A number of writers have recently taken fresh looks at the many centuries-old ontological proof of Anselm. 1 Three of these writers seem to agree with me that traditional ways of treating this topic have been inadequate and that the proof, whether or not it is a sufficient reason for belief, is not without important bearings for philosophy of religion. These writers are Malcolm, Findlay, and Plantinga. With each of these I find considerable common ground, and they have (...) all indicated to me that they are aware of this. In the present article on the topic, however, I wish to discuss a fourth writer, who differs rather sharply from the other three and particularly from me. Since Hick's views are shared in certain respects by what I take to be a main stream of contemporary thought, particularly in Britain, it seems worth while to accept the challenge he offers. (shrink)

"What is value, moral or otherwise? What has positive value and what negative? Axiological ethics or moral value theory is concerned with such questions. In this monograph the author considers the writings of some of the most important exponents of axiological ethics, namely Brentano, Meinong, G. E. Moore, Hastings Rashdall, W. D. Ross, Scheler and Hartmann. He expounds their views clearly and sympathetically but not uncritically, and adds his own opinions about value theory. The reader will find this study full (...) of interest. It contributes to scholarship; is it widely known, for instance, how Scheler anticipated and criticised emotivists? Again, this study makes unpopular claims and argues for them cogently; it is the case, for example, that pp much attention has been lavished on the early chapters of Moore's Principia Ethica, which discuss the naturalistic fallacy, and too little on later chapters, which make Moore 'one of the prime founders of axiology'? In the last chapter Professor Findlay makes his own suggestions toward a theory of value and the reader has to consider the question: Is there a gap in modern moral philosophy which these suggestions help to fill?"-Publisher. (shrink)

A simple numerical procedure is presented for the problem of estimating the parameters of models for the distribution of eggs oviposited in a host. The modelling is extended to incorporate both host density and time dependence to produce a remarkably parsimonious structure with only seven parameters to describe a data set of over 3,000 observations. This is further refined using a mixed model to accommodate several large outliers. Both models show that the level of superparasitism declines with increasing host density, (...) and the rate declines over time. It is proposed that the differing behaviours represented by the mixed model may reflect a balance between behavioural strategies of different selective benefit. (shrink)

First published in 1967, The Transcendence of the Cave is the second in a series of Gifford Lectures on philosophical issues, and continues the themes of the first series entitled The Discipline of the Cave. In the opening chapters, J N Findlay sketches an ontology, an axiology and a theology which are ‘phenomenological’ in the sense of Husserl, as they attempt to show that a ‘firmament’ of logical and other values emerges out of the contingencies of first order liking (...) and interest. The synthesis of these values in an object having many paradoxical, mystical-religious properties is also a necessary outcome of this ‘logic’. In the later chapters, the author attempts to construct an orderly picture of other worldly experiences and their objects based solely on the premise that these experiences must be such as to resolve the many philosophical surds that plague us in this life. (shrink)

Philosophical themes as diverse as language, value, mind and God are among the topics discussed in this book, originally published in 1963. Considerably influential, there are contributions on Time, Camrbidge Philosophy, Doedelian Sentences, Morality by Convention and the Non-Existence of God. They reflect a gradual move from a position where the influence of Wittgenstein is paramount, to a position where there is considerable criticism of linguistic philosophy and a growing interest in the approaches of Hegel and the phenomenologists.

More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing - vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is on (...) seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking. The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarises progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world. Written by two leading vision scientists, this book will be valuable for vision researchers and psychology students, from undergraduate level upwards. (shrink)

Some relationships are within the family -- such as between parents and children, grandparents and children and between siblings -- while others are between friends. In some cases, these distinctions are blurred (Are short-term partners family members? Are family members seen as such when relations become unfriendly? Does divorce, if amicable, replace a family with a friendship?). Using quantitative, cutting-edge statistical analysis, in conjunction with a multi-disciplinary approach, the contributors to this volume address the contemporary state of and dynamics in (...) these various types of relationships, linking these to key rites of passage such as leaving home, marriage and childbirth, to see how these stand after a period of rapid social change. The book will be of interest to scholars in a broad range of disciplines, including sociology, social policy and economics. (shrink)

An interpretation of Plato's earlier dialogues which argues that the few cases of self-predication contained therein are acceptable simply as statements concerning universals and that therefore Plato is not vulnerable in these cases to the "third man argument".

