Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but the proportion of papers (...) using probabilistic methods was approximately three times higher in the late 2010s than it was in the late 2000s. Further analyses explored this change by looking more closely at specific methods, specific levels of technical engagement, and specific subdisciplines within philosophy. These analyses indicate that the increasing proportion of papers using probabilistic methods was pervasive, not confined to particular probabilistic methods, levels of sophistication, or subdisciplines. (shrink)

Physical activities are generally accepted as promoting important psychological benefits. However, studies examining martial arts as a form of physical activity and mental health have exhibited many methodological limitations in the past. Additionally, recent philosophical discussion has debated whether martial arts training promotes psychological wellbeing or illness. Self-efficacy has an important relationship with mental health and may be an important mechanism underpinning the potential of martial arts training to promote mental health. This study examined the effect of martial arts training (...) on the psychological construct of self-efficacy. A total of 283 secondary school students with a mean age of 12.76 (SD = 0.68) years were recruited to complete a time-limited (10-session) martial arts intervention, which was examined using a randomised controlled trial. Univariate ANOVAs found that the intervention improved the experimental group’s self-efficacy compared to the control group, which was sustained at follow-up. Regression analysis indicated that socio-educational status moderated this outcome. These findings support the martial arts-based intervention’s potential to improve self-efficacy and promote wellbeing through physical activity. Martial arts training may be an efficacious psychosocial treatment that can be used as a complementary approach to promote mental health. (shrink)

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics (...) of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse. (shrink)

I show how an almost exclusive focus on the simplest case - the case of a single particle - along with the commonplace conception of the single-particle wave function as a scalar field on spacetime contributed to the perception, first brought to light by I. Bloch, that there existed a contradiction between quantum theory with instantaneous state collapses and special relativity. The incompatibility is merely apparent since treating wave-function values as hypersurface dependent avoids the contradiction. After clarifying confusions which fueled (...) the perception of a paradox, I elaborate on an analysis of the wave function due to Wayne Myrvold to show that nothing special, or ad hoc, is required in treating wave-function values, even in the single-particle case, as hypersurface-dependent; rather, the hypersurface dependence of these values is the natural development of nonlocal entanglement in the context of the relativity of simultaneity. Properly understood, what Bloch's paradox reveals is that the combination of nonlocal entanglement together with a hypersurface-dependent process of state collapse conflicts with the thesis of spatiotemporal separability and, in particular, with the idea that chances are local matters of fact. (shrink)

Although parental choice of secondary schools is a subject of considerable public and academic interest, there has been relatively little research on the extent to which choice is undermining the traditional role of geographically defined school catchments. This paper, therefore, uses data provided by a case-study local education authority to examine the nature and scale of pupil flows across catchment boundaries. It does so by adopting a form of Geographic Information System as the principal research tool. The results show over (...) a third of Year 7 pupils moving to schools other than their catchment comprehensive. Interestingly, the inner-city catchments were the most permeable: by contrast, children in middle class and rural areas were the least likely to enter a school outside their local area. (shrink)

What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed? Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde (...) alongside classic works of philosophy by Nietzsche and Aristotle. By considering great texts from literature and philosophy, Barry examines whether evil is merely a fiction. _The Fiction of Evil_ explores how the study of literature can contribute to the study of metaphysics and ethics and it is essential reading for those studying the concept of evil or philosophy of literature at undergraduate level. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1950, the Metaphysical Society of America has remained a pluralistic community dedicated to rigorous philosophical inquiry into the most basic metaphysical questions. At each year’s conference, the presidential address offers original insights into metaphysical questions. Both the insights and the questions are as perennial as they are relevant to contemporary philosophers. This volume collects eighteen of the finest representatives from those presidential addresses, including contributions from George Allan, Richard Bernstein, Norris Clarke, Vincent Colapietro, Frederick Ferré, (...) Jorge J. E. Gracia, Joseph Grange, Marjorie Grene, George Klubertanz, Ivor Leclerc, Ralph McInerny, Ernan McMullin, Joseph Owens, John Herman Randall, Jr., Nicholas Rescher, Stanley Rosen, John E. Smith, and Robert Sokolowski. Also included are Paul Weiss’s inaugural address to the Society, an introduction chronicling the history of the Society, and an original Foreword by William Desmond and Epilogue by Robert Neville. (shrink)

