The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Just as nature offers aesthetic experiences beyond the reach of art, so the aesthetics of nature raises issues not contained within the philosophy of art. -/- Malcolm Budd presents four interlinked essays addressing all the main problems about the aesthetics of nature. These (...) include: how the aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood; the character of an aesthetic response to nature; what kinds of aesthetic experience nature affords and what kinds of aesthetic judgement it is amenable to; the aesthetic significance of intrusions by humanity into nature; whether aesthetic judgements about nature can be objectively true; the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature; the aesthetic significance of knowledge of nature and in particular whether scientific knowledge is necessary for serious aesthetic appreciation of nature; and the correct model for the appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. -/- The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature also includes a comprehensive exposition and examination of the thoughts of the greatest philosopher to make a substantial contribution to the subject, Immanuel Kant, and an encyclopaedic critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature. Scholars and students of aesthetics will find valuable resources here, and much to think about. (shrink)

The aesthetics of nature has over the last few decades become an intense focus of philosophical reflection, as it has been ever more widely recognised that it is not a mere appendage to the aesthetics of art. Everyone delights in the beauty of flowers, and some are thrilled by the immensity of mountains or of the night sky. But what is involved in serious aesthetic appreciation of the natural world? Malcolm Budd presents four interlinked studies in the aesthetics of (...) nature, approaching the subject from a variety of angles. As well as developing Budd's own original ideas, the book provides a comprehensive treatment of Kant's classic aesthetics of nature, and an encyclopaedic critical survey of recent literature on the subject. (shrink)

The relationship between evidence-based medicine (EBM) and clinical judgement is the subject of conceptual and practical dispute. For example, EBM and clinical guidelines are seen to increasingly dominate medical decision-making at the expense of other, human elements, and to threaten the art of medicine. Clinical wisdom always remains open to question. We want to know why particular beliefs are held, and the epistemological status of claims based in wisdom or experience. The paper critically appraises a number of claims and distinctions, (...) and attempts to clarify the connections between EBM, clinical experience and judgement, and the objective and evaluative categories of medicine. I conclude that to demystify clinical wisdom is not to devalue it. EBM ought not be conceived as needing to be limited or balanced by clinical wisdom, since if its language is translatable into terms comprehensible and applicable to individuals, it helps constitute clinical wisdom. Failure to appreciate this constitutive relation will help perpetuate medical paternalism and delay the adoption of properly evidence-based practice, which would be both unethical and unwise. (shrink)

Is mercy more important than justice? Since antiquity, mercy has been regarded as a virtue. The power of monarchs was legitimated by their acts of clemency, their mercy demonstrating their divine nature. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, mercy had become “an injustice committed against society... a manifest vice.” Mercy was exiled from political life. How did this happen? In this book, Malcolm Bull analyses and challenges the Enlightenment’s rejection of mercy. A society operating on principles of (...) rational self-interest had no place for something so arbitrary and contingent, and having been excluded from Hobbes’s theory of the state and Hume’s theory of justice, mercy disappeared from the lexicon of political theory. But, Bull argues, these idealised conceptions have proved too limiting. Political realism demands recognition of the foundational role of mercy in society. If we are vulnerable to harm from others, we are in need of their mercy. By restoring the primacy of mercy over justice, we may constrain the powerful and release the agency of the powerless. And if arguments for capitalism are arguments against mercy, might the case for mercy challenge the very basis of our thinking about society and the state? An important contribution to contemporary political philosophy from an inventive thinker, On Mercy makes a persuasive case for returning this neglected virtue to the heart of political thought. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 77 - 102 Hobbes has long been associated with the sexual ‘libertinism’ of the Restoration period. The connections that are commonly made are crude, misrepresenting his philosophy; moreover, the attitude to sexual matters expressed in many of his published works was quite puritanical. Yet there are elements of his thought that could be taken to support a libertine agenda: hostility to Augustinian teaching on lust and chastity; the idea that marriage laws are merely (...) human; a recognition of self-regarding elements in sexual psychology; and the idea that desires in themselves are not sins. On this last point, however, Hobbes’s distinction between desires and intentions to act, combined with his account of the role of imagination in desire, does make it possible to attribute to him a distinctly non-libertine theory of how sexual behaviour is modified in civil society. (shrink)

