The article recently published in this journal by Dr B A Rix, a member of the Danish Council of Ethics (DCE), was heavily criticised by Dr David Lamb and Mr Christopher Pallis in subsequent commentaries. The editorial column by Professor Raanan Gillon also criticised the position put forward by Rix. In this article I contend that the definition of death put forward by Pallis and Lamb suffers certain philosophical shortcomings, that the position put forward by Rix deserves fuller consideration, (...) and that Rix is not to be dismissed easily. (shrink)

Kendal Mobley replies to Christopher Catherwood's article ‘Nationalism, ethnicity and tolerance: some historical, political and biblical perspectives’, published in Transformation, Vol 14, no. 1, January 1997, p. 10.

This book presents a comprehensive theory of consciousness. The initial chapter distinguishes six main forms of consciousness and sketches an account of each one. Later chapters focus on phenomenal consciousness, consciousness of, and introspective consciousness. In discussing phenomenal consciousness, Hill develops the representational theory of mind in new directions, arguing that all awareness involves representations, even awareness of qualitative states like pain. He then uses this view to undercut dualistic accounts of qualitative states. Other topics include visual awareness, visual appearances, (...) emotional qualia, and meta-cognitive processing. This important work will interest a wide readership of students and scholars in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

To understand the thesis of actualism, consider the following example. Imagine a race of beings — call them ‘Aliens’ — that is very different from any life-form that exists anywhere in the universe; different enough, in fact, that no actually existing thing could have been an Alien, any more than a given gorilla could have been a fruitfly. Now, even though there are no Aliens, it seems intuitively the case that there could have been such things. After all, life might (...) have evolved very differently than the way it did in fact. So in virtue of what is it true that there could have been Aliens when in fact there are none, and when, moreover, nothing that exists in fact could have been an Alien? So-called "possibilists" offer the following answer: ‘It is possible that there are Aliens’ is true because there are in fact individuals that could have been Aliens. At first blush, this might appear directly to contradict the premise that no existing thing could possibly have been an Alien. The possibilist's thesis, however, is that existence, or actuality, encompasses only a subset of the things that, in the broadest sense, are. So for the possibilist, ‘It is possible that there are Aliens’ is true simply in virtue of the fact that there are possible-but-nonactual Aliens, i.e., things that could have existed (but do not) and which would have been Aliens if they had. Actualists reject this answer; they deny that there are any nonactual individuals. Thus, actualism is the philosophical position that everything there is — everything that can in any sense be said to be — exists, or is actual. (shrink)

There is an important family of semantic notions that we apply to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts - as when we say that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Thought and World presents a theory of the content of such notions. The theory is largely deflationary in spirit, in the sense that it represents a broad range of semantic notions - including the concept of truth - as being entirely free from substantive metaphysical and (...) empirical presuppositions. At the same time, however, it takes seriously and seeks to explain the intuition that there is a metaphysically or empirically 'deep' relation linking thoughts to reality. Thus, the theory represents a kind of compromise between deflationism and versions of the correspondence theory of truth. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of logic and language. (shrink)

This book offers a vigorous and constructive challenge to relativism by examining a wide range of anti-realist theories, and in response offering a variety of arguments amounting to a strong defence of critical realism in the natural and social sciences.

In this report I motivate and develop a type-free logic with predicate quantifiers within the general ontological framework of properties, relations, and propositions. In Part I, I present the major ideas of the system informally and discuss its philosophical significance, especially with regard to Russell's paradox. In Part II, I prove the soundness, consistency, and completeness of the logic.

