Karl Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His criticism of induction and his falsifiability criterion of demarcation between science and non-science were major contributions to the philosophy of science. Popper's broader philosophy of critical rationalism comprised a distinctive philosophy of social science and political theory. His critique of historicism and advocacy of the open society marked him out as a significant philosopher of freedom and reason. This book sets out the historical and intellectual contexts (...) in which Popper worked, and offers an overview and diverse criticisms of his central ideas. The volume brings together contributors with expertise on Popper's work, including people personally associated with Popper, specialists on the topics treated, and scholars with special interests in aspects of Popper's work. (shrink)

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories 'science' and 'religion'; the role of publishing and (...) education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible. (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)

This work makes available to readers without specialized training in mathematics complete proofs of the fundamental metatheorems of standard (i.e., basically ...

The Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky was immersed in theater and the arts through much of his life, collaborating with scholars of the psychology of acting, including Konstantin Stanislavski’s close confidante and long-time editor Liubov Gurevich, on terms and theories expressed in his historically defining text, An Actor’s Work. This article connects linguistic, theoretical, and methodological aspects of Stanislavski’s work with Vygotsky’s quest to develop a new psychology, finding its apogee in the works of his final years, especially after he (...) gained access to an extended draft of Stanislavski’s chapters. As Vygotsky’s theories continue to influence the field of psychology, this article looks to provide a guidepost for refining understanding of Vygotsky’s theories based on archival evidence and a close reading of contemporary translations of Vygotsky’s major works. (shrink)

If faraway peoples have different ideas from our own, is this because they have different mentalities? Did our remote ancestors lack logic? The notion of distinct mentalities has been used extensively by historians to describe and explain cultural diversity. Professor Lloyd rejects this psychologising talk of mentalities and proposes an alternative approach, which takes as its starting point the social contexts of communication. Discussing apparently irrational beliefs and behaviour, he shows how different forms of thought coexist in a single culture (...) but within conventionally defined contexts. (shrink)

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

Darwin himself suggested the idea of generalizing the core Darwinian principles to cover the evolution of social entities. Also in the nineteenth century, influential social scientists proposed their extension to political society and economic institutions. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have hindered the realization of the powerful potential in this longstanding idea. Some critics confuse generalization with analogy. Others mistakenly presume that generalizing Darwinism necessarily involves biological reductionism. This essay outlines the types of phenomena to which a generalized Darwinism applies, and (...) upholds that there is no reason to exclude social or economic entities. (shrink)

We examine the unique nature of agency problems within publicly traded family firms by investigating the earnings management decision of dominant family owners relative to non-family. To do so, we draw upon literature demonstrating that family owners are loss averse with respect to the family’s socioemotional wealth, or the affective endowment derived from firm ownership and control. Our theory and findings suggest that potential reputational consequences of earnings management lead family principals to engage in less of this practice relative to (...) non-family firms, and that founder family firms are less likely than non-founder family firms to use earnings management. Moreover, the family-firm effect varies with the firm size, the degree of CEO entrenchment, and the firm’s stock structure. We provide important insights regarding differences between family and non-family principals in the use of unethical accounting practices, thereby extending agency theory and advancing an underdeveloped research area. (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)

Chomsky’s highly influential Syntactic Structures ( SS ) has been much praised its originality, explicitness, and relevance for subsequent cognitive science. Such claims are greatly overstated. SS contains no proof that English is beyond the power of finite state description (it is not clear that Chomsky ever gave a sound mathematical argument for that claim). The approach advocated by SS springs directly out of the work of the mathematical logician Emil Post on formalizing proof, but few linguists are aware of (...) this, because Post’s papers are not cited. Chomsky’s extensions to Post’s systems are not clearly defined, and the arguments for their necessity are weak. Linguists have also overlooked Post’s proofs of the first two theorems about effects of rule format restrictions on generative capacity, published more than ten years before SS was published. (shrink)

Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not . In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been (...) displayed for several seconds. By controlling the visual saliency of the objects the experiment eliminates the possibility that the incongruency effect is dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed objects. A model of scene perception is suggested whereby attention is unnecessary for the partial recognition of an object that delivers sufficient information about its visual characteristics for the viewer to know that the object is improbable in that particular scene, and in which full identification requires foveal inspection. (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)

In a recent paper, while discussing the role of the notion of analyticity in Carnap’s thought, Howard Stein wrote: “The primitive view–surely that of Kant–was that whatever is trivial is obvious. We know that this is wrong; and I would put it that the nature of mathematical knowledge appears more deeply mysterious today than it ever did in earlier centuries – that one of the advances we have made in philosophy has been to come to an understanding of just ∗I (...) am grateful to audiences at the Steinfest, University of Chicago, May 21-23, 1999, and at the Philosophy of Mathematics Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Feb. 4-6, 2000, and especially to Stewart Shapiro and Tony Anderson, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. (shrink)