Offers an introduction to the political philosophy of Hobbes and Spinoza. It analyses Hobbes's theory of natural law and natural rights, and argues that he operated with two different concepts of rights—which have been confused by his commentators and may to some extent have been confused by Hobbes himself. It then discusses the adaptation of Hobbes's theories by Dutch writers such as the brothers de la Court, whose writings influenced Spinoza, before summarizing the political theory of Spinoza himself, and commenting (...) on the relationship between his ideas and those of Hobbes. (shrink)

Erdelyi's argument for integrating clinical data on repression, mainly Freudian, with laboratory findings suffers from logical and factual errors concerning Freudian repression and about experiments on forgetting.

Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the history of European thought. Although interest in his life and work has grown enomrously in recent years, this is the first complete edition of his correspondence. The texts of the letters are richly supplemented with explanatory notes and full biographical and bibliographical information. This landmark publication sheds new light in abundance on the intellectual life of a major thinker.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is one of the most important philosophical texts in the English language, and one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. This is the first critical edition based on a full study of the manuscript and printing history. It is also the first edition to place the English text side by side with Hobbes's later Latin version of it, complete with a set of notes in which the many passages that differ in the Latin (...) are translated into English. So, for the first time, readers of Leviathan will be able to see clearly every stage of the development of the text. Both texts are fully annotated with explanatory notes. The editor's Introduction, which takes up the whole of the first volume, gives a path-breaking account of the work's context, sources, and textual history. This definitive edition will set the study of Hobbes's masterwork on a new basis. (shrink)

We can understand viewed scenes and extract task-relevant information within a few hundred milliseconds. This process is generally supported by three cortical regions that show selectivity for scene images: parahippocampal place area (PPA), medial place area (MPA) and occipital place area (OPA). Prior studies have focused on the visual information each region is responsive to, usually within the context of recognition or navigation. Here, we move beyond these tasks to investigate gaze allocation during scene viewing. Eye movements rely on a (...) scene’s visual representation to direct saccades, and thus foveal vision. In particular, we focus on the contribution of OPA, which is i) located in occipito-parietal cortex, likely feeding information into parts of the dorsal pathway critical for eye movements, and ii) contains strong retinotopic representations of the contralateral visual field. Participants viewed scene images for 1034 ms while their eye movements were recorded. On half of the trials, a 500 ms train of five transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses was applied to the participant’s cortex, starting at scene onset. TMS was applied to the right hemisphere over either OPA or the occipital face area (OFA), which also exhibits a contralateral visual field bias but shows selectivity for face stimuli. Participants generally made an overall left-to-right, top-to-bottom pattern of eye movements across all conditions. When TMS was applied to OPA, there was an increased saccade latency for eye movements toward the contralateral relative to the ipsilateral visual field after the final TMS pulse (400ms). Additionally, TMS to the OPA biased fixation positions away from the contralateral side of the scene compared to the control condition, while the OFA group showed no such effect. There was no effect on horizontal saccade amplitudes. These combined results suggest that OPA might serve to represent local scene information that can then be utilized by visuomotor control networks to guide gaze allocation in natural scenes. (shrink)

Puts forward an account of the printing and publishing history of the second edition of Leviathan—an edition that has the same date as the first, is known to be a later production, but has never hitherto been dated with any accuracy. With the help of bibliographical evidence and details drawn from the archives of the Stationers’ Company, a fairly detailed account of the history of this edition can be constructed. What the evidence shows is that this so‐called ‘Bear’ edition was (...) first printed in 1670 in London; that the printing was partly confiscated by the Stationers’ Company; and that the remaining sheets were then combined with sheets produced by a Dutch printer in the period 1675–8. (shrink)

Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, vol. 3: From 1914 to the Twenty-First Century. By Jason Thompson. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 598.

