W. J. Mander presents a history of metaphysics in nineteenth-century Britain. He traces the story of the development and interplay of three great schools of thought, the agnostics, the empiricists, and the idealists, and their different responses to the idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves.

W. J. Mander provides a brief introduction to and critical assessment of the thought of the greatest of the British Idealist philosophers, F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), whose work has been largely neglected in this century. After a general introduction to Bradley's metaphysics and its logical foundations, Mander shows that much of Bradley's philosophy has been seriously misunderstood. Mander argues that any adequate treatment of Bradley's thought must take full account of his unique dual inheritance from the traditions (...) of British empiricism and Hegelian rationalism. The scholarship of recent years is assessed, and new interpretations are offered of Bradley's views about truth, predication, and relations, and of his arguments for idealism. (shrink)

The Greek word eoikos can be translated in various ways. It can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. This book explores the philosophical exploitation of its multiple meanings by three philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato. It offers new interpretations of the way that each employs the term to describe the status of their philosophy, tracing the development of this philosophical use of eoikos from the fallibilism of Xenophanes through the deceptive cosmology of Parmenides to Plato's Timaeus. The (...) central premise of the book is that, in reflecting on the eoikos status of their accounts, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato are manipulating the contexts and connotations of the term as it has been used by their predecessors. By focusing on this continuity in the development of the philosophical use of eoikos, the book serves to enhance our understanding of the epistemology and methodology of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus. (shrink)

We suggest that there can be epistemologically significant reasons why certain mathematical structures - such as the Real numbers - are more important than others. We explore several contexts in which considerations bearing on the choice of a fundamental numerical domain might arise. 1) Set theory. 2) Historical cases of extension of mathematical domains - why were negative numbers resisted, and why should we accept them as part of our fundamental numerical domain? 3) Using fewer reals in physics, without really (...) noticing. (shrink)

Ryan, Jennie A current search of reliable internet sources gives the present number of recognised major world religions as somewhere between twenty two and twenty five. These religions have approximately 6.9 billion adherents. Recent meta-analysis of a range of surveys into non-belief in 'God' has reported that between 7% and 10% of the world's population identifies as non-theistic . Out of the top fifty countries with the largest percentage of self-professed atheists, , close to 80% are developed, democratic, mostly European (...) countries, with high standards of public healthcare and accessible food, water and housing. (shrink)

In Laboratory Epistemologies, Jenny Boulboullé examines the significance of hands-on experiences in contemporary life science laboratories. Addressing the relationship between contemplation and manipulation in epistemology, Boulboullé combines participant observations in molecular genetics labs and microbiological cleanrooms with a long durée study of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes' key epistemological text Meditations on First Philosophy, reframing the philosopher as a hands-on knowledge maker. With this reading, Boulboullé subverts the pervasive modern conception of the disembodied knower (...) and puts the hands-on experimenter at the heart of life sciences research. In so doing, she contributes a theoretical model to understanding how life processes on cellular and molecular levels is manually produced in today's techno-scientific spaces. By reassessing the Cartesian legacy and arguing that epistemology should be grounded in the standpoint of a hands-on practitioner, Boulboullé offers the philosophical and historical groundwork to understand and study contemporary life sciences research as multisensory embodied practices. (shrink)

Various Value-Conscious Design frameworks have recently emerged to introduce moral and ethical intelligence into business and technical design contexts, with the goal of proactively influencing the design of technologies to account for moral and ethical values during the conception and design process. Two attempts to insert ethical intelligence into technical design communities to influence the design of technologies in ethical- and value-conscious ways are described, revealing discouraging results. Learning from these failed attempts, the article identifies three key challenges of pragmatic (...) engagement with technical design communities: confronting competing values; identifying the role of the values advocate; and the justification of a value framework. Addressing these challenges must become a priority if one is to be successful in pragmatically engaging with real-world business and design contexts to bring moral and ethical intelligence to bear in the design of emerging information and communication technologies. (shrink)

Stuart, Jennie Review of: My year without meat, by Richard Cornish, Melbourne University Press 2016, 185 pp.

Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher both celebrated and reviled, is among the prominent voices in contemporary Italian thought today. His work, which touches upon fields as diverse as aesthetics and biopolitics, is often understood within a framework of Aristotelian potentiality. With this incisive critique, Doussan identifies a different tendency in the philosopher's work, an engagement with the problem of time that is inextricably bound up with language and visuality. Founded in his early writings on metaphysics and continuing to his present occupation (...) with inoperativity, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben's Philosophy forges an original path through Agamben's extensive commentary on the linguistic and the visual to illuminate the recurrent temporal theme of capture and evasion the cat-and-mouse game that bears the foundational violence of not just representation but concept-formation itself. In the process, Doussan both reveals its limit and establishes a ground for future engagements. (shrink)

In the fields of metaphysics and epistemology, ethics and political thought, idealism can generate controversy and disagreement. This title is part of the Idealism series, which finds in idealism new features of interest and a perspective which is germane to our own philosophical concerns.

This book presents a history of the volitional theory of causation—the philosophical proposal that volition, or will, of the same or broadly the same stamp as that which we experience in our own deliberate and voluntary doings, should be taken as the basis for all causality. Few today know much about the volitional theory of causation, and even fewer have given it any serious attention. But if current opinion regards this suggestion as an unusual one, of minor importance, the historical (...) record shows otherwise, revealing that it is a theory which has been proposed and developed again and again throughout the modern era. Its obscurity is only a recent phenomenon. Starting at the beginning of the Early Modern period and progressing right up modern times, the historical discussion takes in both supporters and critics, as well as both famous and less well-known figures, to tell the story of a long-running debate which contemporary history of philosophy has forgotten. (shrink)

Stuart, Jennie Review(s) of: Hands off not an option! The reminiscence museum mirror of a humanistic care philosophy, by Professor Dr Hans Marcel Becker assisted by Inez van den Dobbelsteen- Becker and Topsy Ros. Eburon Academic Publishers, Delft, 2011 272 pp.

Stuart, Jennie Review of: Norman Haire and the study of sex, by Diana Wyndham, Sydney University Press, 2012,.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

La question qui anime tout ce travail est de savoir comment la philosophie peut se rendre digne du retour aux choses memes. Chez Merleau-Ponty, ce retour implique, de prime abord, une critique vigoureuse de la pensee representative. La phenomenologie merleau-pontienne nous enseigne que la perception, ou plus precisement l'aisthesis, precede le domaine de la representation. C'est donc a l'aisthesis que la phenomenologie doit remonter. Et c'est la tout l'interet d'une ontologie de la peinture qui se demarque profondement d'une ontologie de (...) la representation. Or, l'etude de Jenny Slatman montre clairement que ce retour aux choses memes ne s'acheve pas simplement dans une philosophie de l'art. En effet, l'auteur developpe la these, a travers une lecture rigoureuse de l'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty, selon laquelle le retour aux choses memes resulte en une transformation de l'expression philosophique. Comparable a une oeuvre d'art, l'oeuvre ou l'expression de la philosophie ne devrait pas s'enfermer dans des concepts figes. Mais grace a la force de la metaphore, le discours philosophique peut rester a jamais ouvert et en mouvement perpetuel. (shrink)