In the usual description of space and time, particles are represented by continuous world lines. We replace these world lines by discrete rows of points, obtaining a locally finite, partially ordered set. The “distances” between points along these discrete world lines, and also the “distances” between different world lines, are measured not simply as the distances within the space-time manifold in which the partially ordered set happens to be embedded, but rather in terms of the partially ordered set itself. It (...) is found that variations in the density of points of the partially ordered set produce corresponding variations in the scale of “distances” within the set. These variations produce a gravitational effect which is similar to that of the general theory of relativity. (shrink)

Societies function on the basis of rules. These rules, rather like the rules of the road, coordinate the activities of individuals who have a variety of goals and purposes. Whether the rules work well or ill, and how they can be made to work better, is a matter of major concern. Appropriately interpreted, the working of social rules is also the central subject matter of modern political economy. This book is about rules - what they are, how they work, and (...) how they can be properly analysed. The authors' objective is to understand the workings of alternative political institutions so that choices among such institutions can be more fully informed. Thus, broadly defined, the methodology of constitutional political economy is the subject matter of The Reason of Rules. The authors have examined how rules for political order work, how such rules might be chosen, and how normative criteria for such choices might be established. (shrink)

Geoffrey Leech stresses the contribution of semantics to the understanding of practical problems of communication and concept-manipulation in modern society.

Geoffrey Lloyd engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilizations that is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we still face today. These include, in philosophy of science, the question of the incommensurability of paradigms, the debate between realism and relativism or constructivism, and between correspondence and coherence conceptions of truth. How far is it possible to arrive at an understanding of alien systems of belief? Is it possible (...) to talk meaningfully of 'science' and of its various constituent disciplines, 'astronomy' 'geography' 'anatomy' and so on, in the ancient world? Are logic and its laws universal? Is there one ontology - a single world - to which all attempts at understanding must be considered to be directed? When we encounter apparently very different views of reality, how far can that be put down to a difference in conceptions of what needs explaining, or of what counts as an explanation, or to different preferred modes of reasoning or styles of inquiry? Do the notions of truth and belief represent reliable cross-cultural universals? In another area, what can ancient history teach us about today's social and political problems? Are the discourses of human nature and of human rights universally applicable? What political institutions do we need to help secure equity and justice within nation states and between them? Lloyd sets out to answer all these questions, and to argue that the study of the science and culture of ancient Greece and China provided a precious resource in order to advance a wealth of modern debates. (shrink)

A team of renowned philosophers and a new generation of thinkers come together to offer the first book-length examination of the relationship between philosophical anthropology and animal studies.

I argue that the effectiveness of forgiveness in the healing of relationships is dependent on both the givers and recipients of forgiveness understanding that once it has been granted, forgiveness is not normally able to be retracted. When we forgive, we make a firm commitment not to return to our former state of moral resentment against the offender, replacing it by good-will. This commitment can be broken only where the forgiving party makes some significant cognitive adjustment to her appraisal of (...) either the offender or the offence, believing that her original forgiveness was granted in error. I reject the view that forgiveness can lapse or be withdrawn on the basis of a return of hurt or disappointed feelings, arguing that these do not amount to a restoration of the resentment that is extinguished when forgiveness is granted. I contend that a person who ‘forgives’ and later takes back that ‘forgiveness’ because certain negative feelings have returned either did not genuinely forgive in the first place or shows that she has not fully grasped the nature of forgiveness. (shrink)

This book brings together several internationally known authors with conflicting views on the subject, providing a lively and informative overview of this...

COVID-19 has necessitated inquiry into the capacity of technology to build learning communities to solve problems beyond proximal boundaries. Platforms like Zoom offer pathways for communication and content-delivery, but little stimulus for collective online outcomes (projects/learning-objects/discussion forums). We aim to examine how monetized platforms fit within Marcuse’s technological rationality and its capacity to exercise social control. This owes to dominance of aspects of technology related to providing content rather than how we direct agency towards using it. Such control is reminiscent (...) of influence exercised by portals like television and radio in the mid-1900’s. We suggest Habermas’ communicative rationality using technology can foster critical thinking in online education. We often assume technology is the basis for change in classrooms. As Marcuse says, this enables technology to exact control upon us, and fragment outcomes obtained from using it to learn, warranting creation of new tools. Integrating bottom-up ways of using technology into existing frameworks can mitigate fragmentation of the public sphere resulting from industrialized online education. Fragmentation becomes pervasive with migrating classes online. We provide a framework/design to better encourage critical reflection in online learning communities during unprecedented times such as the era of COVID-19. (shrink)

