Papers resulting from a conference at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, Calif., Aug. 1993.

Patients have received experimental pharmaceuticals outside of clinical trials for decades. There are no industry-wide best practices, and many companies that have granted compassionate use, or ‘preapproval’, access to their investigational products have done so without fanfare and without divulging the process or grounds on which decisions were made. The number of compassionate use requests has increased over time. Driving the demand are new treatments for serious unmet medical needs; patient advocacy groups pressing for access to emerging treatments; internet platforms (...) enabling broad awareness of compelling cases or novel drugs and a lack of trust among some that the pharmaceutical industry and/or the FDA have patients’ best interests in mind. High-profile cases in the media have highlighted the gap between patient expectations for compassionate use and company utilisation of fair processes to adjudicate requests. With many pharmaceutical manufacturers, patient groups, healthcare providers and policy analysts unhappy with the inequities of the status quo, fairer and more ethical management of compassionate use requests was needed. This paper reports on a novel collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and an academic medical ethics department that led to the formation of the Compassionate Use Advisory Committee. Comprising medical experts, bioethicists and patient representatives, CompAC established an ethical framework for the allocation of a scarce investigational oncology agent to single patients requesting non-trial access. This is the first account of how the committee was formed and how it built an ethical framework and put it into practice. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explain the significance of Alfred A. Robb’s philosophy of time stemming from his interpretation of relativity theory; and at the same time, to investigate the reasons for the failure of his philosophical contemporaries to appreciate its significance, with special attention to its reception on Russell’s part. The study of Russell’s reaction to Robb exposes shortcomings in Russell’s own philosophy of time, which has been extremely influential through the years. It also (...) highlights the philosophical differences between Minkowski and Robb, the shared idealistic premises of Russell and McTaggart, and the confluences between the views of Russell, Eddington and McTaggart. The paper closes with an account of how Robb’s interpretation has been vindicated by its adoption in modern physics. (shrink)

In preparation for his lectures on Leibniz delivered in Cambridge in Lent Term 1899, Russell started in the summer of 1898 to keep notes on writings by and about Leibniz in a large notebook of the type he commonly used for notetaking at this time. This article prints, with annotation, all the material on Leibniz in that notebook.

Russell’s most important source for his book on Leibniz was C. I. Gerhardt’s seven-volume Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Russell heavily annotated his copy of this important edition of Leibniz’s works. The present paper records all Russell’s marginalia, with the exception of passages marked merely by vertical lines in the margin, and provides explanatory commentary.

Russell's concept of the self as relevant to semantics, distinct from the psychological concept, evolved from a judger with no complexity of relevance to semantics to a mind with much relevant complexity. The evolution transformed his semantic conceptions: He reassessed what constitutes intentionality, giving up his theory of acquaintance as the aboriginal intentional relation, favoring a contextually constituted intentionality in his theory of neutral monism. His anti-idealism extricated itself from an unwarranted antirepresentationalism. Truth went from being an adverb of (...) acts to an adjective of propositions. He formulated a theory of singular knowledge based on a relation of noticing that anticipated Kaplan's "vivid Names." But, although he saw that the judger-adjudged relation could not account for a judgment's unity, he did not discover what did unify it. Stenius and Geach discovered it in that complex state of the judger which underlies the judgment's verb. (shrink)

At the turn of the century Bertrand Russell advocated an absolutist theory of space and time, and scornfully rejected Leibniz’s relational theory in his Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. But by the time of the second edition, he had proposed highly influential relational theories of space and time that had much in common with Leibniz’s own views. Ironically, he never acknowledges this. In trying to get to the bottom of this enigma, I looked further at contemporary texts (...) by Russell, and also those he might have relied on, especially that of Robert Latta. I found that, like Latta’s, Russell’s interpretation of Leibniz was heavily conditioned by his immersion in neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian philosophy prior to 1898, and that the doctrine of internal relations he attributes to Leibniz was more nearly the view of Lotze. (shrink)

This volume is one of the most significant documents on the thought of the giant of the twentieth-century philosophy. Russell's 'Reply to Criticisms, ' supplemented by a 1971 'Addendum, ' displays his unrivalled clarity, perceptiveness, and scalpel-like wit, on topics ranging from mathematical logic to political philosophy, from epistemology to philosophy of history.