This book is a manifesto for what John Alcock calls “orthodox sociobiology,” the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior following the premise that behaviors and their mechanisms evolve under the primary influence of natural selection acting on individual differences in genetic success. Sociobiology focuses narrowly on finding adaptive explanations for social behaviors while attempting a grand synthesis of biological and social sciences. Alcock's book is largely defensive, aimed at refuting criticisms and a perception that, twenty‐five years (...) after its proclamation, sociobiology is moribund. Alcock's defense relies not on an extensive review of relevant literature but on the persuasiveness of arguments illustrated with favored examples. He emphasizes sociobiology of human cultures and prescribes practical applications for restructuring societal institutions.The major argument against orthodox sociobiology is summarized in Edward O. Wilson's book Consilience : “We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. … Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondingly precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species” . This argument denies that human social behaviors are best understood as biologically evolved adaptations and places them outside the domain of the genetical theory of natural selection.Alcock's major claim for sociobiology's triumph is its use of comparative methodology to identify ultimate causes of social behaviors. Over the past twenty‐five years, evolutionary biologists have developed rigorous systematic methodologies for making comparative inferences in evolutionary research. Such explicitly phylogenetic approaches provide more powerful tests of ultimate causality in evolution than the comparative methods available when sociobiology was first proposed. Although the success of sociobiology would seem to lie in its ability to use the strongest comparative methods to test its major claims, Alcock's examples rely entirely on archaic methodology that no contemporary evolutionist should accept.The hypothesis of adaptation predicts that a character enhances its possessor's ability to utilize resources for survival or reproduction relative to alternatives against which it has been tested evolutionarily. Phylogenetic analysis of species possessing the character and their closest relatives identifies the comparisons appropriate for testing this hypothesis. Hypothetical adaptations are mapped onto phylogenies to identify their origins, antecedent conditions, associated characters, environmental contexts, and selective regimes. Alcock forfeits the power of evolutionary study by arguing that sociobiologists “can only use data from unrelated species known to experience similar selection pressures” in the “independent convergence test” of adaptation. No animal species are completely unrelated, nor are their behaviors adaptive in an absolute sense. Even comparisons of analogous characters across species must consider phylogeny because homologous genes and developmental programs can be utilized for analogous roles in different species. Without a firm grounding in phylogenetic principles, Alcock's methods cannot effectively test hypotheses of evolutionary causality.Alcock spends much effort defending sociobiology against the criticism that its major claims constitute untestable adaptationist stories. David Barash's sociobiological interpretations of mating behavior in bluebirds receive particular attention because Stephen Jay Gould criticized them as untestable. Alcock shows that Barash and others have empirically rejected some explanations in favor of better ones, although the hypotheses tested and the knowledge gained reside entirely in proximate mechanisms, not the ultimate causes that constitute sociobiology's main challenge. Gould's criticism therefore withstands Alcock's counterarguments.Readers unfamiliar with evolution should consult recent books such as Brian Hall's Evolutionary Developmental Biology , Jeffrey Levinton's Genetics, Paleontology, and Macroevolution , and John Avise's Phylogeography to see evolutionary disciplines that have triumphed over the past twenty‐five years. These disciplines contrast with sociobiology in their methodological rigor and profound reformulation of major theories. By contrast, Alcock's sociobiology seems essentially unchanged from the 1970s. If twenty‐five years of sociobiological study have produced only a repetition of its initial conjectures, their effectiveness as testable hypotheses seems doubtful.Alcock acknowledges “human evolutionary psychology” as a new subdiscipline of sociobiology. Indeed, orthodox sociobiology seems to be relocating from biology to psychology departments. My interpretation of this move is that sociobiology has not kept pace with evolutionary biology and therefore has sought refuge in a traditionally nonevolutionary discipline that has not yet incorporated the current critical standards of comparative evolutionary research.Sociobiology has served evolutionary biology mainly by revealing the limits of reductionist selective arguments, thereby directing us to move beyond them. (shrink)

