Book review in this Article The Ethos of the Bible. By Birger Gerhardsson. The Prophets, Vol. 1: The Assyrian Period. By Klaus Koch. The Gospel according to Saint John, Vol. 3. By Rudolf Schnackenburg. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. By Gerd Theissen. Jewish and Christian Self‐Definition, Vol. 3: Self‐Definition in the Craeco‐Roman World. Edited by Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders. The Church and Healing. Edited by W.J. Sheils. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000 to (...) 1215. By Benedicta Ward. The Luminous Vision; Six Medieval Mystics and their Teaching. By Anne Bancroft. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. By Eugenio Garin. Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg 1480–1599. By M.U. Umgang mil Luther. By Gerhard Ebeling. The Reformation and the English People. By J.J. Scarisbrick. Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean‐Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. By Michael Heyd. Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age. By R.V. Young. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. By Lucien Febvre, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb. History of Christianity in India, Vol. II: From the Middle of the 16th to the End of the 17th Century. By Joseph Thekkedath. The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965. By Gerald P. Fogarty. Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. By Michael Sutton. George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition. By Ellen Leonard. The Testing of the Churches 1932–1982: A Symposium. Edited by Rupert Davies. The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. By B.A. Gerrish. An Introduction to Protestant Theology. By Helmut Gollwitzer. Dialogues on Morality and Religion. By Jakob Friedrich Fries. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth‐Century Approaches. By Charles E. Curran. Ethical Issues in Reproductive Medicine. Edited by Maurice Reidy. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. By Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan. Last Writingson the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. By Michael J. Sandel. Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. By Frederick Schauer. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. By Walter J. Ong. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. By James W. Fernandez. Selfless Persons. By Steven Collins. Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader Edited by David R. Blumenthal. The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect, by Ibn Rushd, with the Commentary of Moses Narboni. Edited and translated by Kalman P. Bland. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LIGHT AND METAPHOR IN PLOTINUS AND ST. THOMAS AQUINAS KEVIN CORRIGAN St. Thomas More College University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I HAVE TWO CONCERNS in this paper. The first is a broad concern, related to the nature of metaphor, which stems from the destructionist or deconstructionist tendencies in some contemporary phenomenology or phenomenological existentialism. According to these views, the logocentric emphasis of the Western tradition must be shown (...) for what it really is : an attempt to erect a cover upon a fundamental absence. In Nietzsche's well known view, "truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." 1 For Jacques Derrida all metaphoricity is caught up in an endless circle, which precludes any privileged vantage-point from which one might determine order, hierarchy and center-point. In particular, the unique heliotropic metaphor which, in Derrida's polemic, determines the whole course of Western philosophy " from the Platonic eidos to the Hegelian idea" 2 rests only upon the infinite absence of circularity, for the movement of transference " which turns the sun into metaphor " also inevitably "turns philosophical metaphor towards the sun." 3 1 Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense (1873)," Works 2 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 180. 2 J. Derrida, "White Mythology", trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6 (1974), 1: 5-74 ["La mythologie blanche" in Rhetorique et philosophie, Poetique 5 (Paris: Editions du Seliu, 1971)], p. 55. a Ibid., p. 51. 187 188 KEVIN CORRIGAN In this paper I shall examine the thought of Plotinus and Aquinas, broadly described as idealist and realist respectively, with a view to determining whether or not this transference from the physical to the metaphysical is only an illicit, covert erasure of the material sense and a forgetting that all metaphor is self-implicating, that there is no non-metaphorical standpoint from which to grasp the order and structure of the metaphorical. My second concern is much more specific. It is, first, to compare Plotinus and Aquinas on light and metaphor-two thinkers who might be considered to be poles apart on these questions: on the one hand, Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonic emanationism with its insistence upon the primacy of divine light and the father, surely too, of the tradition of light-metaphysics in the later, mediaeval period; on the other hand, St. Thomas, staunchly realist in the Aristotelian tradition. Second, I will seek to show that this first impression of the gulf between the two thinkers is not borne out by a close textual analysis, and that their respective theories, despite the admitted significant difference in viewpoint, are in some respects very close indeed. Let us look briefly at the light-metaphysics tradition first. For Robert Grosseteste light is the source of all activity and its diffusion is not a material change or a change in place, but rather an instantaneous and substantial multiplication of itself in three dimensions.4 Thus, for the author of the De Intelligentiis light is the fundamental principle of motion and life: " Est autem prima lucis operatio in sensibilibus quad motum et vitam operatur in viventibus." 5 Since light is the noblest of corporeal things, it therefore has an intermediate place between pure form and matter, and for Grosseteste and also Bonaventure it is consequently named the forma corporeitatis, the fundamental form of body as 4 De philosophischen W erke des Robert Grosseteste, ed. Ludwig Baur, in Clemens Baeumker, Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters, vol. IX (Munster, 1912), De Luce, p. 51. 5 Clemens Baeumker, Witelo: Ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII Jahrhunderts, Band III, Heft 2 of Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Munster, 1908), Liber de intelligentiis IX, p. 11. PLOTINUS AND ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 189 such, since light introduces dimension into matter. Light then is the substantial form of the physical universe.6 But how is physical light related to spiritual light? For the light-metaphysics tradition, spiritual light (whether the Uncreated Light which is God himself or the... (shrink)