Logicism and the Philosophy of Language brings together the core works by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell on logic and language. In their separate efforts to clarify mathematics through the use of logic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Frege and Russell both recognized the need for rigorous and systematic semantic analysis of language. It was their turn to this style of analysis that would establish the philosophy of language as an autonomous area of inquiry. This (...) anthology gathers together these foundational writings, and frames them with an extensive historical introduction. This is a collection for anyone interested in questions about truth, meaning, reference, and logic, and in the application of formal analysis to these concepts. (shrink)

This paper focuses on four passages in the journey of the universe from beginning to end: its origin in the Big Bang, the production of heavy elements in first generation stars, the buzzing symphony of life on earth, and the distant future of the cosmos. As a physicist and a Christian theologian, I will ask how each of these passages casts light on the deepest questions of existence and our relation to God, and in turn how these questions are being (...) explored through ongoing research into the interaction between Christian theology and the natural sciences. (shrink)

A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths. In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P-NEG in light of (...) Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P-NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections. (shrink)

Richard Arthur’s _Natural Deduction_ provides a wide-ranging introduction to logic. In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and (...) Monty Python. (shrink)

It is commonly held that there is no place for the 'now’ in physics, and also that the passing of time is something subjective, having to do with the way reality is experienced but not with the way reality is. Indeed, the majority of modern theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics contend that the passing of time is incompatible with modern physical theory, and excluded in a fundamental description of physical reality. This book provides a forceful rebuttal of such claims. (...) In successive chapters the author explains the historical precedents of the modern opposition to time flow, giving careful expositions of matters relevant to becoming in classical physics, the special and general theories of relativity, and quantum theory, without presupposing prior expertise in these subjects. Analysing the arguments of thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Russell, and Bergson to the proponents of quantum gravity, he contends that the passage of time, understood as a local becoming of events out of those in their past at varying rates, is not only compatible with the theories of modern physics, but implicit in them. (shrink)

PROLOGUE Philosophers in pursuit of first principles often appear, even to fellow philosophers, to be off on a quixotic quest. Bertrand Russell, perhaps the ...

G. E. Moore attended Russell’s lectures on Leibniz in 1899 and kept detailed notes which have been preserved among his papers. The present article prints his notes in their entirety with annotations.

The sustained interdisciplinary debate about neovitalism between two Johns Hopkins University colleagues, philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy and experimental geneticist H. S. Jennings, in the period 1911–1914, was the basis for their theoretical reconceptualization of scientific knowledge as contingent and necessarily incomplete in its account of nature. Their response to Hans Driesch’s neovitalist concept of entelechy, and his challenge to the continuity between biology and the inorganic sciences, resulted in a historically significant articulation of genetics and philosophy. This study traces (...) the debate’s shift of problem-focus away from neovitalism’s threat to the unity of science – “organic autonomy,” as Lovejoy put it – and toward the potential for development of a nonmechanististic, nonrationalist theory of scientific knowledge. The result was a new pragmatist epistemology, based on Lovejoy’s and Jennings’s critiques of the inadequacy of pragmatism’s account of scientific knowledge. The first intellectual move, drawing on naturalism and pragmatism, was based on a reinterpretation of science as organized experience. The second, sparked by Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution, and drawing together elements of Dewey’s and James’s pragmatisms, produced a new account of the contingency and necessary incompleteness of scientific knowledge. Prompted by the neovitalists’ mix of a priori concepts and, in Driesch’s case, and adherence to empiricism, Lovejoy’s and Jennings’s developing pragmatist epistemologies of science explored the interrelation between rationalism and empiricism. (shrink)

This essay is a brief assessment of the lasting impact of Michael Polanyi’s thought on the growing interdisciplinary field of “theology and science.” I note representative examples in the writing of Ian Barbour, Thomas Torrance, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke and John Haught, showing how Polanyi’s “personal knowledge,” as well as some other Polanyian themes, have been recognized and accepted.

Published in 1973, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Awards . Its im- pressive collection of awards, outstanding commercial success, and intrinsic interest make it one of the few truly iconic works of hard science fiction. It depicts the work of astronauts in space, and shows an obvious concern for scientific accuracy and logic. In all, Rendezvous with Rama seems like an unlikely candidate for a utopian novel, and that expression would, (...) indeed, misdescribe it. Yet, it contains strong mythic, satirical, and utopian elements, which give it much of its interest. Alas, many of those elements are discarded in the trilogy of novels that appeared much later as an extended sequel to the novel’s action. (shrink)

In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and Monty Python. A previous edition of this book appeared under the (...) title _Natural Deduction_. This new edition adds clarifications of the notions of explanation, validity and formal validity, a more detailed discussion of derivation strategies, and another rule of inference, Reiteration. (shrink)

Discusses philosophers such as John Burke, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, John Marshall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph, James Fenimore Cooper, Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, George Gissing, Arthur Balfour, W.H. Mallock, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana, Sir Henry Maine, and others.