Interviews met wijsgeren en andere wetenschapsmensen over de reden waarom zij zich met de persoon en het werk van de Oostenrijks-Engelse filosoof (1889-1951) bezighouden.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Allan Gibbard is one of the most significant contributors to philosophy over the last five decades. Gibbard's work covers an impressive number of subfields within philosophy, including ethics, philosophy of language, decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also engages with, and makes significant contributions to, work from the natural and social sciences. This volume is not a collection of artifacts from past decades of philosophy. Instead, it is a collection of essays (...) that each make a significant contribution to contemporary work in philosophy. This reflects the fact that Gibbard's work has not only had a massive influence on past discussion in philosophy but also continues to influence new directions of philosophical research. With contributions from: Sara Aronowitz, Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, David Braddon-Mitchell, Nate Charlow, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, Billy Dunaway, Melissa Fusco, Sona Ghosh, Allan Gibbard, Bill Harper, Paul Horwich, Zoë Johnson King, Tristram McPherson, Howard Nye, Lauren Olin, Caleb Perl, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Connie Rosati, Mark Schroeder, Alex Silk, Daniel J. Singer, Brian Skyrms, and Seth Yalcin. (shrink)

In a world that continues to be riven by armed conflict, the fundamental moral and political questions raised by warfare are as important as ever. In this book Brian Orend, a foremost expert in the field, provides an engaging and up-to-date examination of these questions and more.

* I am grateful for research assistance from Erick Davidson * I am grateful for research assistance from Erick Davidson..

Maudemarie Clark adalah salah satu dari sekian akademisi yang cukup tekun menggeluti teks-teks Nietzsche dalam 20 tahun terakhir ini. Buku pertamanya berjudul Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy juga diterbitkan oleh Oxford University Press pada tahun 1990. Sejak saat itu, Clark sering menuliskan kajian-kajiannya mengenai Nietzsche pada berbagai antologi buku maupun jurnal, termasuk Journal of Nietzsche Studies (New York: Penn State University Press). Salah satu kekhasan pendekatan Clark adalah pendekatan kombinasinya yang bercorak analitis. Ia menamakannya kombinasi karena ia mengambil unsur-unsur pendekatan (...) tradisional (Walter Kaufmann dan John Wilcox) dan pendekatan Nietzsche Baru (Alexander Nehamas dan Sarah Kofmann) seraya menganalisisnya dengan gaya analitis (seperti Arthur Danto dan Bern Magnus). Dan hasilnya adalah suatu kajian simpatik mengenai filsafat Nietzsche yang berkaitan erat dengan perkembangan sains, pendidikan, etika, dan politik terkini. Dua tema terakhir itulah (etika dan politik) yang menjadi tema besar buku terbarunya, Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (NEP). Tentu saja kajian Clark ini menarik karena bertentangan dengan pandangan umum yang sering dikenakan kepada Nietzsche: imoralis dan apolitis. NEP sendiri sebetulnya terdiri dari empat belas artikel yang telah disusun secara terpisah oleh Clark entah sebagai artikel jurnal, konferensi, ataupun kuliah. Namun, untuk memudahkan pembaca, Clark menggolongkan keempat belas artikel tersebut ke dalam tiga topik besar, yakni etika, politik, dan metafisika. Melalui dua tema tersebutetika dan politikClark menghadirkan tafsiran tak lazim atas teks-teks Nietzsche. Meski demikian, tafsiran ter sebut bukanlah hal yang baru di kalangan akademisi Nietzschean yang berkembang pesat dalam satu dekade terakhir ini. Misalnya, tafsir yang memprioritaskan nilai-nilai aristokratis ketimbang institusi/tatanan politik aristokratis sekurang-kurangnya telah muncul sejak tahun 1990-an seperti yang dipaparkan oleh Ted Sadler dalam buku Nietzsche: Truth and Redemption (London: Athlone Press, 1995). Dalam buku tersebut, Sadler mengistilahkannya dengan roh aristokratis yang dibedakan dengan dua jenis roh lainnya: roh kelas jelata dan roh kelas menengah. Selain itu, format NPE sebagai kumpulan esai-esai Clark lebih menekankan kekayaan sudut pandang ataupun kritik atas tafsiran umum mengenai etika dan politik Nietzschean ketimbang kedalaman argumentasi akan suatu isu tertentu. Penekanan tersebut tampak ketika Clark membahas pandangan-pandangan para komentator Nietzsche kontemporer (khususnya Anglo-Amerika), seperti: Lawrence J. Hatab, Bernard Williams, Allan Bloom, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Julian Young, dan Brian Leiter. Meski demikian, NPE menawarkan posisi tafsir yang cukup kokoh karena Clark menunjukkan secara langsung teks-teks Nietzsche yang menjadi sumber rujukannya. Tentu saja iklim tersebut baik guna membuka polemik dan variasi pemahaman yang lebih teruji seiring waktu. (Yulius Tandyanto, Mahasiswa, Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, Jakarta.). (shrink)