In this paper I defend and develop Bernard Williams’ claim that the ‘constitutive thought’ of regret is ‘something like “how much better if it had been otherwise”’. An introductory section on cognitivist theories of emotion is followed by a detailed investigation of the concept of ‘agent-regret’ and of the ways in which the ‘constitutive thought’ might be articulated in different situations in which agents acknowledge casual responsibility for bringing about undesirable outcomes. Among problematic cases discussed are those in which agents (...) have caused harm through no fault of their own, or have been constrained to choose the lesser of two evils or to act against their moral values. R. Jay Wallace’s ‘bourgeois predicament’ and related cases, in which we recognize that our present advantages have flowed from regrettable antecedents, further show that regret is often not a simple emotion, and it is argued that conflicted regrets are sometimes unavoidable. Finally, the paper looks at Descartes’ account of regret as a form of sadness engendered by the recollection of irrecoverable happy experiences, to which the ‘constitutive thought’ does not readily apply. It is suggested that what Descartes is discussing is a different genre of emotion for which ‘nostalgia’ might be a better name. (shrink)

Moral knowledge, to the extent anyone has it, is as much a matter of knowing how -- how to act, react, feel and reflect appropriately -- as it is a matter of knowing that -- that injustice is wrong, courage is valuable, and care is due. Such knowledge is embodied in a range of capacities, abilities, and skills that are not acquired simply by learning that certain things are morally required or forbidden or that certain abilities and skills are important.1 (...) To lose sight of this fact, to focus exclusively on questions concerning what is commonly called propositional knowledge, is to lose one's grip on (at least one crucial aspect of) the intimate connection between morality and action. At the same time, insofar as it suggests that moral capacities can be exhaustively accounted for by appeal to peoples' cognitive states, to focus on propositional knowledge is to invite an overintellectualized picture of those capacities. No account of moral knowledge will be adequate unless it does justice to the ways in which knowing right from wrong, and good from bad, is not simply a matter of forming the correct beliefs but is a matter of acquiring certain abilities to act, react, feel, and reflect appropriately in the situations in which one finds oneself. And this means a satisfying treatment of moral epistemology must give due attention to what's involved in knowing how to be moral. (shrink)

When economists pay homage to the wisdom of the distant past it is more likely that a work two decades old is being admired than one two centuries old. Economics is a science, and the sciences are noteworthy for their digestion and assimilation of the work of previous generations. Contributions remain only as accretions to the accepted body of knowledge; the writings and the writers disappear almost without trace. A conspicuous exception to this rule of professional cannibalization is Adam Smith. (...) Since 1776 he has not lacked for honors that have escaped even his most illustrious peers. Who, after all, wears a David Ricardo necktie? So to the author of The Wealth of Nations, all praise! (shrink)

Keynes always intended to write 'footnotes' to his masterwork _The General Theory_, which would take account of the criticisms made of it and allow him to develop and refine his ideas further. However, a number of factors combined to prevent him from doing so before his death in 1946. A wide range of Keynes scholars - including James Tobin, Paul Davidson and Lord Skidelsky - have written here the 'footnotes' that Keynes never did.

Examining Thomas Hill Green's moral philosophy, Thomas defends a radically new perception of Green as an independent thinker rather than a devoted partisan of Kant or Hegel. Green's moral philosophy, argues Thomas, includes a widely misunderstood defense of free will, an innovative model of deliberation that rejects both Kantian and Humean conceptions of practical reason, a barely recognized theory of character, and an account of moral objectivity that involves no dependence on religion--all of which yield a coherent body of moral (...) philosophy that raises important problems neglected in contemporary ethics. (shrink)

Evils, both large and small, are a constant feature of human life. This book is about responding to them and in particular about responding to moral evils, that is, those produced by the deliberate acts of human beings. Prominent in our repertoire of responses to moral evil are forgiveness and punishment, and these, with the numerous conceptual and moral problems they raise, are at the heart of the study in this book. After discussing the idea of evil, Scarre turns to (...) the meaning of forgiveness and the conditions for granting it. He defends a broadly utilitarian approach that stresses the role of forgiveness in repairing the damage that has been caused by injurious or offensive behaviour. Scarre then considers the controversial virtue of mercy and the propriety of revengeful behaviour and resentful attitudes. Finally, he deals with the purpose and justification of judicial punishment, paying particular regard to the appropriate treatment of war criminals. In this timely and sensitively written book, Scarre pays close attention to the existing literature and appraises both contemporary and classical contributions to the debate. This book makes an original contribution to an area of ethical thought that has been attracting an increasing amount of attention from philosophers, jurists and political thinkers. (shrink)