(Accepted for an edition of Synthese that never saw light of day, and remained on my website. Written 2005.) Noting the status of the Law of Continuity as one of Leibniz’s most cherished axioms, Bertrand Russell charged that his philosophy nevertheless amounted to “a complete denial of the continuous”. Georg Cantor made a similar accusation of inconsistency about Leibniz’s philosophy of the actual infinite. But I argue that neither doctrine is inconsistent when the subtleties of Leibniz’s syncategorematic interpretation are (...) properly taken into account. Leibniz rejects the existence of infinite wholes: an infinite aggregate of actual things forms only a fictitious whole. Analogously, infinitesimals are only fictitious parts, this time of ideal wholes. That is, just as an actual infinity of terms can be understood syncategorematically as more terms than can be assigned a number, without there being any infinite numbers, so too the infinitely small can be given a syncategorematic interpretation by means of the Law of Continuity, without there existing any actual infinitesimals. By examining Leibniz’s justification of infinitesimals in his calculus, I argue that the syncategorematic interpretation is also applicable to series of changes, and thus exonerates Leibniz from Russell’s criticism: on this interpretation all naturally occurring transitions are continuous in that the difference between neighbouring states is smaller than any assignable. This means not that there exists a least difference, but that for any assignable finite difference, there exists a smaller one. Thus there is a true continuous transition, even though the states themselves and all assignable differences between them are actually discrete. (shrink)

During the last hundred years the notion of time flow has been held in low esteem by philosophers of science. Since the metaphor depends heavily on the analogy with motion, criticisms of time flow have either attacked the analogy as poorly founded, or else argued by analogy from a “static” conception of motion. Thus (1) Bertrand Russell argued that just as motion can be conceived as existence at successive places at successive times without commitment to a state of motion (...) at an instant, so duration can be conceived as existence at each of the times at which a thing exists without any commitment to a becoming or flow from one instant to another. I call this the “at-at” objection to time flow. A second objection (2) is that the sufficiency of the “B-theoretic” conception of time for physics makes the concept of time flow otiose. On this rendering the existence of a thing through time is just the “tenseless existence” of the thing at each instant of the duration (or at each spacetime point), without any flow from one instant or point to another. A third objection (3) is that in relativity theory, owing to the relativity of simultaneity, there is no unique invariant ‘now’, or hyperplane of simultaneously occurring events. If time flow is conceived in terms of the flow of such a ‘now’, then the non-existence of a worldwide instant of occurrence appears to be refuted. Lastly, (4) a capstone to these criticisms is the objection famously raised by Jack Smart: if rate of flow of any quantity can only be reckoned with respect to time, then with respect to what does time flow? If it does not even make sense to ask how fast time flows, then surely the metaphor should be abandoned as confused. (shrink)

'Wolterstorff (2009) provides an important explanation to the question: What caused the surprising resurgence in philosophical theology that has occurred over the last 50 years—a resurgence that rivals its zenith in the Middle Ages? This article supplements that with a more fine-grained answer to the question. Recent discoveries in Arthur Norman Prior’s correspondence with J.J.C Smart and Mary Prior, between November 1953 and August 1954 on the possibility of necessary existence, demonstrates the importance of Prior’s discussion of the Barcan (...) formulae in Time and Modality (1957) for the resurgence of analytic theology. The correspondence establishes that Prior’s discovery of tense-logic, and his discussion of quantified tense-logic constituted the perfect opportunity for him to challenge key anti-metaphysical assumptions in analytic philosophy, from which four important consequences can be drawn for the resurgence of philosophical theology. First, Prior’s discussion of time and existence challenged the idea of Russell (1945) and Findlay (1948) on the logical status of a necessary existing being. Second, the discussion challenged the Analytic school’s view of analysis and gave Prior the opportunity to introduce a different perspective on the relationship between logic and metaphysics. Third, it gave Prior a good opportunity to demonstrate that the then-prevailing attitude towards medieval logic was wrong. Fourth, it made it possible for Prior to demonstrate that the highly surprising metaphysical conclusions of quantified tense-logic brings modern logicians into a discussion with the theologically minded medieval logicians. (shrink)