Zettel, an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but (...) from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "[ Philosophical Remarks ] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's The Analysis of Mind . He modifies the Tractatus 's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association. (shrink)

This anthology of readings in the survey of Western philosophy--from the Ancient Greeks to the 20th Century--is designed to be accessible to today's readers. Striking a balance between major and minor figures, it features the best available translations of texts--complete works or complete selections of works-- which are both central to each philosopher's thought and are widely accepted as part of the canon. The selections are readable and accessible, while still being faithful to the original. Includes Introductions to each historical (...) period and to each philosopher, and an abundance of drawings, diagrams, photographs, and a timeline. This Combined Volume contains the most important works from Baird's Philosophic Classics, Volumes I-V. ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY. Plato. Aristotle. HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. Epicurus. Epictetus. Plotinus. MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. Augustine. Boethius. Anselm (and Guanilo). Moses Maimonides. Thomas Aquinas. William of Ockham. Pico Della Mirandola. MODERN PHILOSOPHY. Ren Descartes. Thomas Hobbes. Blaise Pascal. Baruch Spinoza. John Locke. Gottfried Leibniz. George Berkeley. David Hume. Immanuel Kant. NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. G.W.F. Hegel. John Stuart Mill. Soren Kierkegaard. Karl Marx. Friedrich Nietzsche. TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY. Edmund Husserl. Bertrand Russell. Martin Heidegger. Ludwig Wittgenstein. A.J. Ayer. Jean-Paul Sartre. Willard Van Orman Quine. Jacques Derrida. For anyone interested in Philosophy, History of Philosophy, or History of Intellectual Thought. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud (to whom reference was made in the course on aesthetics) between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious belief. As very little (...) is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations a little formidable. (shrink)

This valuable dictionary of Plotinus's Enneads has resulted from long and painstaking labors. H. J. Sleeman began the project in 1946 and continued with it until 1957. Gilbert Pollet, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Leuven, took over in 1959 by revising the first draft of the dictionary in the light of the critical edition of Plotinus's Enneads by P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer and of their subsequent emendations of their critical edition in the Oxford (...) editio minor. Pollet also utilized the almost complete but unpublished "Index Verborum" of Plotinus compiled by Ludwig Früchtel and entrusted to H.-R. Schwyzer on Früchtel's death in 1963. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as or constitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample to an appealing deflationary view of (...) collective action as a matter of all members of a group making a contribution to bringing about some event. I show that this is a mistake. I give a deflationary account of constitutive rules in terms of essentially collective action types. I then give an account of one form of constitutive agency in terms of constitutive rules. I next give an account of status functions—of which being a spokesperson is one—that also draws on the concept of a constitutive rule. I then show how these materials help us to see how proxy agency is an expression of the agency of all members of the group credited with doing something when the proxy acts. (shrink)

