The Doomsday Argument says we should increase our subjective probability that Doomsday will occur once we take into account how many humans have lived before us. One objection to this conclusion is that we should accept the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA): Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist. Nick Bostrom argues that we should not accept the SIA, because it can be used (...) without knowledge of birth rank. Bradley Monton tries to construct a Doomsday Argument without knowledge of birth rank. I argue that Monton fails. The argument he constructs has implicit knowledge of birth rank and it is this knowledge that does the work. Furthermore, I argue that provided we dont have certain specific information about the future, the Doomsday Argument requires knowledge of birth rank. (shrink)

I argue that there is a flaw in the way that response-dependence has been formulated in the literature, and this flawed formulation has been correctly attacked by Mark Johnston’s Missing Explanation Argument (1993, 1998). Moving to a better formulation, which is analogous to the move from behaviourism to functionalism, avoids the Missing Explanation Argument.

Book reviewed in this article:F.H. Bradley, Collected Works Volumes 1–5.

Curley begins by showing that two of the main interpretations of Spinoza are wrong. He considers the "Bayle-Joachim interpretation" and the "Wolfson interpretation." In general, his criticism of these interpretations is brief, and in some instances, incorrect, as for example, the notion that Joachim believes in an Eleatic view as the final statement for particulars in Spinoza's metaphysics. Curley uncovers the traditional obscurities of Spinoza's metaphysics through a model metaphysic of his own upheld by logical atomism. "Just as Joachim saw (...) Spinoza through lenses ground by Hegel and Bradley, so I have seen him through those ground by Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein." Through these modern lenses, the author takes a fresh look at the basic problems of Spinoza's system, e.g., the causality of God, the relation between substance as infinite and its modes which are finite, and the traditional problems concerning the attributes which go back as far as Spinoza's correspondence with Tschirnhaus and Schuller. The book should prove interesting to those whose philosophical "bent of mind" is modern British.--D. J. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS At the Origins of Modern Atheism. By MICHAEL J. BucKLEY, S.J. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Pp. viii+ 445. Writing ostensibly a history of the philosophical origins of 18th century atheism in 17th century theism, Michael Buckley, S.J., has contributed a learned, subtle, and provocative hook whose length is significantly increased and whose focus is considerably enlarged by a running commentary about the metatheory (...) (Richard McKeon's philosophical semantics) that structures his reading of the chosen theists and atheists. Buckley provides the best summary of his own historical conclusion: "... theology generated apologetic philosophy and philosophy generated Universal Mechanics, and these in turn co-opted theology to become the foundations of theistic assertions... [But] when the contradictions between Cartesian and Newtonian mechanics were further negated... god became a deus otiosus" [pp. 358-359]. This conclusion rests on a philosophical principle whose elements are taken from Plato's Seventh Epistle: " The name, the definition, and the instance for the atheistic negations are all set by the current theism " [p. 15]. In turn, this principle is justified by a cluster of meta-theses that are not easily summarized, although one stands above the rest: " Much more may he involved in such a process of ideas [from 17th century theism to 18th century atheism] than their· own internal necessity, hut internal necessity remains and governs inherently " [p. 334]. The latter meta-thesis asserts that there is a dialectic of ideas and it is from this point of view that Buckley reads the conceptual history of modern atheism. Dialectical necessity is a bugbear for many contemporary philosophers, hut Buckley argues, convincingly I think, that some kind of conceptual necessity links theism and atheism. Atheism is, essentially, the negation of a particular form of theism. In Hegelian terms, atheism is a determinate negation which draws all of its conceptual content from what it negates. Buckley, however, puts an even greater Hegelian spin on the same point. If the theism carries within itself a contradiction, it negates itself and, thereby, dialectically generates its contradiction-atheism [cf. p. 17]. " Modern atheism took not only its meaning hut its existence from the self-alienation of religion " [p. 359]. A theism that believes in the existence of an intelligent, personal God, Who creates and orders the universe, but that attempts a rational 144 BOOK REVIEWS 145 justification of this belief apart from the religious experience that alone can embody such a faith contains exactly the kind of inner contradiction that generates the negation of itself. Buckley focuses on the poignant contradiction of a Christian theology abandoning " the religious figure of Jesus as the principal evidence for the reality of God" [p. 41] in favor of some philosophy (whether that of Descartes, Malebranche, or Newton) which provides a different and allegedly more certain kind of evidence for God's existence. This theology, or more precisely the theistic philosophies it spawned, are the sources of modern atheism because, if Descartes and Newton are consistently combined, philosophy can do quite well without God. Laplace's famous reply to Napoleon, although it was not originally an atheistic slogan, captures what Diderot and d'Holbach thought: God is an unnecessary hypothesis in a truly universal mechanics which needs to presuppose only matter and motion. The historical story, of course, is more complicated than this skeleton dialectic can suggest. Buckley richly details the story but I shall rehearse only its opening chapter. Buckley begins with the Jesuit theologian, Leonard Lays (1554-1623), usually known under his Latin name, Lessius, whose De providentia numinis et anima immortalitate (1613) set the pattern for subsequent Catholic theology. Lessius, who was convinced that atheism by eliminating the eternal judge destroys morals and sound politics, revived Stoic arguments, numerous variations on a theme, which show that the universe is everywhere imprinted with a divine design. Lessius's intent, although he referred only to ancient philosophers, was not to replay the classical battle between the Stoics and the Epicureans but to combat the atheism, silent and disguised in contemporary Europe, that Lessius thought to be the inevitable outcome of the wars of religion and theological fights. Lessius, however, paid scant attention to his own insight... (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Eliot wrote this book as his Ph.D. dissertation in 1916, and has allowed it to be published "as a curiosity of biographical interest." It is not difficult to move from his insistence in the thesis on the continuity of ideality and reality, of word and object, to his poetry and criticism. Precisely because of this insistence, Eliot's thesis is of more than merely biographical interest. As a work in philosophy it has a strikingly contemporary ring. E.g., "Without words, no objects". (...) Eliot was fundamentally sympathetic to Bradley's thought, but he was also open to the criticisms of Meinong and Russell, both of whom are discussed at length. The result is a kind of via media between idealism and realism, a very contemporary concern. Two 1916 essays on Leibniz are appended.—R. J. W. (shrink)