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)

At Cratylus 385b–c, Plato appears to argue that names have truth-value. Critics have almost universally condemned the argument as fallacious. Their case has proven so compelling that it has driven editors to recommend moving or removing the argument from its received position in the manuscripts. I argue that a close reading of the argument reveals it commits no fallacy, and its purpose in the dialogue justifies its original position. I wish to vindicate the manuscript tradition, showing that the argument establishes (...) that there is subject matter for investigation, and there is a correctness of names. (shrink)

Parece que san Agustín, en sus "sermones ad populum" proporciona muy poca información concreta sobre las realidades sociales de riqueza y pobreza. El artículo examina esta información para comentar la importancia que tenía para Agustín el aspecto social de la pobreza.

Demonic composition, demonic refinement and demonic union are alternatives to the usual ‘angelic’ composition, angelic refinement (inclusion) and angelic (usual) union defined on binary relations. We first motivate both the angelic and the demonic via an analysis of the behaviour of non-deterministic programs, with the angelic associated with partial correctness and demonic with total correctness, both cases emerging from a richer algebraic model of non-deterministic programs incorporating both aspects. Zareckiĭ has shown that the isomorphism class of algebras of binary relations (...) under angelic composition and inclusion is finitely axiomatized as the class of ordered semigroups. The proof can be used to establish that the same axiomatization applies to binary relations under demonic composition and refinement, and a further modification of the proof can be used to incorporate a zero element representing the empty relation in the angelic case and the full relation in the demonic case. For the signature of angelic composition and union, it is known that no finite axiomatization exists, and we show the analogous result for demonic composition and demonic union by showing that the same axiomatization holds for both. We show that the isomorphism class of algebras of binary relations with the ‘mixed’ signature of demonic composition and angelic inclusion has no finite axiomatization. As a contrast, we show that the isomorphism class of partial algebras of binary relations with the partial operation of constellation product and inclusion (also a ‘mixed’ signature) is finitely axiomatizable. (shrink)

In responding to an essay by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer about photographs taken in the streets of Chernivitsi in the 1940s, and thus in the midst of the Holocaust, this paper seeks to link their concerns to a broader consideration of photography as a modern phenomenon. In the process, the paper provides a brief history of street photography, a genre virtually ignored in standard histories of the photographic medium. The author suggests that Hirsch and Spitzer’s paper bravely reminds us (...) that our fascination with photographs is based not on truth, but on a combination of desire and faith . Their account of street photography in Czernowitz thereby amounts to an interpretation of photographs as dynamic modes of apprehension rather than as static objects from the past that veridically represent it. It is precisely this aspect of photographs that makes them such unusually complicated, ambiguous, and incongruous historical objects. (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.

After some introductory remarks on "experimental metaphysics", a brief survey of the current situation concerning the major types of hidden-variable theories and the inexistence proofs is presented. The category of stochastic, contextual, local theories remains open. Then the main features of a logical analysis of "locality" are sketched. In the deterministic case, a natural "light-cone determination" condition helps bridge the gap that has existed between the physical requirements of the special theory of relativity and formal conditions used in proving the (...) Bell -Wigner theorem. Natural generalization to the stochastic type, taking account of the distinction between epistemic and physical probabilities, leads to a series of independence claims constituting some significant limitations on generalized Bell theorems. In particular, the conditional stochastic independence requirement is seen both to go beyond the demand of compliance with the STR and to be a genuine necessity in deriving any Bell theorem for the stochastic case. The conclusion is also supported that, if determinism is given up, the Bell theorems and experiments do not pose an additional obstacle to unifying relativity theory and quantum mechanics beyond what is already posed by the "instantaneous" collapse of the wave function. (shrink)

There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently dropped: he had not (...) faced the problem. Heidegger had faced the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.... Only a great thinker could help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance, of course, is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence—of who is competent to judge. StraussHeidegger conceals nothing. He does not lie. He says what he really thinks.JanicaudIt is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him. LevinasOnly once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken about what really matters to me.HeideggerFor a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find. MachiavelliThe `doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it. HeideggerBut for those on the outside everything is in parables; so that they may see but not perceive, and hearing, they may hear but not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them. Mark 4:12“Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?”... “I would have, had you remained silent.”BoethiusThe same goes for Heidegger: It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.Althusser. (shrink)