This paper outlines a defense of scientific realism against the pessimistic meta- induction which appeals to the phenomenon of the exponential growth of science. Here, scientific realism is defined as the view that our current successful scientific theories are mostly approximately true, and pessimistic meta- induction is the argument that projects the occurrence of past refutations of successful theories to the present concluding that many or most current successful scientific theories are false. The defense starts with the observation that at (...) least 80% of all scientific work ever done has been done since 1950, proceeds with the claim that practically all of our most successful theories were entirely stable during that period of time, and concludes that the projection of refutations of successful theories to the present is unsound. In addition to this defense, the paper offers a framework through which scientific realism can be compared with two types of anti-realism. The framework is also of help to examine the relationships between these three positions and the three main arguments offered respectively in their support. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that externalist accounts of cognition such as Clark and Chalmers' (1998) “active externalism” lead to an explosion of knowledge that is caused by online resources such as Wikipedia and Google. I argue that externalist accounts of cognition imply that subjects who integrate mobile Internet access in their cognitive routines have millions of standing beliefs on unexpected issues such as the birth dates of Moroccan politicians or the geographical coordinates of villages in southern (...) Indonesia. Although many externalists propose criteria for the bounds of cognition that are designed to avoid this explosion of knowledge, I argue that these criteria are flawed and that active externalism has to accept that information resources such as Wikipedia and Google constitute extended cognitive processes. (shrink)

I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role of intuitions in philosophical (...) inquiry. When we have done this, we can see that it is impossible for intuitions properly understood to be relative in the way that has been suggested as they are conceived of as expressions of competence in the concepts deployed in their contents. The remaining methodological issues, though not to be dismissed, present no in principle objection to the method of thought experiments. (shrink)

Scientific realism is the position that success of a scientific theory licenses an inference to its approximate truth. The argument from pessimistic meta-induction maintains that this inference is undermined due to the existence of theories from the history of science that were successful, but false. I aim to counter pessimistic meta-induction and defend scientific realism. To do this, I adopt a notion of success that admits of degrees, and show that our current best theories enjoy far higher degrees of success (...) than any of the successful, but refuted theories of the past. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Searle's account of we-intentions and then argues that it is subject to counterexamples, some of which are derived from examples Searle uses against other accounts. It then offers an alternative reductive account that is not subject to the counterexamples.

The combination problem is still one of the hardest problems for a panexperientialist ontology. Prominently, among others, Philip Goff wrote two papers in 2009 arguing that panexperientialists cannot get around the combination problem. We will argue that Goff 's attack is only relevant if parsimony is the only methodological principle for evaluating and comparing ontologies. Our second approach will sketch a version of panexperientialism for which the combination problem does not arise at all. Panexperiential holism is the theory that the (...) universe as a whole is one big experiential matter of fact. What we normally believe to be independent centres of conscious subjectivity are merely long-lived structural features of this big experience. The notion of 'personal identity' entailed by panexperiential holism is essentially vague and may lead us into something like Derek Parfit's relation R . Therefore, persons are not merely series of experiences, but exemplify the common denominator of these experiences. In this sense, a person is what has experiences, or the subject of experiences. We will argue that this concept fits nicely into some frameworks of personal identity put forth by Peter Simons and Godehard Brüntrup. (shrink)

