In a recent paper, Jc Beall has employed what he calls ‘shriek rules’ in a putative solution to the long-standing ‘just false’ problem for glut theory. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, I distinguish the ‘just false’ problem from another problem, with which it is often conflated, which I will call the ‘exclusion problem’. Secondly, I argue that shriek rules do not help glut theorists with either problem.

The purpose of this book is to present unpublished papers at the cutting edge of research on dialetheism and to reflect recent work on the applications of the theory. It includes contributions from some of the most respected scholars in the field, as well as from young, up-and-coming philosophers working on dialetheism. Moving from the fringes of philosophy to become a main player in debates concerning truth and the logical paradoxes, dialetheism has thrived since the publication of Graham Priest’s (...) In Contradiction, and several of the papers find their roots in a conference on dialetheism held in Glasgow to mark the 25th anniversary of Priest’s book. The content presented here demonstrates the considerable body of work produced in this field in recent years. With a broad focus, this book also addresses the applications of dialetheism outside the more familiar area of the logical paradoxes, and includes pieces discussing the application of dialetheism in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In a series of exquisite examples that could only have been gathered by a professional philosopher with an extraordinary respect for young minds, Gareth...

Plato and Aristotle thought that philosophy begins in the perplexed recognition that there are significant puzzles one does not know how to deal with. Some such puzzles can be expressed in questions of the form, ‘How is it possible that p?’, e.g., ‘How is it possible that the world had an absolute beginning?’ I discuss an example of young children asking that last question and go on, with further examples, to make a plea for cultivating such questions as an (...) educational objective, whether the perplexity-expressing questions themselves be scientific, philosophical, or both. (shrink)

Extensive research has demonstrated that rs1360780, a common single nucleotide polymorphism within the FKBP5 gene, interacts with early-life stress in predicting psychopathology. Previous results suggest that carriers of the TT genotype of rs1360780 who were exposed to child abuse show differences in structure and functional activation of emotion-processing brain areas belonging to the salience network. Extending these findings on intermediate phenotypes of psychopathology, we examined if the interaction between rs1360780 and child abuse predicts resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the amygdala (...) and other areas of the salience network. We analyzed data of young European adults from the general population (N = 774; mean age = 18.76 years) who took part in the IMAGEN study. In the absence of main effects of genotype and abuse, a significant interaction effect was observed for rsFC between the right centromedial amygdala and right posterior insula (p <.025, FWE-corrected), which was driven by stronger rsFC in TT allele carriers with a history of abuse. Our results suggest that the TT genotype of rs1360780 may render individuals with a history of abuse more vulnerable to functional changes in communication between brain areas processing emotions and bodily sensations, which could underlie or increase the risk for psychopathology. (shrink)

This report, the first of the project, presents original research evidence based on 1,516 face-to-face interviews with young Syrian international protection beneficiaries and applicants, 18-32 years old, which were conducted in the UK, Lebanon and Greece, between April and October 2017. Key findings from this comparative analysis inform our policy recommendations concerning the settlement, training and skills provision for young forced migrants in the UK. Key Findings: - Young Syrian refugees in the UK have the highest levels (...) of skills and training, and are most eager to remain and contribute to the host country, compared with those in Greece and Lebanon. - Young Syrian refugees are faced with higher levels of unemployment in the UK than citizens, while many of them who are in employment are doing jobs for which they are over-qualified. - Refugees in the UK receive better support and have an overall more positive experience and evaluation of actors compared to those in Greece and Lebanon, but access to key provisions designed to enhance labour market participation remains patchy. - Syrian refugees who have been resettled to the UK report overall more positive experiences than those coming through the asylum route, despite higher levels of employment among the latter and the government supposedly taking the more vulnerable among the former. - Young Syrians in Scotland are better supported, and more positive about their engagement with people and institutions, although they are currently more distanced from re-integration into the labour market compared to those settled in England. (shrink)

Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher brings together groundbreaking essays by renowned American philosopher Gareth B. Matthews in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy in children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. In addition, contemporary scholars critically assess Matthews’ pioneering efforts and his legacy. Matthews (1929-2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy who had conversations with young children, discovering that they delight in philosophical puzzlement and that their philosophical thinking often enriched his (...) own understanding. Those conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which this book features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship, showing where he broke new ground and identifying developments and debates in the fields he helped to initiate. They take up pressing challenges, including biased idealizations of childhood in children’s literature; the tensions between teaching philosophy to, and doing philosophy with young people; the merits of theorizing childhood without theorizing children; and how professional philosophy at once desires and resists a return to childhood. This second volume in the Philosophy for Children Founders series is an important resource for philosophers, educators, and anyone interested in children’s philosophical thinking, developmental psychology, what it means to philosophize with children, the nature of childhood, and how children’s literature goes philosophical. It will guide and inspire those who share Matthews’ conviction that the impulse to philosophize begins in early childhood. (shrink)

