The emergence of virtue ethics as a third type of moral theory to rival Utilitarianism and Kantianism is one of the most significant recent developments in moral philosophy in the English-speaking world. Yet despite the vast amount of work in this field over the last three decades there is still something unsatisfactory about virtue theory as exemplified in the contemporary literature. For one thing, as Rosalind Hursthouse points out, there have been scarcely any books 'which explore virtue ethics systematically and (...) at length' (p. 5), almost all contemporary work having been in the form of articles which often stress the tentative and exploratory nature of their authors' investigations. Virtue ethics is still, as it were, in its adolescence, relatively unformed and without character. Hursthouse believes it is time for virtue ethics to 'grow up', and intends On Virtue Ethics as a contribution to this process. (shrink)

The central insight of Darwin's Origin of Species is that evolution is an ecological phenomenon, arising from the activities of organisms in the 'struggle for life'. By contrast, the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which rose to prominence in the twentieth century, presents evolution as a fundamentally molecular phenomenon, occurring in populations of sub-organismal entities - genes. After nearly a century of success, the Modern Synthesis theory is now being challenged by empirical advances in the study of organismal development and (...) inheritance. In this important study, D. M. Walsh shows that the principal defect of the Modern Synthesis resides in its rejection of Darwin's organismal perspective, and argues for 'situated Darwinism': an alternative, organism-centred conception of evolution that prioritises organisms as adaptive agents. His book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about (...) the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides equational semantics for Dung's argumentation networks. The network nodes get numerical values in [0,1], and are supposed to satisfy certain equations. The solutions to these equations correspond to the ?extensions? of the network. This approach is very general and includes the Caminada labelling as a special case, as well as many other so-called network extensions, support systems, higher level attacks, Boolean networks, dependence on time, and much more. The equational approach has its conceptual roots in the nineteenth (...) century following the algebraic equational approach to logic by George Boole, Louis Couturat, and Ernst Schroeder. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the meaning of probability statements. The interpretation of probability has excited nearly as much philosophical controversy as the interpretation of quantum mechanics. 20th century physicists have mostly adopted a frequentist conception. In this paper it is argued that we ought, instead, to adopt a logical or Bayesian (...) conception. The paper includes a comparison of the orthodox and Bayesian theories of statistical inference. It concludes with a few remarks concerning the implications for the concept of physical reality. (shrink)

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the (...) most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

In this rehabilitation of the relational transaction of compromising, we follow Paul Ricoeur in arguing that at the intersection of diverse orders of value, compromising rises to the level of a moral duty. Thus, an ethics of compromise, rooted in recognition theory, provides a virtuous means of moral engagement with otherness in the context of pluralism. Virtue theory needs to move in an interactive direction by enlisting moral epistemology, for a shift in focus from the individual agent to the interaction (...) of agents ; attending to the political theorists and sociologists who ground meaningful compromise in mutual recognition; and tailoring such recognition to bounded human capacities for rationality and empathy, via "psychological realism"—all in service of attenuating the discomfort and even moral pain that agents may feel when called upon to compromise. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest adding to predicate modal and temporal logic a locality predicate W which gives names to worlds (or time points). We also study an equal time predicate D(x, y)which states that two time points are at the same distance from the root. We provide the systems studied with complete axiomatizations and illustrate the expressive power gained for modal logic by simulating other logics. The completeness proofs rely on the fairly intuitive notion of a configuration in order (...) to use a proof technique similar to a Henkin completion mixed with a tableau construction. The main elements of the completeness proofs are given for each case, while purely technical results are grouped in the appendix. (shrink)

Onderwerp en gezegde, door D. M. Bakker.--Enkele opmerkingen over het Godsbegrip van Justinus Martyr, door J. den Boeft.--Heidegger, Descartes, Luther, door J. van der Hoeven.--"Geschichtlichkeit" bij Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, door G. Horsman.--Menselijke ontmaskering en Bijbels démasqué , door R. Huson.--Kleine geschiedenis van het begrip "niets" in de antieke wijsbegeerte (tot e met de Sofisten en Plato), door P. A. Meijer.--De structuur van opvoeden en opvoedkunde, door J. W. Mojet.--Individualiteit in de fysica, door M. D. (...) Stafleu. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong; II—Does Knowledge Entail Belief?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 21–36, https://doi.org/10.109.

What place has poetry in the teaching or reflection of ethicists? Even poetry that has no obvious political edge can play an important role in refining a poetics of the will, where will is understood at once as the motive power of action and as the seat of both our freedom and our bondage. Poems by W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, William Carols Williams, and others are examined against a background provided by the work of Erazim Kohák, H. (...) Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Ricoeur. A poetics of the will requires attention to affirmation, beauty, and wonder, but also to concrete embodiment, full recognition of the complex reality of persons and situations, and mature resistance to the temptation to righteousness and the seduction of despair. (shrink)

Ranging himself against philosophical and theological traditions that he considered “bankrupt,” William H. Poteat sought to set philosophy back on its feet by exemplifying the way one might reason philosophically from a different set of assumptions. His project can, in this respect, be usefully compared to that of F. H. Jacobi two centuries earlier. Poteat and Michael Polanyi offered attuned critiques of philosophical presuppositions and practices. Constructively, both were committed to bringing home the agent and knower who had been evacuated (...) by depersonalized and abstracted accounts of being and knowing. (shrink)

Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of (...) subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness, lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought. (shrink)

Children's consent to treatment remains a contentious topic, with confusing legal precepts and advice. This paper proposes that informed consent in children should be regarded as shared between children and their families, the balance being determined by implicit, developmentally based negotiations between child and parent--a "family rule" for consent. Consistent, operationalized procedures for ethically obtaining consent can be derived from its application to both routine and contentious situations. Therefore, use of the "family Rule" concept can consistently define negligent procedure in (...) obtaining consent from children, and could be used as a unifying framework in the development of new professional guidelines. A "guideline"-based approach to children's consent to treatment may offer greater individuality than a "rights"-based approach, though careful training and oversight will be needed for it to be effective. (shrink)