Pythagoras -- Confucius -- Heracleitus -- Parmenides -- Zeno of Elea -- Socrates -- Democritus -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Mencius -- Zhuangzi -- Pyrrhon of Elis -- Epicurus -- Zeno of Citium -- Philo Judaeus -- Marcus Aurelius -- Nagarjuna -- Plotinus -- Sextus Empiricus -- Saint Augustine -- Hypatia -- Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius -- Śaṅkara -- Yaqūb ibn Ishāq aṣ-Ṣabāḥ al-Kindī -- Al-Fārābī -- Avicenna -- Rāmānuja -- Ibn Gabirol -- Saint Anselm of Canterbury -- al-Ghazālī (...) -- Peter Abelard -- Averroës -- Zhu Xi -- Moses Maimonides -- Ibn al-'Arabī -- Shinran -- Saint Thomas Aquinas -- John Duns Scotus -- William of Ockham -- Niccolò Machiavelli -- Wang Yangming -- Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam -- Thomas Hobbes -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Benedict de Spinoza -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz -- Giambattista Vico -- George Berkeley -- Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu -- David Hume -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Immanuel Kant -- Moses Mendelssohn -- Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet -- Jeremy Bentham -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -- Arthur Schopenhauer -- Auguste Comte -- John Stuart Mill -- Søren Kierkegaard -- Karl Marx -- Herbert Spencer -- Wilhelm Dilthey -- William James -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege -- Edmund Husserl -- Henri Bergson -- John Dewey -- Alfred North Whitehead -- Benedetto Croce -- Nishida Kitarō -- Bertrand Russell -- G.E. Moore -- Martin Buber -- Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Martin Heidegger -- Rudolf Carnap -- Sir Karl Popper -- Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- Hannah Arendt -- Simone de Beauvoir -- Willard Van Orman Quine -- Sir A.J. Ayer -- Wilfrid Sellars -- John Rawls -- Thomas S. Kuhn -- Michel Foucault -- Noam Chomsky -- Jürgeb Gabernas -- Sir Bernard Williams -- Jacques Derrida -- Richard Rorty -- Robert Nozick -- Saul Kripke -- David Kellogg Lewis -- Peter (Albert David) Singer. (shrink)

The _Philosophical Investigations_ of Ludwig Wittgenstein present his own distillation of two decades of intense work on the philosophies of mind, language and meaning.

In this chapter, I defend the program of conceptual analysis, broadly construed, and the method of thought experiments in epistemology, as a first-person enterprise, that is, as one which draws on the investigator's own competence in the relevant concepts. I do not suggest that epistemology is limited to conceptual analysis, that it does not have important a posteriori elements, that it should not draw on empirical work wherever relevant (and non-question begging), or that it is not a communal enterprise. Although (...) discussion in the space available will necessarily be brief, and many points must be elided altogether, I aim to sketch salient features of the landscape, clarify issues, set aside some confusions, and outline responses to some recent challenges. In §2, I sketch a traditional account of concepts and conceptual truths. In §3, I review a broad conception of analysis as encompassing not just reduction but also articulation of conceptual connections. In §4, I address the charge that in studying epistemic concepts we turn away from our proper target of study, the actual phenomena of knowledge, justification, and so on. In §5, I give a brief overview of the method of thought experiments. In §6, I address objections to thought experiments that have their source in "experimental philosophy." In §7, I address the charge that pursuing conceptual analysis in epistemology is misplaced because 'knowledge', 'justification', 'evidence' and so on, are natural kind terms, and hence that we must engage in empirical research to discover the real essences of the kinds they pick out (if any). (shrink)

This paper evaluates Putnam’s argument in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, for the claim that we can know that we are not brains in a vat (of a certain sort). A widespread response to Putnam’s argument has been that if it were successful not only the world but the meanings of our words (and consequently our thoughts) would be beyond the pale of knowledge, because a causal theory of reference is not compatible with our having knowledge of (...) the meanings of our words. I argue that this is not so. I argue also, however, that given how Putnam argues (here) for the causal theory of reference, he cannot after all escape this consequence. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the nature of disagreement in scientific ontologies in the light of case studies from biology and cognitive science. I argue that disagreements in scientific ontologies are usually not about purely factual issues but involve both verbal and normative aspects. Furthermore, I try to show that this partly non-factual character of disagreement in scientific ontologies does not lead to a radical deflationism but is compatible with a “normative ontological realism.” Finally, I argue that (...) the case studies from the empirical sciences challenge contemporary metaontological accounts that insist on exactly one true way of “carving nature at its joints.”. (shrink)

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." -/- In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the (...) "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. -/- Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold: on the one hand, we present the outlines of a history of university collections in Germany. On the other hand, we discuss this history as a case study of the changing attitudes of the sciences towards their material heritage. Based on data from 1094 German university collections, we distinguish three periods that are by no means homogeneous but offer a helpful starting point for a discussion of the entangled institutional and epistemic factors in (...) the history of university collections. In the 19th century, university collections were institutionalized and widely recognized as indispensable in research and teaching. During the 20th century, university collection became increasingly marginalized both on an institutional and theoretical level. Towards the end of the 20th century, the situation of university collections improved partly because of their reconsideration as material heritage. (shrink)