It is a pleasure for me to give this opening address to the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference on ‘Explanation’ for two reasons. The first is that it is succeeded by exciting symposia and other papers concerned with various special aspects of the topic of explanation. The second is that the conference is being held in my old alma mater, the University of Glasgow, where I did my first degree. Especially due to C. A. Campbell and George Brown there was (...) in the Logic Department a big emphasis on absolute idealism, especially F. H. Bradley. My inclinations were to oppose this line of thought and to espouse the empiricism and realism of Russell, Broad and the like. Empiricism was represented in the department by D. R. Cousin, a modest man who published relatively little, but who was of quite extraordinary philosophical acumen and lucidity, and by Miss M. J. Levett, whose translation of Plato's Theaetetus formed an important part of the philosophy syllabus. (shrink)

K. T. Fann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the man and his philosophy. New Jersey, Humanities Press; Sussex, Harvester Press: 1967. 415 pp. 10.50.Gerd Brand, The central texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Translated and with an introduction by Robert E. Innis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. xxv + 182 pp. £ 10.00 /£3.95.Joseph Warren Dauben. Georg Cantor: his mathematics and philosophy of the infinite. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. xiii + 404 pp., 4 plts. $25 US.S. Poggi, I sistemi dell'esperienza. Psicologia, logica (...) e teoria della scienza da Kant a Wundt. Bologna: il Mulino, 1977.679 pp., Lit. 12.000.Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds. An introduction to logic and its philosophy. Indianapolis and New York; Hackett Publishing Company: Oxford; Blackwell: 1979. xxi + 391 pp. £15.00 /£4.95.S. Haack, Philosophy of logics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. xiv + 276 pp. £ 13.50.F. J. Pelletier, Mass terms: some philosophicalproblems. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Reidel, 1979. xiii + 303 pp. Dfl. 70/$34.00.Theo A. F. Kuipers, Studies in inductive probability and rational expectation. Dordrecht, Holland and Boston, USA.: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978. xii + 145 pp. Dfl. 50/$22.50. (shrink)

In the idealistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British philosophy under Hegelian influence endeavoured to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as based on logical construction. The keynote of the Hegelian dialectic, as interpreted by both F. H. Bradley and J. E. McTaggart is that the mind is there from the first. In the advance from the bare abstraction of Being to the fully concrete whole—“Before the mind there is a single conception, but the whole (...) mind itself which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result.” The idea expressed by poetry in Tennyson's “Flower in the crannied wall,” which as the mind is fixed upon it reveals in an expansion to the universe the nature of God and Man, illustrates in a simple way the central philosophic conception of the British metaphysical idealists. Poetry could overlook the hard struggle of the little plant to keep its foothold against crowding competitors. Philosophy was perhaps too oblivious of this in its compelling postulate of the all pervading unity in which every difference and seeming contradiction would be reconciled. (shrink)

Mrs. Krook seems to describe her own religious position in the following words on p. 347 of her book: “the religious Humanist, who has received his first life from the Judaeo–Christian religion and is condemned to nurse his redemptive hope in solitude between the emancipated irreligious on the one side and the orthodox religious on the other …”. It is a pity that she delayed until the last paragraph to make explicit what one gathered only as the book went on. (...) One reader at least for most of the length of the book survived in hope between the desire to put the book away on the one hand and the desire to be kindled at some flame on the other. To him the book really seemed to come alive with the consideration of Messianic Humanism and in particular D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died. One felt that there was something coming earlier on, especially from the discussion of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, and one was told that one could expect even more from a consideration of Henry James, but the book until then might have seemed little more than a collection of not very well related comments on a series of texts: Plato’s Gorgias, Hobbes’s Leviathan, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, Hume’s Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, J. S. Mill’s Three Essays on Religion, Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, and then Lawrence’s The Man Who Died. (shrink)

This book presents a thorough reexamination of the role of divine grace in am kara s system and shows that am kara regarded grace as an essential component of the process leading to enlightenment and liberation. am kara s indebtedness to earlier Ved ntins is also shown.