This article highlights Gareth Matthews's contributions to the field of philosophy for young children, noting especially the inventiveness of his style of engagement with children and his confidence in children's ability to analyze perplexing issues, from cosmology to death and dying. I relate here my experiences in introducing philosophical topics to adolescents, to show how Matthews's work can be successfully extended to older students, and I recommend taking philosophy outside the university as a way to foster critical thinking (...) in young students and to improve the public status of the profession. (shrink)

Gareth Evans was arguably the finest philosopher of his generation; he died tragically young, but the work he completed has had a seismic impact on the philosophies of language and mind. In this volume an outstanding international team of contributors offer illuminating perspectives on Evans's groundbreaking work, paying tribute to his achievements and leading his ideas in new directions. Contributors Josi Luis Bermzdez, John Campbell, Quassim Cassam, E. J. Lowe, John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke, Ian Rumfitt, Ken Safir, Mark (...) Sainsbury. (shrink)

Gareth B. Matthews (1929–2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy whose conversations with young children led him to discover their penchant for philosophical thinking, which often enriched his own. Those conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which our book, Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher, features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy (...) in children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. They assess where he broke new ground and identify developments and debates in those fields. In the reviews that follow, Harry Brighouse, David Bakhurst, and Sheron Fraser-Burgess respond to Matthews’ original essays and those of the contemporary scholars. While recognizing Matthews’ significant contribution to advancing philosophy in the lives of children, all three reviewers indicate ways to push his agenda forward. We read Brighouse as calling for engagement with philosophy in media (including television and film) beyond classical and contemporary children’s literature. Bakhurst explicitly calls for further empirical study of children’s philosophical thinking to support more realistic conceptions of childhood and philosophy—including when philosophy might not be appropriate for children. Fraser-Burgess calls for an accounting of the ways that philosophy for children may reinscribe unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and of the ways it can be used to confront and combat them. (shrink)

Since the late 1960s, philosophy for children has become a global, multi-disciplinary movement involving innovations in curriculum, pedagogy, educational theory, and teacher education; in moral, social and political philosophy; and in discourse and literary theory. And it has generated the new academic field of philosophy of childhood. Gareth B. Matthews (1929-2011) traced contemporary disrespect for children to Aristotle, for whom the child is essentially a pre-intellectual and pre-moral precursor to the fully realized human adult. Matthews Matthews dubbed this the (...) “deficit conception of childhood” and wrote extensive critiques of its perpetuation in Jean Piaget’s stage model of cognitive development and in Lawrence Kholberg’s stage model of moral development. He published the first book (1994) in the field of philosophy of childhood and wrote a column of reviews of philosophically-oriented children’s books. He argued that even academic philosophers can benefit from the freshness and directness of children’s thinking. For Matthew Lipman (1923-2010) and Ann Margaret Sharp (1942-2010), the child is only potentially a philosophical agent and grows into becoming such by means of a philosophical education. Lipman invented the literary genre of children’s philosophical fiction, which systematically reconstructs key philosophical issues and positions in language accessible by children, attempts to help children recognize philosophical dimensions of their own experience, and models philosophical dialogue. Lipman and Sharp developed a protocol for a “community of philosophical inquiry,” in which people with diverse experiences, ideas and concerns dialogue together around a shared philosophical question, with the aim of forming reasonable, meaningful judgments about the matter. The early success of philosophy for children was due in part to its coincidence with the critical thinking movement in education, in which Lipman was an important figure. Its emphasis on ethics has justified its use as a program of ethics, character, and even religious education. It has also been used for civics education, because of how it instantiates democratic deliberation and power-sharing. At the same time, philosophy for children has been criticized by religious and social conservatives, developmental psychologists, and philosophers. Today, the diversity of approaches, aims, materials, and grounding theories of philosophy for children signifies different understandings of philosophy, childhood and education, which have become “essentially contested concepts” within the movement. Philosophy for children is no longer unified by an identifiable theory, purpose, pedagogy, method or curriculum, but is now used to further a number of disparate educational agendas. Shaun Gallagher’s (1992) heuristic of four schools of hermeneutics is helpful in understanding these competing agendas. Conservative hermeneutics is the attempt to devise methods of interpretation that uncover and preserve truth or original meaning without distortion or bias. This is consonant with the use of philosophy for children to help young people appropriate the fundamental questions, ideas and skills of (Western) philosophy as a resource for understanding the world and managing their own experience, and with the understanding critical thinking as a way of avoiding prejudice and approaching truth. Critical hermeneutics approaches interpretation—including teaching and learning—as a method of liberating the interpreter from the racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist, religiously fanatical, and other kinds of ideologies that commonly distort thinking, feeling and behavior. This is consonant with those who argue that the attributes of mutual criticism, inclusion, solidarity, self-regulation, and distributed power make the community of philosophical inquiry an ideal site for recognizing and overcoming ideology. Others find philosophy for children politically ineffectual due to the limited role of students and teachers in co-constructing the curriculum and its lack of an explicit component of political critique and action. Radical hermeneutics suggests that because every text is open to a plurality of meanings, the purpose of interpretation is not to artificially constrain that plurality but to play with the signs that constitute the text in order to achieve fresh insights. A radical hermeneutical strand is identifiable in the philosophy for children literature when scholars resist the idea that the aim of philosophical dialogue is to find consensus or to narrow down on the most reasonable conclusions. Moderate hermeneutics holds that the work of interpretation is the attempt to reach meaning or shared understanding in a process modeled on dialogue between the familiar and the strange. This is consonant with those who argue that philosophical traditions can still give meaning to (young) people’s lives, but that those traditions must be continually reinterpreted (including by children) in order to survive and flourish. Fifty-odd years since its inception, philosophy for children has deepened and diversified, both theoretically and as a field of practice. Perhaps the only point of agreement among (most) everyone in the movement is that children’s philosophical thinking, variously understood, is necessary for the realization of the intellectual, moral, and political agency the movement attributes to them. (shrink)