There are a wide variety of theories of causation available in the philosophical literature. For the philosopher working in philosophy of mind, who makes use of causal concepts, what is to be made of this embarrassment of riches? By considering a variety of theoretical perspectives, she can discover which principles or assumptions about causation are robust, and which hold only within particular frameworks. In particular, she should be suspicious when the different premises in an argument can only be made true (...) by shifting between different theories of causation. I illustrate these themes using the causal exclusion argument. (shrink)

Liberal environmentalism, or green politics, intends to Dind a compromise between the prevailing global economic order and the need to protect the environment. The idea of sustainability, introduced in the Rio Summit, is the central component of international climate agreements. But on closer analysis, it can be argued that the problem of climate change is rooted in a neo-liberal system in which corporate interests collude with state policies. The free market is one of the fundamental causes of the systematic destruction (...) of the environment. Big corporations, so motivated by proDit, cannot be trusted to absorb the huge social costs of environmental degradation. For this reason, the use of indigenous wisdom is proposed to balance our way of life and environmental preservation. The study argues that climate justice would require dismantling an exploitative economic order to avert the existential threat from changing climactic patterns. (shrink)

The philosopher Kant is a key thinker in shaping our contemporary concept of morality, freedom, and happiness. This book argues that Kant believes in God, but that he is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western Philosophy.

The present paper constitutes a development of the position that illness, whether bodily or mental, should be analyzed as an incapacitating failure of bodily or mental capacities, respectively, to realize their functions. The paper undertakes this development by responding to two critics. It addresses first Szasz’s continued claims that (1) physical illness is the paradigm concept of illness and (2) a philosophical analysis of mental illness does not shed any light on the social and legal role of the idea. Then, (...) in reply to Wakefield, the aim is to defend the account as an interpretation of Aristotle and to argue that this Aristotelian view of mental illness is preferable to one that rests on a supposed value free account of human function. More generally the discussion points to the fact that both Wakefield and Szasz rely on a number of metaphysical assumptions about the supposedly empirical nature of medical diagnosis, about the relation between facts and values, and about mind and body (among others), which are open to challenge. In particular the paper indicates an aristotelian approach to the fusion, in the natural world, of so-called facts and values, and the relevance of this fusion to the analysis of the concept of illness. This suggests the debate over distinct conceptions of that concept must both illumine and be illuminated by these deeper metaphysical questions. (shrink)

This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

Fundamental Causation addresses issues in the metaphysics of deterministic singular causation, the metaphysics of events, property instances, facts, preventions, and omissions, as well as the debate between causal reductionists and causal anti-reductionists. The book also pays special attention to causation and causal structure in physics. Weaver argues that causation is a multigrade obtaining relation that is transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric. When causation is singular, deterministic and such that it relates purely contingent events, the relation is also universal, intrinsic, and well-founded. (...) He shows that proper causal relata are events understood as states of substances at ontological indices. He then proves that causation cannot be reduced to some non-causal base, and that the best account of that relation should be unashamedly primitivist about the dependence relation that underwrites its very nature. The book demonstrates a distinctive realist and anti-reductionist account of causation by detailing precisely how the account outperforms reductionist and competing anti-reductionist accounts in that it handles all of the difficult cases while overcoming all of the general objections to anti-reductionism upon which other anti-reductionist accounts falter. This book offers an original and interesting view of causation and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics. (shrink)

Business ethics as a field of academic endeavour has made significant progress over the past two or three decades. It now boasts a substantial body of scholarly literature, which is a major resource in which much time and effort have been invested and from which much can be gained. However, there is still much work to be done, and the dynamic nature of both academic life and the world beyond it ensures that new issues and opportunities will continue to emerge. (...) Business ethicists, individually and collectively, through the allocation of their limited research resources, will govern how well the field progresses and meets future challenges over the years to come. In particular, through our decisions about what we do or do not study and write about, we will determine the future shape of the scholarly literature – what it addresses successfully and on what it remains silent or inadequate. Implicitly or explicitly, individually and collectively, choices are made, and some are presumably better than others. This paper is a reflection on the progress of business ethics as an academic enterprise. Of course, the development of business ethics as a focus of academic interest has been marked by several review papers already, some reflecting underlying concerns consistent with Enderle’s comment that “in its present stage of development, business ethics appears to be far from being an established academic discipline”. Some might question whether something like business ethics can ever be an academic discipline as such, and for the purposes of this paper it will be helpful to distinguish between disciplines – such as philosophy, economics and psychology – and fields to which the concepts and methods of academic disciplines can be applied. Nevertheless, whatever kind of academic activity business ethics is taken to be, there are significant issues relating to its academic status. (shrink)