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

We note a range of interesting and challenging points which take forward the discourse around the ethics of sharing patient data. Of most note are criticisms of our jury recruitment and methods; questioning how we can engender trust and support from the wider, uninformed public when we only have the view of a small informed public; asking what work needs to be done to ethically transfer data from a clinical care setting to that of research; suggesting that dynamic consent with (...) opt-outs could be an avenue for allowing patients more control over the use of their medical data for research; and asking how we bridge from ‘is’ (a description of public views) to ‘ought’ (what should policy be?). The first criticisms to be addressed focus on the recruitment and methods of our jury, raised by Carter.1 She suggests that the selection of participants, using a population distribution of responses to a data-sharing question, resulted in a jury too positively oriented to data sharing at the outset. Further, she suggests that we counted individual votes rather than allowing the jury to come to a collective position, that jurors were not asked to prioritise the common good, that we present a lack of data from the jury’s deliberations, and as a result, there is a difficulty with evaluating the reasoning and authenticity of deliberation. Regarding recruitment of our jury, our stated aim, which we acknowledge is not shared by all juries, was to achieve a sample which broadly matched what we would expect if …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Tragic Emotions Malcolm Budd Hume opens his essay "OfTragedy" with these remarks: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle... The whole art ofthe poet is employed, in rouzing and supporting the compassion (...) and indignation, the anxiety and resentmentofhis audience. They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.1 The task he sets himself is to explain this seemingly problematic pleasure. Hume'sproblemisnotmerelytoaccountforthepleasurablenature of the experience of a well-written tragedy or even for the pleasure a spectator of a well-written tragedy receives from passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. His conception ofthe problem is more specific than this. The problem, as Hume understands it, is to explain a pleasure which still retains all the features and outward symptoms ofdistress and sorrow, for example, but which lacks any of the unpleasurableness intrinsic to the experience of these emotions when they are aroused by real, rather than artistically represented, tragic incidents. Soit wouldnotbe enough forHume toindicate a source of pleasure in the experience of a well-written tragedy, or a pleasure which stems from the arousal of passions that are in themselves disagreeable and which compensates for the pain or unpleasantness suffered in undergoing such passions. He must attempt to explain how a negative emotion is transformed into a positive emotion, rather than merely add a specified pleasure to the negative emotion. He thus acquiesced in the standard eighteenth century assumption that the experience is purely pleasurable, but correctly rejected the stock eighteenth century solution, provided by Du Bos, for example. However, Hume also intensified the problem, since the experience ofa well-written tragedy is, for Hume, not only one in which there is no unpleasantness, but one that is extraordinarily Volume XVII Number 2 93 MALCOLMBUDD pleasurable—extraordinarily pleasurable at the very moments at which the spectator experiences the negative emotions. He must therefore explain how an experience which involves the arousal of negative emotions can be as supremely pleasurable as he takes it tobe. The problem thatHume setshimselfisthereforethatofaccounting for the intense pleasure, unqualified by pain ("one uniform and strong enjoyment"), ofa spectator ofa well-written tragedy in whom negative emotions have been arousedin response to the tragic nature ofwhatis represented in the play. His solution is in fact perfectly fitted to the problem as he sees it, exploiting each feature ofthe experience that he construes as unqualifiedly pleasurable to explain the absence of unpleasantness and the intensity ofthe pleasure. Since the experience is ofa well-written tragedy, it is the experience of(i) a particular kind of artistic representation, an imitation, in Hume's language; (ii) a well-written representation; and (iii) a tragic representation. The first feature, according to Hume, ensures that the experience is pleasurable (in a certain respect), for "imitation is always of itself agreeable" (Essays, 220). The second feature not only adds to the pleasurable nature of the experience but, according to Hume, insofar as it swells the pleasure, it increases the likelihood that pleasure will be the "predominant" emotion in the experience, thus allowing it to capture the force or impulse of any contrary, subordinate emotion in the experience. And the third feature, according to Hume, ensures that the spectator experiences powerful negative emotions, so that the predominant emotion of pleasure is much greater than it would be in the case ofan equally well-written play with an uninteresting subject which does not engage the spectator's negative emotions. What exactly is Hume's solution? It turns upon assigning a crucial role to the way in which the painful events in a tragedy are represented. First, the manner ofrepresentation ofa painful scene in a well-written tragedy is highly agreeable. Second, the satisfaction derived from the manner of representation—the beauty of language, the selection and arrangement of incidents, and the fact and... (shrink)