[1] Michael Gareth Justin Evans was born in London on May 12 th, 1946, to his parents Gwaldus and Justin Evans. He had an older brother Huw, an older sister Myfawny, and a younger sister Elaine. As a young student, Evans was both highly intelligent and careless. The final report from his form master at Granton Primary School says that "Gareth is so vigorous and impatient to get his work finished that he is subject to error. A (...) delightful boy!". (shrink)

Some people think that the impulse to philosophise begins in early childhood: Gareth Matthews, for instance, in his Philosophy and the Young Child . His book begins ‘TIM , while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’” ‘Tim's puzzle,’ he tells us, ‘is quintessentially philosophical. Tim has framed a question that calls into doubt a very ordinary notion in such a way as to make us wonder (...) whether we really know something that most of us unquestioningly assume we know.’. (shrink)

Using picture books as a means of initiating philosophical discussions with younger children is an idea that has occurred to a number of people involved in P4C/Philosophy in Schools in various parts of the world. Some went on to develop support materials to encourage teachers to go beyond reading picture books to/with their classes to drawing the students into a community of philosophical inquiry. Early examples include Karin Murris, Chris de Haan and colleagues, and myself in Australia, and Tom Wartenberg (...) in the USA. As well as Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, Tom’s work drew on the writings of Gareth Matthews, both in his 1980 book 'Philosophy and the Young Child', and his regular columns on the philosophy in picture books in the journal 'Thinking'. (shrink)

This essay explores the evolving systems ofjustz$5cation and morality that emerge fiom mother and child dialogues. Contrasting a mother's ethic of care with a surrounding cultural climate of violence, I argue that children are capable of providing insigljt to this seeming socialcontradiction.Ifocus on a series cfconversa- tionsI've had with my nowJiveyear oldson with regard to naturally occurringharm (i.e.yfloods,disease...) and human createdharm (i.e. war, violence,physical intimi- dation). I argue that my son's effortsto "makethe symbolic reap are consistent with philosopher Gareth (...) Matthews' (1980) claim that young children are capable of complexphilosophicalthinkingthoughitmaygodormantatabouteightornineyears of age. M y view is thatphilosophicalthinking between mother and child typifies the feminist ideal that respecful investigation can occur between two parties who are uneyual in terms of socialpower. Though my son is smaller, less experienced, and physically weaker, he has come to believe that these qualities will not be relevant in others' assessment of his explanations of the world. (shrink)

One of the most striking innovations in Aristotle’s philosophical writing is also one of its most characteristic features. That feature is Aristotle’s idea that terms central to philosophy, including ‘cause’ [aition], ‘good’, and even the verb ‘to be’, are, as he likes to put it, “said in many ways.” To be sure, philosophers before Aristotle give some evidence of having recognized the phenomenon of being said in many ways. Plato, in particular, suggests that things in this world that we call (...) “just” are only namesakes of the Just Itself. But, beyond that, homonymy seems to have been, even for Plato, no more than a source of ambiguity for wordplay. Aristotle is apparently the first philosopher to propose a taxonomy of homonymy and to view the identification and analysis of homonymies as a genuinely philosophical project. (shrink)

This book will be of great interest to philosophers of mind and epistemologists, historians of philosophy and their students, philosophers of religion, and ...

The ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion II continues to generate a remarkable store of sophisticated commentary and criticism. However, in our opinion, much of this literature ignores or misrepresents the elegant simplicity of the original argument. The dialogue below seeks to restore that simplicity, with one important modification. Like the original, it retains the form of a reductio, which we think is essential to the argument’s great genius. However, it seeks to skirt the difficult question of whether 'exists' is a (...) genuine predicate by appealing instead to a distinction between having only mediated causal powers and having unmediated causal powers. Pegasus has no unmediated causal powers, but he has mediated causal powers through the thoughts, depictions, and literature in which he figures. This distinction allows us to argue about the existence of God without begging any questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I support a hybrid form of expressivism called constructive ecumenical expressivism (CEE) which I have previously used (to attempt) to resolve the gamer’s dilemma. (Young, 2016. Resolving the gamer’s dilemma. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) In support of CEE, I argue that the various other attempts at either resolving, dissolving or resisting the dilemma are consistent with CEE’s moral framework. That is, with its way of explaining what a claim to morality is, with how moral norms are established, (...) with the role intuition is able to play in establishing these norms, and therefore with how the gamer’s dilemma can be resolved. I also demonstrate, more broadly, how CEE advocates robust relativism as a means of justifying the constructed moral norm’s normative credentials, and therefore how one society’s norm can be judged morally superior to another’s. (shrink)

What is often called Descartes' dream problem should perhaps be called Plato's dream problem instead. Certainly it can be found in Plato's Theaetetus at 158b–c. It can also be found in Cicero and, through Cicero's influence, in much of the work of St Augustine.

An application of Young's Habermasian critical theory of education to classroom communication problems of teachers in schools, with a special focus on the question/answer cycle and its educational role. The book uses classroom transcripts extensively in the analysis.

In L. Frank Baum's story, Ozma of Oz, which is a sequel to Baum's much more famous story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companion come upon a wound-down mechanical man bearing a label on which are printed the following words: Smith and Tinker's Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live As Dorothy and her companion are made to discover when they wind up this (...) man, he is indeed capable of doing all the things of which his label boasts—acting, speaking and even thinking. But as Tik-Tok himself insists, and no one in the story casts doubt on the matter, he is not alive. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of death by ancient Greek philosophers including Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. It suggests that Aristotle offered no cheerful optimism similar to Socrates in his “Apology” and did not provide any arguments about the immortality of the soul like Plato in “Phaedo.” What Aristotle attempted to do was to help us face immortality that can enhance our chances of living worthy lives.

Almost all of us would agree that the experience of art is deeply rewarding. Why this is the case remains a puzzle; nor does it explain why many of us find works of art much more important than other sources of pleasure. Art and Knowledge argues that the experience of art is so rewarding because it can be an important source of knowledge about ourselves and our relation to each other and to the world. The view that art is a (...) source of knowledge can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Horace. Artists as various as Tasso, Sidney, Henry James and Mendelssohn have believed that art contributes to knowledge. As attractive as this view may be, it has never been satisfactorily defended, either by artists or philosophers. Art and Knowledge reflects on the essence of art and argues that it ought to provide insight as well as pleasure. It argues that all the arts, including music, are importantly representational. This kind of representation is fundamentally different from that found in the sciences, but it can provide insights as important and profound as available from the sciences. Once we recognise that works of art can contribute to knowledge we can avoid thorough relativism about aesthetic value and we can be in a position to evaluate the avant-garde art of the past 100 years. Art and Knowledge is an exceptionally clear and interesting, as well as controversial, exploration of what art is and why it is valuable. It will be of interest to all philosophers of art, artists and art critics. (shrink)