Reports of anomalous experiences are to be found in all known societies, both historically and geographically. If these reports were accurate, they would constitute powerful evidence for the existence of paranormal forces. However, research into the fallibility of human memory suggests that we should be cautious in accepting such reports at face value. Experimental research has shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, including eyewitness testimony for anomalous events. The present paper also reviews recent research into susceptibility to false memories and (...) considers the relevance of such work for assessing reports of anomalous events. It is noted that a number of psychological variables that have been shown to correlate with susceptibility to false memories also correlate with the tendency to report paranormal and related anomalous experiences. Although attempts to show a direct link between tendency to report anomalous experiences and susceptibility to false memories have had only limited success to date, this may reflect the use of inappropriate measures. (shrink)

Baker, James and Reader offer new religious engagement with the public sphere via means of interdisciplinary analysis and empirical examples, developing what we call a Relational Christian Realism building upon interaction with contemporary Philosophy of Religion. This book represents an exciting contribution to philosophy and practice of religion on both sides of the Atlantic and aspires to be sufficiently interdisciplinary to also appeal to readerships engaged in the study of modern political and social trends.

Argues that the analysis of movement and its correlative procession in the Divine Comedy is fundamental to an understanding of how Dante generates meaning in his poetic text.

By analyzing cases in which we must choose between options whose values are not precisely comparable, this paper presents the case for the existence of a previously unrecognized class of practical reasons – reasons that arise from how the value of an option compares to the values of the alternatives. Several implications of these comparative value-based reasons are discussed – including the context-dependence of one option’s being ‘rationally preferable to’ an alternative, and the fact that, even when the values of (...) an agent’s alternatives fail to be precisely comparable, practical reason will always be able to determine that the choice of at least one option is justified. (shrink)

Badiou is without doubt the most influential philosopher working in Europe today - this book will provide the first detailed introduction to Being and Event, a ...

Extensive literatures exist on the epistemology of testimony, memory, and perception, but for the most part these literatures do not systematically consider the extent of the analogies between the three epistemic sources. A number of the same problems reappear in all three literatures, however. Dealing simultaneously with all three sources and making a careful accounting of the analogies and disanalogies between them should therefore avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. Other than limits on the scope of which memorially- and testimonially-based beliefs (...) should be included in the Parity Thesis, I argue that most of the disanalogies that different philosophers have proffered between the sources do not mark distinctions among the universes of possible testimonially-, memorially-, and perceptually-based beliefs regarding the explanation of those beliefs' epistemic status. I first criticize the suggestion that perception is a generative epistemic source, while testimony and memory are not; I propose and defend counterexamples in which testimony and memory produce new beliefs. Next, I criticize a variety of distinctions that have been drawn between testimony and perception, taken chiefly from the reductionist-antireductionist literature on testimony. I criticize the suggestion that the conceptualization of content and the transparency of experience affect the epistemologies of testimony and perception in different ways. Regarding memory and testimony, I advocate modeling testimony on the legal relationship of a principal and an agent, arguing that law's apparatus used to analyze such situations suggests that using others' epistemic services in testimony will supply the same epistemic benefits and burdens as if we had performed those epistemic tasks personally and then relied only on memory. I apply this analysis to the transmission of defeaters in testimony. I argue that memory does feature the epistemic equivalent of a perceptual image and that both perceptually- and memorially-based beliefs can concern either the past or the present. Finally, I construct a set of six transformations that turn individual possible instances of perceptually-, memorially-, or testimonially-based beliefs into individual possible instances of the other two types of beliefs without changing the structure of those beliefs' epistemologies. (shrink)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its potential for strategic (...) manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