This reply considers how my article’s approach might be extended by attention to individual, contextual, and ecological processes. I agree that individual learning and agency play important roles in ontogeny; that sociologists have conducted informative work about the interpersonal and institutional contexts shaping on-line emotion construction; and that consideration of the relational niches in which discrete emotions consolidate can help to clarify their abstract structure. Emotion construction works with nonsocial as well as social materials.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Myrmidon vs. the AbbessHow Contrasting Mechanisms to Resolve Mimetic Contagion in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Comedy of Errors Stand as a Warning Against the Rejection of Christianity in Favor of Resurgent Homeric EthosBrian P. Quaranta (bio)This investigation started with a question: Why does Shakespeare hate the Iliad?The question arose after first reading Troilus and Cressida (T&C), Shakespeare's play set during the Trojan War. In his retelling, all (...) claims to glory for Homer's heroes are undermined; a world that is presented by Homer as brutal but honorable is replaced, by Shakespeare, with one that is rife with social and physical disease. As I continued to consider why Shakespeare displayed such hostility toward the Iliad, I found myself recognizing multiple, much more subtle, allusions to the Trojan War in another of his plays set in ancient Greece, The Comedy of Errors (COE). In time, it became apparent that the connection of these two plays with each other, and with the Iliad, was deliberate; through this comparison, Shakespeare rejects the Homeric ethos in favor of a Christian one. A consideration of René Girard's work on Shakespeare helps to bring home the connection between the plays and the concern that they illuminate.In his Theatre of Envy, Girard famously claimed that Shakespeare was consciously familiar with the concepts of mimetic desire and its relationship [End Page 183] to collective violence.1 He drew upon T&C and COE for examples: T&C for its explication of the importance of degree, its employment of collective murder, and the association of mimetic contagion with disease,2 and COE primarily for its emphasis on the special role of twins in mimetic theory as exemplars of identical rivals.3 Girard, I believe, is correct that Shakespeare understood the mechanisms and implications of mimetic theory, and he demonstrates how in these plays its consequences play out in a purely pagan world, and then in another in which there is a saving Christian intervention.The intellectual current of Shakespeare's time has been characterized by two primary themes: Reformation and Renaissance. The use of the word reformation, when taken on its own terms, suggests a benign and necessary process. But for an Englishman in the late 16th century, reformation also would have meant violence, displacement, fracture, war, and the disintegration of a once-unified Christendom. This crumbling of the ancient universal catholic church was accompanied by the Renaissance, a term used to refer to the rebirth of interest in, and progressive obsession with, the culture and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans.4 My argument is that the two plays discussed here can be read as Shakespeare's response to these developments, demonstrating an anxiety over the threat of resurgent pagan values to a troubled Christianity, with T&C's ending standing as a warning of the danger of a return to the scapegoat mechanism, and COE reminding the reader of the power of the Christian alternative.The essay begins with a brief reminder of the depth of the enthusiasm for the classical era that emerged in Europe in the century leading up to, and including, the life of Shakespeare. I then detail the surprising ways in which Shakespeare thoroughly upends expectations in his retelling of the Trojan War story, discrediting the original tale. Next, the similarities of the Comedy of Errors to Troilus and Cressida, and to the Iliad, are documented. Because this area has received little previous scholarly attention, and because it is crucial to the argument, the inversions of the Trojan War in COE are meticulously detailed. Once it has been established that the two plays both respond to the Iliad, Girard's mimetic theory is brought to bear to explain the very different endings of the plays and to reveal Shakespeare's underlying concern about the Homeric ethos.THE RENAISSANCE AND SHAKESPEARE'S RESPONSE TO THE CLASSICSThe emerging triumph of the Greco-Roman pagan world over the renaissance mind, and its intrusion into the Christian realm, are evident in the development [End Page 184] of visual art in the decades preceding Shakespeare's work. Works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano, depicting... (shrink)