In its January 20th, 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court ruled that certain restrictions on independent expenditures by corporations for political advocacy violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, which provides that “Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Justice Kennedy, writing for the 5-4 majority, (...) held that “[b]y suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, the Government prevents their voices and view-points from reaching the public and advising voters on which person or entities are hostile to their interests” (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 38-9 (2010); emphasis added). Much of the language of the opinion, and some of its reasoning, as this passage illustrates, presupposes that corporations are agents capable of speech, and that it is (at least in part) in the light of this that limitations on political advocacy by corporations are prohibited by the Constitution. -/- While there are other strands in the argument, they are interwoven with the conception of the corporation as agent and speaker, with its voice and its viewpoints. The dissenters on the court objected on precisely this point (among others). Justice Stevens wrote sarcastically in his dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, that “[u]nder the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech” (558 U.S. 33 (2010)). Justice Sotomayor suggested in oral argument that the Court’s century-old practice of treating corporations as persons rests on a conceptual mistake. -/- My concern in this essay is not with the question whether the restrictions violate the Constitution. There are many issues that bear on this which will be outside the scope of my discussion. My concern is with the proper conceptual framework for understanding the agency of corporations and corporate speech, and the role that conceptions of these play in the background of the majority’s reasoning. The issue is legal, but it also has philosophical, conceptual and semantic aspects. It will be the latter aspects, and their potential to shed light on legal reasoning, that are my main focus. An adequate framework requires saying what properly speaking the corporation is, how agency is expressed through the corporation, whose agency it is, centrally whether the corporation is an agent or person in its own right, and in what sense it can be said to be capable of speech. I draw on recent work in collective action theory, particularly with respect to the semantics of collective action sentences (Ludwig 2007) and the analysis of the proxy agency in collective action (Ludwig 2014), to show (i) that corporations are neither genuine agents nor (therefore) capable of engaging in genuine speech, (ii) that consequently the First Amendment does not apply to corporations per se, and (iii) that a better understanding of the mechanisms of corporate agency casts doubt on more indirect arguments for extending the First Amendment to “corporate speech” as well. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin has argued recently for subject-body dualism on the basis of reflections on the possibility of survival in fission cases from the literature on personal identity. The argument focuses on the claim that there is a factual difference between the claims that one or the other of two equally good continuers of a person in a fission case is identical with her. I consider three interpretations of the notion of a factual difference that the argument employs, and I argue (...) that on each of them the argument either begs the question or is unsound. (shrink)

This paper shows how one can respond within truth-theoretic semantics, without appeal to parataxis, to Donald Davidson's objection to the intelligibility of Paul Horwich's statement of the minimalist position on truth.

Wir sorgen uns um die Wahrheit und unsere Sorge bedarf einer vorsichtigen Erörterung. Schnell sind Argumente gefunden, die belegen, dass wir ohne Wahrheit nicht auskommen. Wahre Meinungen sind von überragendem instrumentellem Nutzen, in allen Lebensbereichen ist Erfolg von der Wahrheit unserer Überzeugungen abhängig. Dennoch kann die Sorge um die Wahrheit nicht mit einem einfachen Verweis auf ihren Nutzen erklärt werden. In diesem Aufsatz verfolge ich zwei Ziele. Zum einen möchte ich verständlich machen, warum instrumentelle Erklärungen der Sorge um die Wahrheit (...) zu kurz greifen. Sie sind defi zitär, da unsere Sorge um die Wahrheit erst dann zu einem philosophischen Problem wird, wenn sie uns so viel abverlangt, dass instrumentelle Überlegungen eine Abkehr von der Wahrheitssuche nahe legen. Wird in solchen Konfl iktsituationen dennoch am Wahrheitsziel festgehalten, so wird die Wahrheit um ihrer selbst willen gesucht. Es entsteht daher die Frage, was es bedeutet, nach der Wahrheit um der Wahrheit willen zu suchen. Eine Erörterung dieser Frage ist das zweite Ziel des Aufsatzes. (shrink)

