In this response, I dispute Professor Narbonne’s thesis on the literary leeway of the poet, emphasizing the constraints on poetic license from both the nature of the genre and the ethical and educational role tragedy played for Aristotle in civic life.

A remarkable collection of photographs by an ex-Marine who worked as a lawyer in Lawrence County, Ohio, for around thirty-six years.

Bertrand Russell was, along with G.E. Moore, deserving of accolade as a founder of analytic philosophy, and of its close companion, the linguistic turn. Here I explain how his relocates philosophy's concern with appearance and reality as a concern with grammatical surface and logical depth. I then on remark the irony of Russell's unhappiness with views to the effect that an ethical judgment is not, despite linguistic appearances, really something that can be true or false. A further irony lies (...) in Russell's error of assigning metaphysical grandeur to logical truths, an error he could have avoided by more fully appreciating how logically misleading linguistic appearances can be. (shrink)

Catholic Social Teaching aspires to an economy that serves needs, upholds justice, and inculcates subsidiarity. But it suffers from a significant omission—it fails to look “inside” the business organisations that comprise the fundamental building blocks of the economic system. It is therefore ill-equipped to suggest how businesses could be reformed to meet these aspirations. MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelian account of the relationships between goods, virtues, practices and institutions provides resources that could enable CST to overcome this lacuna. This paper describes the (...) MacIntyrean account and compares it with CST’s existing categories. It then analyses the case of the Lloyds Banking Group. This allows not only diagnosis, but potentially a prescriptive account of how virtue may be “crowded-in” to business organisations. The paper concludes by suggesting that this approach might make a distinctive contribution to CST, and hence enable CST to make an even more significant contribution to business ethics. (shrink)

The phrase ‘autoepistemic logic’ was introduced in Moore [1985] to refer to a study inspired in large part by criticisms in Stalnaker [1980] of a particular nonmonotonic logic proposed by McDermott and Doyle.1 Very informative discussions for those who have not encountered this area are provided by Moore [1988] and the wide-ranging survey article Konolige [1994], and the scant remarks in the present introductory section do not pretend to serve in place of those treatments as summaries of the (...) field. A good deal of the material omitted here pertains to the specifically nonmonotonic nature of autoepistemic logic as standardly developed, but as we shall urge, there is from one point of view nothing distinctively nonmonotonic about the basic motivating ideas of the subject. (shrink)

In recent years, emergentism has resurfaced as a possible method by which to secure autonomous mental causation from within a physicalistic framework. Critics argue, however, that emergentism fails, since emergentism entails that effects have sufficient physical causes, so they cannot also have distinct mental causes. In this paper I argue that this objection may be effective against supervenient emergentism, but it is not established that it is effective against mereological emergentism. In fact, after demonstrating that two founding emergentists, Samuel Alexander (...) and C. Lloyd Morgan, are mereological emergentists, I show how mereological emergentism provides fresh responses to the causal exclusion problem. (shrink)

This book brings together the leading researchers on these issues and for the first time in literature, illustrates how a unified approach based on the idea of ...

A persistent challenge for nominally behavioral viewpoints in philosophical psychology is how to make sense of psychological terms that appeal to the mental. Two such viewpoints, logical behaviorism and conceptual analysis, hold that psychological terms appealing to the mental must be taken to mean (i.e., refer to) something that is publicly observable, such as underlying physiological states, publicly observable behavior, or dispositions to engage in publicly observable behavior, rather than mental events per se. However, they do so for slightly different (...) reasons. A third viewpoint, behavior analysis, agrees that (a) some terms are functionally related to (i.e., occasioned by) the link between publicly observable behavior and publicly observable features of the environment, (b) some terms are dispositional, and (c) a purely private language could not arise. However, behavior analysis also recognizes that some psychological terms relate to private behavioral events, such as occur when speakers report internal sensations or engage in covert behavior. (shrink)

This book is a sophisticated, detailed, and original examination of the main ideas that have dominated Anglo-American legal philosophy since the Second World War. The author probes such themes as: whether there can be right answers to all disputed law cases; how laws and other rules impact on the practical rationality of actors subject to their authority; whether general principles justifying the law must themselves be thought of as part of the law binding on legal actors; and the possibility of (...) an interpretivist jurisprudence that is continuous with law practice in a given culture. (shrink)

Emphasizes various elements of James' thought.

One recent debate in philosophy of physics has centered whether quantum particles are individuals or not. The received view is that particles are not individuals and the standard methodology is to approach the question via the structure of quantum theory. I challenge both the received view and the standard methodology. I contend not only that the structure of quantum theory is not the right place to look for conditions of individuality that quantum particles may or may not satisfy, but also (...) that there is an important role for traditional metaphysics to play. Consequently, my work brings together the philosophy of physics and traditional metaphysics literatures to shed new light on the debate over the individuality of quantum particles. I defend a set of conditions of individuality and argue that quantum particles satisfy these conditions thereby defending the view that particles are individuals in opposition to the received view. I also challenge a second feature of the standard methodology insofar as I challenge the significance of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles in terms of which much discussion in the philosophy of physics literature is framed. My work is significant in a number of additional ways as well. My work implies that the dominant explanation for quantum statistics in terms of non-individuality is incorrect and it also undermines the ontic-structural realists metaphysical underdetermination challenge to the scientific realist. (shrink)

The social sources of antisocial behavior; principles of social inequality; and the origins, enemies, and possibilities of rational discussion in public affairs ...

The author records her experiences trying to commune with nature in an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of loved ones, in a profound ...

This article outlines an objective list theory of animal and alien well-being. Responding to three sorts of perfectionist criticism of such OLT, it argues that OLT is actually superior on each count. This is significant, because perfectionism is much discussed yet OLT is little discussed in philosophy of animal well-being, and because perfectionism can reasonably be expected to do comparatively well on the points where it is criticizing OLT.

ABSTRACT This article raises three concerns about Buchanan's argument related to the individualist description of ideology and psychological description of the obstacles to justice, as well as the way in which he separates empirical and normative beliefs, which, the article argues, are much more closely connected in all the examples that he raises. In the end, however, it agrees with Buchanan's central contention concerning the cognitive biases that interfere with progress towards justice, but, it argues, these operate at a more (...) sub‐conscious level than described by Buchanan. (shrink)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Page 294-298, May 2012.

The diverse papers which make up this book are variations on a theme which is based in biological science - yet none of the contributors is really a biologist. Our metaphor for describing what we are doing here is that we have gathered together in a room because that particular room provides us with a certain view of our individual areas of interest - a view that may have been previously obscured. We are visiting the house of biology in the (...) hope that we may see more clearly things that we each find baffling about our particular field of work in education, research, or daily living. (shrink)