This thesis is about toleration as a modality of citizenship for pluralistic societies. Its central argument is that the current dissatisfaction with "mere" toleration which we find so broadly represented in our public and scholarly cultures is based on an underestimation of the capacities and attitudes that toleration entails. The liberal recasting of toleration, sophisticated and indeed invaluable though it is abets this devaluation by focusing too exclusively on public justification and on the Lockean stream of the tradition from which (...) we draw. ;The present thesis begins by tracing some of the difficulties facing the Rawlsian and Habermasian projects if we accept a vivid picture of the pluralisms amidst which we live. It then sketches the central features of a complementary tradition of toleration as it flows to us through the works of Montaigne, William James, Mikhail Bakhtin and others. An attempt is made to show where the resources drawn from this tradition might fit in to a theory of citizenship given reasonable Rawlsian qualms about "thick" public conceptions and given the fissiparous nature of a civil society like ours. The thesis ends with a pair of empirically oriented chapters which show ways in which we could conceive a praxis of toleration which might respond to the issues raised in the earlier sections of the work. (shrink)

Introduction: the fingerprint of spirit -- The subject/object of cinema: The Maltese falcon -- "A deeper breath": from body to spirit in Kiss me deadly -- Negative dioretix: Repo man -- "Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!": two types of fetishism in The big Lebowski.

Efforts aimed at broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) require a holistic presentation of the state of racial and gender participation. Statistics currently used to describe participation often include raw counts of degrees and the percentages of demographic groups receiving STEM degrees. While these data provide insights into demographic trends, they do not present the complete picture because these “traditional” statistics do not capture how well a field of study reflects—or is proportionally similar to—a larger body, such (...) as the college population. If the goal of broadening participation in STEM education is to ensure that all racial and gender groups are proportionally represented, analysts require direct measures of representation. In this article, we present a novel metric that assesses the degree to which groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in a given field. This metric calculates field-specific representation by comparing the proportion of degrees awarded to members of a demographic group in a specific field of study with the proportion of all degrees awarded to that group. Using data from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, we demonstrate the efficacy of this representation metric and show that it provides new insights into STEM participation levels for women and other groups considered to be underrepresented. While traditional measurements show the increasing number of degrees awarded to and the increasing share of underrepresented minority students in STEM, our metric revealed that underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and the natural sciences. (shrink)

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — three eminent thinkers, having little or no need for more money in their purses, and nothing particular to interest them in the law reviews and philosophy journals, set out to meet and discuss legal philosophy in a literary part of the world. It is a way these three have of driving off ennui and formulating the next publication. Whenever they find themselves growing stale about the pen; whenever it is adamp, (...) drizzly November in London; whenever they find themselves involuntarily churning out conference papers and bringing up the rear of every symposium on offer; and especially whenever they find their critics getting such an upper hand on them, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent them from deliberately sitting down and methodically knocking off a paper excoriating every stranger they have met — then, they account it high time to gettogether as soon as they can. (shrink)

IN RECOVERY OF THE MEASURE: INTERPRETATION AND NATURE, Robert Cummings Neville develops a philosophy of nature and theory of interpretation as centerpieces for his projected three-volume Axiology of Thinking. This emerging ontology of value is impressive for both its originality and complexity. Neville's claims about meaning, truth, objectivity, and knowledge are deployed in explicit opposition to the relativism, historicism, and subjectivism currently so popular among philosophers. His critique is formidable because neither polemical nor defensive; it is rather the expression of (...) a coherent metaphysical vision. (shrink)

Form Follows Force : Greg Lynn -- Relational Architecture : Rafael Lozano-Hemmer -- Making to Place : Simryn Gill -- Concluding Remarks : Immanence (Many Lives).

In this paper I describe and argue against two positions. The first, espoused by Epicurus and other philosophers, contends that in permanent death, since there is no longer a subject, my own death cannot be a loss for me. I argue that this thesis makes an illicitassumption and itself embodies a conceptual confusion. Therefore, my death can after all have the logical status of a loss for me. The Christian Church, however, has adopted what I call the “official” position; namely, (...) that while my death could be a loss for me, if I am a believer, it must instead be considered a gain. Against this claim, I urge the adoption of a contrary “unofficial” position which argues that even as a believer my death may be a loss for me. I contend that the “official” position embodies internal incoherence and promotes a corrupt version of Christianity. The “unofficial” position, however, is compatible with Christian teaching on self-mortification and more accurately represents New Testament attitudes towards death. Thereby I conclude that regarding my death as loss to myself is neither conceptually absurd nor a failure of faith. (shrink)