This chapter discusses how order ethics relates to the theory of justice. We focus on John Rawls's influential conception "Justice as Fairness" (JF) and compare its components with relevant aspects of the order-ethical approach. The two theories, we argue, are surprisingly compatible in various respects. We also analyse how far order ethicists disagree with Rawls and why. The main source of disagreement that we identify lies in a thesis that is central to the order ethical system, viz. the requirement of (...) incentive-compatible implementability. It purports that an ethical norm can be normatively valid only if individuals have a self-interested motive to support it. This idea conflicts with the Rawlsian view because there are cases where it is not clear, from the standpoint of self-interest, why everybody should support its moral demands. If the thesis of incentive-compatible implementability is, in fact, correct, a proponent of JF would have to reform her views. We suggest how she could do that while salvaging the heart of her normative system as a “regulative idea”. The conception that would result from this reformation may be seen as a new variant of order ethics, which we propose to call “Rawlsian Order Ethics”. (shrink)

Camus and James are not often thought to have much in common. But both agree that “Is life worth living?” is a fundamentalphilosophical question, and an examination of the views of each as to what constitutes a life that is worth living reveals strikingsimilarities. Although James freely uses the language of religion which Camus adamantly avoids, they agree that a life worth livingis marked by a sense of intimacy and communion with others and with the world itself—and by a resolve (...) to fight against the evilsthat threaten well-being. (shrink)

Filipe Drapeau Vieira Contim,Pascal Ludwig | : La plupart des théoriciens de l’identité des types souscrivent à un physicalisme a posteriori à l’égard des propriétés phénoménales. Selon cette conception, les énoncés d’identité esprit/cerveau peuvent être justifiés par une inférence à la meilleure explication (IME) partant du fait empirique des corrélations esprit/cerveau. Nous soutenons que la théorie de l’identité ne peut pas s’appuyer sur cette méthodologie abductive. Nous montrons tout d’abord que l’on ne peut pas justifier les énoncés d’identité esprit/cerveau (...) au moyen d’une IME partant des corrélations esprit/cerveau car cette stratégie conduit à un dilemme : ou bien les corrélations ne sont pas des explananda, ou bien les identités esprit/cerveau doivent être admises comme des faits bruts au même titre que les lois dualistes. Nous montrons ensuite que ces énoncés d’identité peuvent être néanmoins justifiés par une IME partant du pouvoir causal des états phénoménaux. Cette seconde stratégie n’est toutefois d’aucune aide pour la forme a posteriori de théorie de l’identité ici discutée dans la mesure où elle débouche sur un physicalisme de type a priori. | : Most type identity theorists endorse a posteriori physicalism about phenomenal properties. On such a view, mind/brain identity statements can be justified by an inference to the best explanation (IBE) starting from the empirical premise of mind/brain correlations. We contend that Identity Theory cannot be based on such an abductive methodology. First, we argue that mind/brain identity statements cannot be justified by an IBE from correlations as it leads to the following dilemma : either correlations are trivial facts that cannot pretend to the status of explananda, or mind/brain identities must be admitted as brute facts, just like dualist laws. Second, we show that these identity statements can still be justified by an IBE starting from the premise of mental causation. However, this strategy is of no help for the a posteriori brand of Identity Theory here challenged since the same premise forces one to embrace a priori physicalism. (shrink)

In his posthumously published book The Confession of Augustine, J.F. Lyotard reconstructs St. Augustine's invocatio: his "move upward" towards the absolute. The paper deals with three segments of Lyotard's text that interpret St. Augustine's method of letting the voice of the invoked "speak within me"; his attempt to progress to the atemporal "at the umbilical" of temporal experience; and his reading of the caller and the called as identical. Two aspects of Lyotard's interpretation are pointed out as problematic: his thesis (...) of the "silent" absolute "You"; and his assumption, that invocatio takes pleasure in a "radical heteronomous" subordination "under the law of an unknown master.". (shrink)