First published in 1974, J.N. Findlay's classic work on Plato has now been re-issued.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

During active vision, the eyes continually scan the visual environment using saccadic scanning movements. This target article presents an information processing model for the control of these movements, with some close parallels to established physiological processes in the oculomotor system. Two separate pathways are concerned with the spatial and the temporal programming of the movement. In the temporal pathway there is spatially distributed coding and the saccade target is selected from a Both pathways descend through a hierarchy of levels, the (...) lower ones operating automatically. Visual onsets have automatic access to the eye control system via the lower levels. Various centres in each pathway are interconnected via reciprocal inhibition. The model accounts for a number of well-established phenomena in target-elicited saccades: the gap effect, express saccades, the remote distractor effect, and the global effect. High-level control of the pathways in tasks such as visual search and reading is discussed; it operates through spatial selection and search selection, which generally combine in an automated way. The model is examined in relation to data from patients with unilateral neglect. (shrink)

This paper undertakes two tasks. It will endeavour, first of all, to establish that there is a difficult discipline called Absolute-theory - Aristotle called it First Philosophy or Theology - which builds itself around the concept of a unique something which exists in an unqualified and necessary manner, and to which everything not itself attaches, or from which it in one manner or another derives. We shall try to distinguish the different strands or strata in the conception of an Absolute, (...) and shall then consider the alternative ways in which such a concept can be developed. For though, if there is or can be anything Absolute, it is one and unique and without rivals or alternatives, there are for us a large number of alternative ways of conceiving of what is absolute, some of which are arguably better and less exposed to antinomy than others. And of course there is always for us the alternative of not conceiving or not believing in any Absolute at all. And we shall briefly glance at the great historical dynasty of Absolutes: the infinitely arbitrary, anthropomorphic, of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition, the less arbitrary Aristotelian-Neoplatonic Absolute of Thomas Aquinas, the Substantial Absolute of Spinoza, the Leibnizian-Wolffian Absolute of which Kant made his Ideal of Pure Reason, the Upanishadic Absolute of Shanaracharya, the infinitely vacuous Absolute of Mahayana Buddhism, the Deistic and Materialistic Absolutes of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, the absolute Space-Time of modern physicists, the Aussersein of Alexius Meinong and the Logical Space of Ludwig Wittgenstein. If the construction of Absolutes is an unrewarding language-and thought-game, it is none the less one which practically all the more intense thinkers have tried to play. I shall next, in the second part of my paper, try to establish that Hegel is by far the subtlest and the most successful of all the Absolute-theorists. His whole philosophy may be regarded as an essay in Absolute-theory, in that it throughout does nothing but try out, modify or discard categories of thought and forms of being because they fail to measure up to an adequate conception of an Absolute. And in his vast rehearsal of categories and forms of being Hegel arguably works up to a conception of the Absolute which takes account of a far wider and richer array of issues, and forestalls a more varied assemblage of objections than any other exercise in Absolute-theory. Sometimes Hegel anticipates thought-moves that will occur long after his death: the moves, e.g., of John Stuart Mill regarding the Syllogism’s being a Petitio Principii, and inductive reasoning’s being really an inference from particulars to particulars. And it will be our contention, finally, that Hegel is by far the most successful of Absolutists, in that he, and he alone, has worked out a many-sided Logic which, whatever its imperfections, is the only sort of instrument with which Absolute-theory can be tackled. In arguing in this manner I shall be contributing to the main theme of this Congress, the nature of the Universe, for the Universe, I believe, is a very vague and degenerate sort of Absolute. (shrink)

By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

The present paper is a very hastily executed attempt to provide a philosophical account of personality within the framework of a more or less Platonic ontology. I am writing it because I believe the conscious person, the “soul” as it would have been called in an earlier thought-dispensation, to be one of the most interesting and pivotal of cosmic structures, one which, if dealt with in a careless or reachme-down manner, as a side-issue or queer offshoot of things not conceived (...) in its peculiar terms and manner, will throw one’s whole cosmic picture and system of fundamental categories out of joint. The conscious person may be an extremely rare, transitory, fortuitously produced phenomenon—there are increasing grounds for regarding it in this manner—but its modes of operation and some of its basic logical properties are so very extraordinary as perhaps to throw more light on the universe out of which it arises than the indefinitely numerous, unconscious, impersonal things which surround it on every side and which will with some probability ultimately engulf it. I am also writing it because I have come to entertain the conviction that what absolutely and unambiguously is, is more of the nature of a universal, a subsistent, an essence, something which is a Nature or Character itself, rather than anything which transitorily or inadequately embodies or exemplifies or is a case of it, and because I wish to accommodate these two profoundly held convictions to one another. My problem is the one Plato dealt with whenever, as in the Phaedo, Timaeus, and other writings, he tried to see how Soul, the source of motion in the changeable world, and itself internally changeable, can stand to essences of which it does not make sense to predicate intrinsic change. And it is also the issue dealt with by Hegel when he makes conscious Spirit the carrying out into full reality of the eternal Idea, and when he goes so far as to identify the Ego, which is the center of the conscious person, with absolute universality and negativity in its purest, most intransigent, all-sublating form. (shrink)