THE PAPER DEFINES AND DEFENDS A PRINCIPLE OF COLLECTIVE SELF-DETERMINATION AS ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ORDERING OF A JUST SOCIETY. THAT PRINCIPLE SPECIFIES THAT INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPATE EQUALLY IN THE MAKING OF DECISIONS WHICH WILL GOVERN THEIR ACTIONS WITHIN INSTITUTIONS OF SPECIAL COOPERATION. THE PAPER ADOPTS THE STRATEGY OF ARGUING TO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE BY ASKING WHAT PRINCIPLES WOULD BE CHOSEN IN RAWLS' ORIGINAL POSITION. IT ARGUES THAT, CONTRARY TO THE THRUST IMPLICIT IN RAWLS AND OTHER LIBERAL THINKERS, PERSONS (...) IN THE ORIGINAL POSITION WOULD HAVE NO BASIS FOR DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN POLITICAL AND NON-POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL COOPERATION, AND THUS WOULD CHOOSE THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-DETERMINATION DIRECTLY AS APPLYING TO ALL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES OF SOCIAL COOPERATION. (shrink)

As John Rist presents Augustine, he was a man who “lived on the frontier between the ancient world and mediaeval Western Europe”. Among the the many who tried to transform ancient thought, Rist tells us, Augustine was “the most radical and the most influential”.

The Socratic elenchus is a method of philosophical analysis which Plato largely dropped in his middle and later writings, with two exceptions, Republic 1 and the Theaetetus. But it is a mistake to describe these as elenctic dialogues, which typically seek an analysis of a virtue in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, by questioning some alleged expert about its essence. Republic 1 does not follow this pattern: Thrasymachus fundamentally objects to such a procedure and the presuppositions underlying it, while (...) Glaucon and Socrates turn to developing their own theories of justice. The Theaetetus is likewise concerned with exploring and testing theories, in this case of knowledge. The Socratic elenchus cannot produce any philosophically interesting theories, let alone establish their truth, but at most refute them. As Plato increasingly sought out such theories, the kind of analysis at issue in the Socratic elenchus came to interest him less. (shrink)

Anthony Kenny says it is impossible to want what one already has and knows one has. We present a counter-example and then suggest that Kenny may have been misled by the fact that wanting expresses itself in goal-directed behavior. From the truism that one's behavior cannot be directed toward a goal that one knows one has already attained, Kenny may have been led to suppose that behavior directed toward an as yet unattained goal cannot express one's desire for what one (...) has and knows one has. (shrink)

Does a competent person suffering from a terminal illness or enduring an otherwise burdensome existence, who considers his life no longer of value but is incapable of ending it, have a right to be helped to die? Should someone for whom further medical treatment would be futile be allowed to die regardless of expressing a preference to be given all possible treatment? These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in this wide-ranging discussion of both the morality (...) of medically assisted death and the justifiability of making certain instances legal. A case is offered in support of the moral and legal permissibility of specified instances of medically assisted death, along with responses to the main objections that have been levelled against it. The philosophical argument is bolstered by empirical evidence from The Netherlands and Oregon where voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are already legal. (shrink)

Students and scholars will find that these essays provide impressive evidence of the persisting vitality of Augustine's thought.

By ‘the unity of psychology’ I mean something one might also express by saying that the psychology of human beings is part of the psychology of animals generally. Perhaps there are several different ways of trying to trace out the ramifications of the idea that psychology is one. A central consideration, I think, is likely to be some sort of principle of continuity up and down the scale of nature. The idea would be that up and down the scale of (...) animated or ensouled things there are always psychological continuities, never any strict discontinuity. If human beings can get angry, can want to get ahead in life, can see an illusion, can develop an Oedipus complex, then so can some lower animal do either the very same thing, something similar, or at least something analogous. (shrink)

In a recent paper Paul Vincent Spade suggests that, although the medieval doctrine of the modes of personal supposition originally had something to do with the rest of the theory of supposition, it became, by the 14th century, an unrelated theory with no question to answer. By contrast, I argue that the theory of the modes of personal supposition was meant to provide a way of making understandable the idea that a general term in a categorical proposition can be used (...) to refer to the individual things that fall under it. Once that idea had been made acceptable, truth conditons for the various forms of categorical proposition could be given without any specific appeal to the ideas of descent and ascent in terms of which the modes had been defined. (shrink)

Epistemology and metaphysics as described by Socrates is the crux of this article. Socrates here is all set to assess the wisdom of the candidates. He goes about arguing as to who is wiser and the various aspects of wisdom. He also elaborates on wisdom as a virtue. The article further harps on the idea of what counts as knowledge and also highlights the differences between Socratic Ignorance and Complete Ignorance.