Contemporary recognition theory has developed powerful tools for understanding a variety of social problems through the lens of misrecognition. It has, however, paid somewhat less attention to how to conceive of appropriate responses to misrecognition, usually making the tacit assumption that the proper societal response is adequate or proper affirmative recognition. In this paper I argue that, although affirmative recognition is one potential response to misrecognition, it is not the only such response. In particular, I would like to make the (...) case for derecognition in some cases: derecognition, in particular, through the systematic deinstitutionalization or uncoupling of various reinforcing components of social institutions, components whose tight combination in one social institution has led to the misrecognition in the first place. I make the case through the example of recent United States debates over marriage, especially but not only with respect to gay marriage. I argue that the proper response to the misrecognition of sexual minorities embodied in exclusively heterosexual marriage codes is not affirmative recognition of lesbian and gay marriages, but rather the systematic derecognition of legal marriage as currently understood. I also argue that the systematic misrecognition of women that occurs under the contemporary institution of marriage would likewise best be addressed through legal uncoupling of heterogeneous social components embodied in the contemporary social institution of marriage. (shrink)

This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.

What is it for a thinker to possess the concept of perceptual experience? What is it to be able to think of seeings, hearings and touchings, and to be able to think of experiences that are subjectively like seeings, hearings and touchings?

Causes often influence their effects via multiple routes. Moderate alcohol consumption can raise the level of HDL ('good') cholesterol, which in tum reduces the risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, moderate alcohol consumption can also increase the level of homocysteine, which in tum increases the risk of heart disease. The net or overall effect of alcohol consumption on heart disease will depend upon both of these routes, and no doubt upon many others as well. This is a familiar fact of life (...) for engineers and policy makers, one that often gives rise to unintended consequences. Suppose, for example, that the American Federal Aviation Administration were to institute new regulations requiring that aeroplanes be equipped with some expensive new safety feature. Would this regulation save lives? Not necessarily. Every dollar (or pound, or euro, or yen ... ) that an airline spends to upgrade its fleet is a dollar that must be recouped in some way, most likely through higher fares. Higher fares may, in tum, persuade some travellers to drive instead of fly- especially on shorter routes. But it is inherently more dangerous to drive a given route than to fly it, so the net effect of the new regulation may cost lives, rather than saving them (Glassner 1999: 188). (shrink)

This book examines the issue of rational cooperation, especially cooperation between people with conflicting moral commitments. The first part considers how the two main aspects of cooperation - the choice by a group of a particular cooperative scheme and the decision by each member to contribute to that scheme - can be understood as guided by reason. The second part explores how the activity of reasoning itself can take a cooperative form. The book is distinctive in offering an account of (...) what people can accomplish by reasoning together, of the role of deliberation in democratic decision making, and of the negotiation of the proper use of concepts. Presenting for the first time a detailed analysis of the general problem of cooperation and collective reasoning between people with different moral commitments, this book will be of particular interest to philosophers of the social sciences and to students in political science, sociology and economics. (shrink)

What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and (...) Žižek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed. (shrink)

For many philosophers of science, mathematics lies closer to logic than it does to the ordinary sciences like physics, biology and economics. While this view may account for the relative neglect of the philosophy of mathematics by philosophers of science, it ignores at least two pressing questions about mathematics that philosophers of science need to be able to answer. First, do the similarities between mathematics and science support the view that mathematics is, after all, another science? Second, does the central (...) role of mathematics in science shed any light on traditional philosophical debates about science like scientific realism, the nature of explanation or reduction? When faced with these kinds of questions many philosophers of science have little to say. Unfortunately, most philosophers of mathematics also fail to engage with questions about the relationship between mathematics and science and so a peculiar isolation has emerged between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics. In this introductory survey I aim to equip the interested philosopher of science with a roadmap that can guide her through the often intimidating terrain of contemporary philosophy of mathematics. I hope that such a survey will make clear how fruitful a more sustained interaction between philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics could be. (shrink)