The goal of our target article was to review a number of emerging facts about the effects of limbic damage on memory in humans and animals, and about divisions within recognition memory in humans. We then argued that this information can be synthesized to produce a new view of the substrates of episodic memory. The key pathway in this system is from the hippocampus to the anterior thalamic nuclei. There seems to be a general agreement that the importance of this (...) pathway has previously been underestimated and that it warrants further study. At the same time, a number of key questions remain. These concern the relationship of this system to another temporal-lobe/diencephalic system that contributes to recognition, and the relationship of these systems to prefrontal cortex activity. (shrink)

For some time, the role of culture in language education within schools, universities and professional communication has received increasing attention. This article identifies two aporias in the discourse of intercultural communication : first, that it contains an unstated movement towards a universal consciousness; second, that its claims to truth are grounded in an implicit appeal to a transcendental moral signified.These features constitute IC discourse as ‘totality’, or as ‘metaphysics of presence’.The article draws on the work of Levinas ; and Derrida (...) to propose more considered ethical grounds for intercultural praxis. Contra a Hegelian impetus towards universal consciousness,we posit an irreducible distance and separation between the self and other. In so doing, not only are we able to supersede the field’s implicit appeal to the transcendental as a source of truth but also to counter perceptibly ‘exorbitant’ claims and actions of the intercultural other. In this vein, the article proposes a discourse ethics of responsibility by which it still becomes possible for a critical intercultural praxis to make value judgements and to take potentially transformative action vis-à-vis cultural acts that challenge the limits of intercultural tolerance and hospitality. (shrink)

IT is tempting to assume that an obvious way in which Aristotle determined his list of categories was to take a primary substance as subject and classify its predicates. The advantage of this suggestion is that it appears to give us the list of categories given at Categories 1b25 ff. For example, if we take Socrates as subject, then, when we predicate man of him, we get a predicate which is a substance. When we consider "Socrates is grammatical" we get (...) a predicate in quality or "how qualified". "Socrates is in the market place" gives us place or "where" and so on. (shrink)

To ensnare the sophist of the Sophist in a definition disclosing him as a purveyor of images and falsehoods Plato must block the sophistical defence that image and falsehood are self-contradictory in concept, for they both embody the proposition proscribed by Parmenides — ‘What is not, is’. It has been assumed that Plato regards this defence as depending on a reading of ‘what is not’ in its very strongest sense, where it is equivalent to ‘what is not in any way’ (...) or ‘nothing’. Likewise, the initial paradoxes of not-being are seen as requiring that to mē on be understood in this way, that later designated by Plato as the opposite of to on or ‘being’. On this interpretation, Plato's counter-strategy is to recognise a use of to mē on which is not opposed in this strict sense to being, but is indeed a part of it and is ‘being other than’. In a stimulating article, R. W. Jordan challenges this account. I shall briefly attempt to show that his objections are not decisive and that his own interpretation is open to question. Jordan makes the interesting suggestion that a distinction between two senses of not-being, where one is equivalent to nothing and one is not, dates from the middle dialogues — particularly from Republic V, where objects of agnoia are mēdamē onta and objects of doxa are both onta and mē onta. He concludes , ‘Malcolm's view, then, seems to amount to this: that Plato is now extending the moral he draws about objects of belief in the Republic to cover forms. Forms too now are seen to be both being and notbeing.’. (shrink)

First published in 1966, _The Discipline of the Cave_ is the first series of a course of Gifford lectures on philosophical issues.. J N Findlay’s lectures use the image of the Cave to show how familiarity is full of restrictions, and involves puzzles and discrepancies unable to be resolved or removed. Such philosophical perplexities may be a result of the misunderstanding and abuse of ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. They may also be a way of ‘drawing us towards (...) being’, providing proof of the absurdity of ordinary thought, speech and experience unless modified and added to in ways which may point beyond it. What may be called a mystical and otherworldly element may need to be introduced into or rendered explicit in all our experience in order to give a viable sense to the most commonplace human utterances and activities. (shrink)