The original contributions to this Royal Institute of Philosophy collection are centrally concerned with ethics, but from a wide variety of perspectives. The essays, written by authors of great distinction, range from the analytic and theoretical to the applied, touching such topical and hotly-debated issues as what constitutes morality in political life, the relation between education and ethical standards, and whether morality can indeed be defined. The volume will provide stimulating reading for scholars and students alike.

Pezdek and Lam [Pezdek, K. & Lam, S. . What research paradigms have cognitive psychologists used to study “False memory,” and what are the implications of these choices? Consciousness and Cognition] claim that the majority of research into false memories has been misguided. Specifically, they charge that false memory scientists have been misusing the term “false memory,” relying on the wrong methodologies to study false memories, and misapplying false memory research to real world situations. We review each of these claims (...) and highlight the problems with them. We conclude that several types of false memory research have advanced our knowledge of autobiographical and recovered memories, and that future research will continue to make significant contributions to how we understand memory and memory errors. (shrink)

This study steps beyond the traditional arguments of feminism and examines homebirth from a libertarian perspective. It addresses the debate over homebirth and midwifery, which includes the use of direct-entry midwives as well as the philosophical implications of individual autonomy expressed through consumer choice. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that the medical establishment gains economic and political control primarily through medical licensing, and uses the state to undermine personal freedom as it advances a government-enforced monopoly on birth. At the same time, (...) empirical studies have established a substantial record of high safety and low medical complication rates for homebirth as compared to hospital births. Ultimately, the state’s restriction on medical choices is incompatible with the nonaggression principle and voluntarism, and therefore, with libertarianism. (shrink)

Professor Sutherland has argued that ‘God wills the good’ should be regarded as an analytic truth, with the consequence that any account of what is God's will in which it does not appear to be good is either a mistake about God's will or a mistake about what is good.

Philosophy of mind as traditionally understood has rarely engaged directly with psychology and psychiatry. This collection establishes the importance of this interdisciplinary approach and explores new directions in the 'philosophy of psychiatry and psychology'. The essays are by a distinguished group of contributors whose interests and expertise embrace the cognitive, biological and medical sciences as well as the social sciences and humanities. The topics are wide ranging and raise fundamental questions such as what establishes personality or personal identity; how should (...) insanity - or sanity - be defined; what is 'consent'? Readers, like the contributors, will come from a wide range of backgrounds, and find the volume suggests new approaches and offers new insights. (shrink)

This volume offers a lively and accessible guide to some of the major issues current in French philosophy today and to some of the figures who are or have been influential in shaping its development. The collection is unusual and interesting in bringing together a range of contributors from both Britain and France, and is intended not only for professional philosophers but also for those with a more general interest in the French intellectual scene.

This book was first published in 1985. The journal is concerned with the study of philosophy in all its branches: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, social and political philosophy and the philosophies of religion, science, history, language, mind and education. The journal is not committed to any particular school or method and contributors are expected to avoid needless technicality. There is a section on new books which includes reviews, book notes and a list of books received.

Doctored images can cause people to believe in and remember experiences that never occurred, yet the underlying mechanism responsible are not well understood. How does compelling false evidence distort autobiographical memory? Subjects were filmed observing and copying a Research Assistant performing simple actions, then they returned 2 days later for a memory test. Before taking the test, subjects viewed video-clips of simple actions, including actions that they neither observed nor performed earlier. We varied the format of the video-clips between-subjects to (...) tap into the source-monitoring mechanisms responsible for the ‘doctored-evidence effect.’ The distribution of belief and memory distortions across conditions suggests that at least two mechanisms are involved: doctored images create an illusion of familiarity, and also enhance the perceived credibility of false suggestions. These findings offer insight into how external evidence influences source-monitoring. (shrink)

A. Phillips Griffiths; VIII—On Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 167–186, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

In his recent article 1 Stewart Sutherland rightly and trenchantly criticizes some accounts of hope which ignore, or radically misrepresent, how it is conceived in religious contexts. The most surprising, to me, is Chesterton's, that hope is ‘the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate’. Surprising, not so much for its content as for its source. However, this particular example could be of one who would risk giving scandal for the sake of wit; what he (...) could have had in mind is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’ . Sutherland also makes clear the unhelpfulness of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ analysts' account of the concept; not least because it is given without reference to the religious concept, and often is irrelevant to the notion of hope ‘in its proper conceptual surroundings’. (shrink)

What impulses lead us to ask philosophical questions and pursue philosophical enquiry? In a series of stimulating essays fourteen distinguished thinkers examine philosophy and their own engagement with it. Titles such as "How philosophers (who lose their faith) redefine their subject," "Philosophical plumbing," "Putting into order what we already know" and "Is philosophy a 'theory of everything'?" indicate the range of topics and the lively and provocative ways in which they are tackled.

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First published in 1975, this is a book of general intellectual interest about the role of the university in contemporary society and that of university teachers in relation to their subjects, their students, and their wider political commitments. Alan Montefiore offers preliminary analyses of the family of concepts most often invoked in discussions of these problems, taking the central dispute to be between those who hold a 'liberal' view of the university and those who regard this notion as illusory, dishonest (...) or undesirable. Six academics, representing, discuss issues of substantive conflict in light of Montefiore's initial distinctions. The volume is of particular interest to students of political and social philosophy, and political and educational theory. It is also intended for a wider readership among those who care about the political status of the universities and recognize the importance and difficulty of the problems involved in this. (shrink)

Wittgenstein always thought that he had not been understood, and indeed that it was very unlikely that many people ever would understand him. Russell not only failed to understand Wittgenstein's later work; according to Wittgenstein himself, Russell profoundly failed to understand even the Tractatus . Professor Anscombe says even she did not understand him, and that to attempt to give an account of what he says is only to express one's own ordinariness or mediocrity or lack of complexity. Certainly, most (...) people acquainted with the Tractatus , when that work was Wittgenstein's only published book, gave it what now seems a quite crass positivistic interpretation. Wittgenstein's own preface to the Tractatus , despite its last sentence, does not help. He does tell us that the whole sense of the work is that what can be said can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence: but this does not make it clear that what we cannot talk about is all that is really important. Even when one has realised all this, however, one is aware mostly of one's failure to understand; and that if one did get any distance in understanding the last sixth of the Tractatus , the process would be extremely difficult, and the results quite astonishing. (shrink)

Professor Vesey poses the following question: … philosophers talk of ‘free will’ with a view to justifying our engaging in the practice of treating people as responsible for what they do. But why do we feel the need for a justification? It is because they want, also, to engage in the practice of looking for (motor) causes of everything that happens, and feel that the two practices are somehow incompatible? If so, then it is very paradoxical that they should turn (...) to Descartes, and his theory of willing. Descartes' answer to the question ‘What does a person do immediately?’, namely ‘He performs an act of will’, has what I call ‘the incompatibility feature’, whereas Aristotle's answer has not. Why are they not content to say, with Aristotle, that the two practices are compatible, and hence there is no need for a justification? (shrink)