In 1987 Uppingham School celebrates the centenary of the death of its best known headmaster, Edward Thring. When Thring arrived at the Rutland market town in 1853 he inherited a small country grammar school of purely local renown, but by the time of his death in 1887 Uppingham was a thriving public school of national reputation. As the school flourished, so too did the headmaster's standing, and in the decade before his death he was a much consulted authority on educational (...) matters. Thring's contributions to educational theory and practice are numerous, but it is in the field of moral education that his influence has lasted longest. This paper examines that contribution. (shrink)

This article analyses the extent to which expert authorities have basic communicative obligations to be open, honest, and transparent, with a view to shaping strategies of public engagement with such authorities. This article is in part a response to epistemic paternalists such as Stephen John, who argue that the communicative obligations of expert authorities, such as scientists, permit the use of lying, or lack of openness and transparency, as a means of sustaining public trust in scientific authority. In this article, (...) I elucidate John’s position and reject it. I argue that expert authorities have strong communicative obligations to be open, honest, and transparent, which are grounded in the insight that such authorities hold positions of public trust. After demonstrating how this insight undermines John’s position, I conclude the article by considering the implications regarding public engagement with expert authorities. (shrink)

Contributions to COVID-19 vaccination programmes promise valuable collective goods. They can support public and individual health by creating herd immunity and taking the pressure off overwhelmed public health services; support freedom of movement by enabling governments to remove restrictive lockdown policies; and improve economic and social well-being by allowing businesses, schools, and other essential public services to re-open. The vaccinated can contribute to the production of these goods. The unvaccinated, who benefit from, but who do not contribute to these goods (...) can be morally criticised as free-riders. In this paper defends the claim that in the case of COVID-19, the unvaccinated are unfair free-riders. I defend the claim against two objections. First, that they are not unfair free-riders because they lack the subjective attitudes and intentions of free-riders; second, that although the unvaccinated may be free-riders, their free-riding is not unfair. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of trustworthiness typically define trustworthiness as an agent being reliable in virtue of a specific motivation such as goodwill. The underlying thought motivating this view is that to be trustworthy is to be more than merely reliable. If motivational accounts are correct, this is a problem for non-motivational accounts of trustworthiness, as motivations are not required for trustworthiness. In this paper, I defend the non-motivational approach to trustworthiness and show that the motivational approach is inadequate. I do this (...) by making a novel distinction between trusting-to and trusting-as relations. A trusting-to relation is a relation in which a trustor ‘X’ trusts the trustee ‘Y’ to do something. Trusting-as relations are an overlooked relation implicit in all trusting-to relations. They describe the social relationship that holds between X and Y. I will argue that trusting-as relations determine whether any specific motivations are required for trustworthiness trusting-to relations. Thus, I show that acknowledging trusting-as relations enables us to provide a satisfactory explanation of the motivation intuition without making specific motivations constitutive features of trust. -/- . (shrink)

We ask whether it is reasonable to delay or refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines that have been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective against infectious diseases. We consider two kinds of vaccine hesitancy. The first is geared to scientifically informed open questions about vaccines. We argue that in cases where the data is not representative of relevant groups, such as pregnant women and ethnic minorities, hesitancy can be reasonable on epistemic grounds. However, we argue that hesitancy is (...) not reasonable if a vaccine has passed well-conducted clinical trials. The second kind of hesitancy is to do with beliefs about the institutions offering a successfully trialled vaccine and the justifiability of cooperating with those institutions. For example, in the UK, distrust of the UK Government or the National Health Service is identified as a factor in the vaccine hesitancy of minority ethnic populations. We ask whether this sort of hesitation is reasonable given normative requirements of fair co-operation, both with those institutions and the wider population. We suggest that the answer is not straightforward. Sometimes the hesitation is unreasonable but understandable. (shrink)

The standard theory of electoral accountability treats the electorate as an appraiser of government performance on a range of complex issues, which re-elects or de-elects depending on its evaluation of that performance. This paper draws from studies on voter knowledge and behaviour to present a dilemma for the standard theory: either voters do not know how well their rulers have performed, or if they do, they do not base their votes on that knowledge. It is shown that, on either horn (...) of the dilemma, the standard account of electoral accountability fails, and that attempts to deflate the dilemma through heuristic and aggregative approaches to voter knowledge, or proposals for alternative systems of government, are also inadequate. The paper then sets out and defends an alternative conception of electoral accountability, which holds that electoral accountability is not about micro-assessing a government’s actions. Rather, it is about preventing political rulers from committing or allowing substantial harms to come upon those they govern. This alternative conception is compatible with a realistic view of voter knowledge and behaviour, but nonetheless makes electoral accountability an essential component of a well-functioning democratic system. (shrink)

