In his book Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, Crispin Wright notes that remarkably little has been done to provide an unpictorial, substantial account of what mathematical platonism comes to. Wright proposes to investigate whether there is not some more substantial doctrine than the familiar images underpinning the platonist view. He begins with the suggestion that the essential platonist claim is that mathematical truth is objective. Although he does not demarcate them as such, Wright proposes several different tests for objectivity. (...) The paper finds problems with each of these tests. (shrink)

This paper defends a position held by W, D, Ross that it is no part of one’s duty to have a certain motive since one cannot by choice have it here and now.

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs that (...) acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions (...) to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world. (shrink)

This previously-unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially-structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien's novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the central racist myth of European thought.

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 60-70.

Foundations of the theory of signs.--Signs, language, and behavior.--Five semiotical studies.

This is a new release of the original 1948 edition.

Responding to claims to the contrary, this essay shows how liberal education, the education of critical exposure, indoctrinates students into a style of belief and belief formation. It argues that a common liberal view about what constitutes freedom from indoctrination is precisely the form of indoctrination feared by many conservative communitarians. While I support the style and procedures of liberal education, I argue that we cannot excise all indoctrinating components from it by semantic, logical or epistemic analyses of what indoctrination (...) or education means. (shrink)

In few cases among modern religious ethicists are the contemporary issues concerning the problem of norms and of criteria more intriguingly brought to the fore than in the ethics of Martin Buber.

The ongoing pursuit of tacit knowledge Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9500-6 Authors Charles W. Smith, Department of Sociology, Queens College, CUNY, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

ABSTRACT The publication of George Yancy's latest book, Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher (2020), provides a welcome opportunity to reflect not just on the book itself but on ‘Black’ public philosophy and how it should be conceptualised. In the first part of the essay, I look at public philosophy as a recent self‐conscious exercise in the profession and then – citing Critical Theory's coinage from decades ago of the idea of a ‘counterpublic’ – raise the (...) question of whether the concept of a ‘Black counterpublic philosophy’ might not be a better designation. The second part defends this claim by enumerating some of the key obstacles facing Black philosophers in the field: a minuscule population, a stigmatising identity shaped by the legacy of racial slavery in modernity, the denial of a recognised philosophical tradition, and a racial research focus at odds with the discipline's self‐conception as removed from the corporeal. Finally, the third part situates Yancy's work and achievement against this background, while warning (as illustrated by the virulent backlash he has encountered) of the dangers of such an enterprise. (shrink)

This article tries to provide a genealogy for, and a characterization of, “critical philosophy of race,” which has only recently begun to gain formal recognition as a subject within the discipline. After discussing the contested periodization of race and racism, the author turns to the related question of whether they have affected the history of Western philosophy from the classical epoch to modernity. Then he reviews contemporary scholarship in critical philosophy of race, looking at standard divisions of the field: metaphysics (...) ; epistemology ; aesthetics ; ethics ; social and political philosophy ; and existentialism, phenomenology, and pragmatism. (shrink)

Publication by Eugene Vanderpool of the ostrakon with the name vindicates an inference made by Gustav Gilbert, Beiträge zur innern Geschichte Athens, 144 f. There he claimed that Nicostratus son of Dieitrephes and Nicostratus , who is mentioned by Aristophanes, Wasps 81 f, were identical. Gilbert supposed that the qualities implied of Nicostratus in that passage were of the type to endear him to Nicias.

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1008-1026, December 2021.