ‘workers’ state’ nor state capitalist but a new form of exploiting class society, bureaucratic collectivism. The WP refused to ‘defend the Soviet Union’ and developed a distinctive democratic revolutionary Marxism, summed up by the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism!’. And, in reaction to Cannon's monolithic conception of the party, the WP developed a highly democratic internal political culture marked by ‘an atmosphere of genuine tolerance’ unceasing internal debate carried in the public press, and untrammelled rights for minorities. (shrink)

In his Introduction to Logical Theory, Strawson argues that Aristotelian logic can be given a successful interpretation into ordinary English, but not into the symbolism of Principia Mathematica, on the grounds that Aristotelian logic and ordinary English share something absent in PM, namely, the doctrine of presupposition. It is argued that Strawson is mistaken. PM does justice to the logical rules of Aristotelian logic and also has a fully articulated doctrine of presupposition.

Concerned to remedy the ‘state of severe disarray’ that immobilises the left in advanced capitalist countries, Howard Chodos and Colin Hay set out to inquire into ‘the organisational conditions that are necessary to the radical transformation of capitalism'. This disarray is expressed in the drift of social-democratic parties in the wake of the neoliberal mainstream, the inability of a fragmented and disappearing radical Left to orient either itself or spontaneous resistance to the global neoliberal agenda, and the failure of the (...) ‘new’ social movements as a vehicle of ‘broader social transformation'. Against this background of fragmentation, dispersal and division, the authors spell out their central contention: the idea that ‘there is a distinctively creative component to politics', as the claim that organisation in general and the political party in particular provide the necessary context for the actualisation of ‘belief-dependent emergent capacities'. Fulfilling a ‘multi-dimensional mediating function', the party provides ‘an indispensable context in which we can define who we are and what we stand for', a locus for the definition of commonalities, and hence it constitutes a basis for strategic action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Melon and the Dictionary:Reflections on Descartes's DreamsAlan Gabbey and Robert E. HallThe interpretation of dreams is rarely answerable to either evidential or settled theoretical control. When the phantasms of the dreaming mind seem unaccountable, as they often do, they seem to belong to a mental world beyond the reach of historical, philosophical, or scientific analysis, a world for which the rules of methodological engagement seem inappropriate, rather than (...) merely impossible to observe. So in advance we ask the reader's indulgence if we appear somewhat to ignore the historian's normal duty to transmute favored speculations into well-argued conclusions based on solid evidence. We do have evidence to present, however, and indeed one or two conclusions that seem to us compelling. But if skeptics question their value, at least they will do so without envy, since they will not want to chase after our speculations on the Dreams—unless with the intention of chasing them and us out of the Cartesian arena altogether.Most of that arena is set aside for exegetical tussles with the respectable philosophizing of the Meditations, the Discourse on Method, and The Principles of Philosophy or The Passions of the Soul. But for some of the liveliest Cartesian games, you must move to that part of the arena where biographers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and historians have fun with the "petit registre en parchemin," as the Stockholm Inventory describes it.1 This notebook contained [End Page 651] the twelve-page Olympica, in which Descartes recounted the three Dreams, announced his discovery of the foundations of "a wonderful science," and in the margin of the manuscript noted a year later his emerging understanding of "the foundation of a wonderful discovery." Later we'll rerun a few of the Olympian performances of previous interpreters, as preliminaries to a couple of our own interpretative games.First let us recall what happened on Saint Martin's Eve, the night of 10 November 1619, in Descartes's twenty-fourth year.2 In the days preceding that night Descartes's concern with the search for truth gave him much mental torment which the society of his friends could not dissipate. This tired him so much that his brain became inflamed: "he fell into a kind of enthusiasm, which left him in such a state that his depressed spirit was ready to receive dreams and visions." Retiring to bed "full of enthusiasm" from "having found that day the foundations of a wonderful science," Descartes (Baillet tells us) had three dreams "which he imagined could have come only from on high." In Dream I, while he was walking through the streets, his imagination was haunted by terrifying phantoms (fantômes). A severe disabling weakness in his right side forced him to bend over to his left so that he could continue toward his destination. Ashamed of walking in that way, he tried to straighten up, but a strong whirlwind spun him round three or four times on his left foot. Still more terrifying was the thought that he was falling at every step because of the difficulty in dragging himself through the streets.Then seeing a college with open gates, he entered, seeking relief from his afflictions, and intending to pray in the college chapel. But he had passed someone he knew without hailing him. He tried to return to greet him and was hurled back by the wind blowing against the chapel. At the same time he saw in the middle of the college courtyard another person who greeted him civilly by name, and told him that if he cared to look for Monsieur N., "he had something to give him." "M. Descartes imagined that it was a melon that someone had brought from some foreign country." But even more surprising was the fact that those who gathered round him to talk were standing straight and firm on their feet, whereas he was still bent over and staggering about, even though the wind which had threatened several times to blow him over had now greatly abated. At this point he awoke to feel a pain that made him fear that all this was the [End Page 652] work of... (shrink)

Ethical discourse is typically inconclusive, and with good reason. But this inconclusiveness is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to helping publicly accountable policy-makers in the health care system provide an ethical justification for their decisions. It is suggested that instead of ending with platitudinous statements such as that a balance has to be struck between the rival ethical considerations, empirical research should be undertaken to elicit the quantitative trade-offs that the affected general public would be prepared to accept when (...) striking this balance. In the expected absence of any consensus, it is further suggested that the views of the median person be taken as the best approximation to the group view. Finally it is argued that, far from this quantitative approach lacking humanity by treating individuals as “mere statistics”, it shows greater compassion than the proponents of those approaches whose fellow feeling can only be stirred by information pertaining to identified individuals. (shrink)

A new consideration of these changes is a practical and cultural necessity. In Conditions of Music, Alan Durant extends Deryck Cooke's Language of Music, placing the insights of Cooke into a much wider sociological and historical framework.