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...) processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. "Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science. Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University. (shrink)

We ask whether it is reasonable to delay or refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines that have been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective against infectious diseases. We consider two kinds of vaccine hesitancy. The first is geared to scientifically informed open questions about vaccines. We argue that in cases where the data is not representative of relevant groups, such as pregnant women and ethnic minorities, hesitancy can be reasonable on epistemic grounds. However, we argue that hesitancy is (...) not reasonable if a vaccine has passed well-conducted clinical trials. The second kind of hesitancy is to do with beliefs about the institutions offering a successfully trialled vaccine and the justifiability of cooperating with those institutions. For example, in the UK, distrust of the UK Government or the National Health Service is identified as a factor in the vaccine hesitancy of minority ethnic populations. We ask whether this sort of hesitation is reasonable given normative requirements of fair co-operation, both with those institutions and the wider population. We suggest that the answer is not straightforward. Sometimes the hesitation is unreasonable but understandable. -/- . (shrink)

Introduction -- Aesthetic judgements, aesthetic principles, and aesthetic properties -- Aesthetic essence -- The acquaintance principle -- The intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements -- The pure judgement of taste as an aesthetic reflective judgement -- Understanding music -- The characterization of aesthetic qualities by essential metaphors and quasi-metaphors -- Musical movement and aesthetic metaphors -- Aesthetic realism and emotional qualities of music -- On looking at a picture -- The look of a picture -- Wollheim on correspondence, projective properties, and (...) expressive perception -- Wittgenstein on aesthetics. (shrink)

Trust is commonly defined as a metaphysically-hybrid notion involving an attitude and an action. The action component of trust is defined as a special form of reliance in which the trustor has: (1) heightened expectations of their trustee; and (2) a disposition to justifiably feel betrayed if their trust is broken. The first aim of this paper is to reject the view that trust is a form of reliance. -/- The second aim of this paper is to develop and defend (...) a non-reliance-based variation of Katherine Hawley’s commitment trust account. Roughly, on my variant account, if X trusts Y to ϕ, then X has a belief with the following counterfactual as its content: ‘if I were to rely on Y to keep a commitment to ϕ, then I believe that Y would keep that commitment to ϕ.’ I defend this account against the objection that non-reliance accounts cannot explain the intuition that trust involves heightened expectations, and that it elicits justified betrayal when broken. I also respond to the argument that such accounts can’t provide adequate explanations of therapeutic trust, which is taken to be a counterexample of belief trust insofar as it describes instances where trustors trust trustees despite not believing that they are trustworthy. (shrink)

Malcolm David Eckel takes us on a contemporary quest to discover the essential meaning behind the Buddha's many representations. Eckel's bold thesis proposes that the proper understanding of Buddhist philosophy must be thoroughly religious--an understanding revealed in Eckel's new translation of the philospher Bhavaviveka's major work, The Flame of Reason. Eckel shows that the dimensions of early Indian Buddhism--popular art, conventional piety, and critical philosophy--all work together to express the same religious yearning for the fullness of emptiness that Buddha (...) conveys. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of trustworthiness typically define trustworthiness as an agent being reliable in virtue of a specific motivation such as goodwill. The underlying thought motivating this view is that to be trustworthy is to be more than merely reliable. If motivational accounts are correct, this is a problem for non-motivational accounts of trustworthiness, as motivations are not required for trustworthiness. In this paper, I defend the non-motivational approach to trustworthiness and show that the motivational approach is inadequate. I do this (...) by making a novel distinction between trusting-to and trusting-as relations. A trusting-to relation is a relation in which a trustor ‘X’ trusts the trustee ‘Y’ to do something. Trusting-as relations are an overlooked relation implicit in all trusting-to relations. They describe the social relationship that holds between X and Y. I will argue that trusting-as relations determine whether any specific motivations are required for trustworthiness trusting-to relations. Thus, I show that acknowledging trusting-as relations enables us to provide a satisfactory explanation of the motivation intuition without making specific motivations constitutive features of trust. (shrink)