Propositional attitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to view propositional attitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in which propositional attitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility that propositional attitudes may be transparent, (...) just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent. (shrink)

This comment on the case presented in ‘Cholera and Nothing More’ argues that the physicians at this public-health centre did not have an ordinary clinician's obligations to promote the health of the people who came to them for care, as they were instead set up to serve a laudable and urgent public-health goal, namely, controlling a cholera outbreak. It argues that, nonetheless, these physicians did have some limited moral duties to care for other diseases they encountered—some ancillary-care duties—arising from their (...) voluntarily entering into a kind of intimate relationship with the patients they took in, one in which those patients effectively waive certain rights to bodily and medical privacy. (shrink)

In this paper H. S. Harris argues that it is misguided to suggest that Hegelrsquo;s philosophical project was a dialectical illusion generated by his historical situation and that he would never have believed that his vision was achievable if he had been faced with the world that we face today. Not only does Harris proclaim himself to be a Hegelian, he claims that Hegel would today also remain a Hegelian. He goes on to argue that despite the fragmentation of the (...) twentieth century and the apparent collapse of the vision articulated in the French Revolution, Hegelrsquo;s thinking continues to be relevant because although his philosophy is the lsquo;comprehension of onersquo;s timersquo;, Hegel also produces a philosophy that is out of time and somehow final.br /. (shrink)

For me personally the year 1945 is significant because it marked the beginning of my own academic career. In that year I matriculated at Oxford as a candidate for the B.A. in Literae Humaniores. For Hegel studies it is significant for a different reason. It is the year in which Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies appeared. Popper’s book contributed nothing to the understanding of Hegel - M. B. Foster’s Political Philosophy of Plato and Hegel, which appeared ten years earlier, (...) is much more important in that respect - but it sealed in amber, so to speak, the image of Hegel which had become canonical for the liberal generation whose public conscience was Bertrand Russell. It marked the nadir of Hegel’s reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world.. (shrink)

This commentary is an attempt to sharpen some of the issues raised in the paper and thereby increase the generality of the proposal. Some implications of an exact definition of behavior for strategies of measurement and hence behavioral variability are discussed. The role of both respondent and operant behavior in natural selection is emphasized.