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of (...) studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of forgiveness has mainly focused on cases in which victims and offenders are known to each other. But it commonly happens that a victim brings an offender under a definite description but does not know to which individual this applies. I explore some of the conceptual and moral issues raised by the phenomenon of forgiveness in circumstances in which identification is incomplete, tentative or even mistaken. Among the conclusions reached are that correct and precise identification of the offending (...) individual is not essential for forgiveness to take place; that an offender can, under certain strict conditions, be said to be forgiven by proxy where the victim has misidentified the offender and ‘forgiven’ the wrong person; and that proxy forgiveness of this sort is not subject to the objections commonly levelled against ‘proxy’ or ‘third-party forgiveness.’. (shrink)

In Morality, Bernard Gert argues that the fundamental demands of morality are well articulated by ten distinct, and relatively simple, rules. These rules, he holds, are such that any person, no matter what her circumstances or interests, would be rational in accepting, and guiding her choices by, them. The rules themselves are comfortably familiar (e.g. “Do not kill,” “Do not deceive,” “Keep your promises”) and sit well as intuitively plausible. Yet the rules are not, Gert argues, to be accepted merely (...) because they are intuitively attractive, nor because they are already widely recognized, but because they stand as the only set of rules that can qualify as appropriately acceptable to all rational beings. (shrink)

Because commemorations of historic events say as much about the present as the past, it is important to think carefully about how and why we should remember the Great War in the centenary year of its outbreak. Commemoration must not be allowed to degenerate into mere mass entertainment, thoughtless celebration of martial valour, an occasion for chauvinism, or an advertisement for the merits of war as a means of settling international disputes. More respectable reasons for commemorating the Great War are (...) that it provides opportunities to learn from past mistakes, to reaffirm some common core values, and to pay our respects to those who died in their country’s service. I argue, however, that each of these justifications raises serious problems of interpretation and application, and that careful thought and moral sensitivity are needed if our efforts at commemoration are not to send out the wrong messages. (shrink)

Together with relativity theory, quantum mechanics stands as the conceptual foundation of modern physics. It forms the basis by which we understand the minute workings of the subatomic world. But at its core lies a paradox--it is unmeasurable. This book presents a powerful and energetic new approach to the measurement dilemma.

One of the consequences of the public outcry over the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre was the establishment of a Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University. The photogenic ‘Lie Detector Man’, Leonarde Keeler, was the laboratory’s poster boy, and his instrument the jewel in the crown of forensic science. The press often depicted Keeler gazing at a female suspect attached to his ‘sweat box’, a galvanometer electrode in her hand, a sphygmomanometer cuff on her arm and a rubber pneumograph (...) tube strapped across her breasts. Keeler’s fascination with the deceptive charms of the female body was one he shared with his fellow lie detector pioneers, all of whom met their wives – and in William Marston’s case, his mistress too – through their engagement with the instrument. Marston employed his own ‘Love Meter’, as the press dubbed it, to prove that ‘brunettes react far more violently to amatory stimuli than blondes’. In this article, I draw on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and pleasure to argue that the female body played a pivotal role in establishing the lie detector’s reputation as an infallible and benign mechanical technology of truth. (shrink)

It has sometimes been claimed that the perceived badness of an act can in some circumstances, or for some agents, be a reason for performing it. The present paper challenges this claim, arguing that it is hard to make sense of the idea that a negative evaluation of an action can provide an intelligible reason for doing it. Apparent counter‐examples are discussed and dismissed and the paper concludes with some general reflections on the relationship between evaluation and motivation.

This is the first book to take nursing ethics beyond stock 'moral concepts' to a critical examination of the fundamental assumptions underlying the very nature of nursing. It takes as its point of departure the difficulties nurses experience practising within the confines of a bioethical model of health and illness and a hierarchical, technocratic health care system. The contributors go on to deal openly and honestly with controversial issues faced by nurses, such as euthanasia and HIV.

Moral philosophers have mostly condemned the condonation of a bad act as being close to complicity in wrongdoing or, at best, as indicative of a lax moral conscience. I argue, in contrast, that condoning a wrongful act is sometimes not only permissible but positively virtuous. After considering the nature of condonation, I describe a range of circumstances in which it may be an appropriate response to wrongdoing, expressing such virtues as compassion and mercifulness, tolerance of human frailty, a love of (...) amity, and a proper respectfulness for others’ autonomy as moral agents. (shrink)