The Explanation of Social Action is a critique of the conventional understanding of methods of explanation in the social sciences. It argues that any scientific approach to explanation must build on the phenomenological experience of actors.

This book shows otherwise. John Martin rehabilitates Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine.

The idea that the Renaissance witnessed the emergence of the modern individual remains a powerful myth. In this important new book Martin examines the Renaissance self with attention to both social history and literary theory and offers a new typology of Renaissance selfhood which was at once collective, performative and porous. At the same time, he stresses the layered qualities of the Renaissance self and the salient role of interiority and notions of inwardness in the shaping of identity.

We have many histories of social theory-what different authors attempted to do as they responded to previous theories. But we know precious little about how they did this in structural terms-what scaffolding they adopted and adapted to make their claims. Yet today's social thoughts largely employ structures passed down from previous generations, structures that were developed to solve problems that are no longer ours. In The True, the Good, and the Beautiful, John Levi Martin explores these structures, the (...) resulting tensions, and their broader significance for sociological thought. By examining how thinkers mapped interpersonal to intrapersonal structures, he traces the development of the underlying architectonics of theory, focusing on one that was inherited from eighteenth-century philosophy and brought into social science in the nineteenth century. He shows that the structural tensions inherent in these theories paralleled those being worked out in practical terms by constitutional theorists as thinkers attempted to return to their most fundamental understandings of the nature of the human, the social, and the political to recraft their societies. A magisterial new interpretation of the foundations of sociological thought, The True, the Good, and the Beautiful is as ambitious a work of social theory as we have seen in generations. (shrink)

John Corcoran’s natural deduction system for Aristotle’s syllogistic is reconsidered.Though Corcoran is no doubt right in interpreting Aristotle as viewing syllogisms as arguments and in rejecting Lukasiewicz’s treatment in terms of conditional sentences, it is argued that Corcoran is wrong in thinking that the only alternative is to construe Barbara and Celarent as deduction rules in a natural deduction system.An alternative is presented that is technically more elegant and equally compatible with the texts.The abstract role assigned by tradition and (...) Lukasiewicz to Barbara and Celarent is retained.The two ‘ perfect syllogisms’ serve as ‘basic elements’ in the construction of an inductively defined set of valid syllogisms.The proposal departs from Lukasiewicz, and follows Corcoran, however, in construing the construction as one in natural deduction.The result is a sequent system with fewer rules and in which Barbara and Celarent serve as basic deductions.To compare the theory to Corcoran’s, his original is reformulated in current terms and generalized.It is shown to be equivalent to the proposed sequent system, and several variations are discussed.For all systems mentioned, a method of Henkin‐style completeness proofs is given that is more direct and intuitive than Corcoran’s original. (shrink)

The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead, most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market approach is inadequate, and that its inadequacies can be remedied by studying sexual action as occurring within a specifically sexual field (...) , with a correlative sexual capital. Such a conception allows for historical and comparative analysis of changes in the organization of sexual action that are impeded by the use of a market metaphor, and also points to difficulties in Bourdieu's own treatment of the body qua body. (shrink)

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective (...) being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory. (shrink)

Lever-Tracy (2010) concluded from a review of major international sociological journals that sociology is 'lagging behind' in terms of research on the challenges of global climate change. More recently, John Urry (2011) contributed a rather speculative book on 'post-carbon sociology', yet sociologists continue to lag behind geographers and psychologists in contemplating the social and cultural dimensions of climate-change adaptation. The findings of the present paper suggest that the sociology of climate-change adaptation could take its lead from the work of (...) cultural and human geographers on people-place relationships, and engage with art theory and practice to offer imaginative insights into the scope and scale of the climate-change challenge. Sociologists could also make a major contribution to current debate on the roles of community action and community engagement in climate-change adaptation, noting that the word 'community' is open to abuse and misunderstanding. Drawing on his own research on the challenges facing local communities in Australia and Sri Lanka, the author combines previously disconnected bodies of literature to identify some important points of departure for the journey towards Urry's 'post-carbon sociology'. (shrink)

The paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher. Reversion to the (...) One can then be explained as the logical inference of hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

The mediaeval logic of Aristotelian privation, represented by Ockham's expositionof All A is non-P as All S is of a type T that is naturally P and no S is P, iscritically evaluated as an account of privative negation. It is argued that there aretwo senses of privative negation: (1) an intensifier (as in subhuman), the dualof Neoplatonic hypernegation (superhuman), which is studied in linguistics asan operator on scalar adjectives, and (2) a (often lexicalized) Boolean complementrelative to the extension of (...) a privative negation in sense (1) (e.g., Brute). Thissecond sense, which is the privative negation discussed in modern linguistics, isshown to be Aristotle's. It is argued that Ockham's exposition fails to capture muchof the logic of Aristotelian privation due to limitations in the expressive power of thesyllogistic. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

The paper explores the existential import of universal affirmative in Descartes, Arnauld and Malebranche. Descartes holds, inconsistently, that eternal truths are true even if the subject term is empty but that a proposition with a false idea as subject is false. Malebranche extends Descartes? truth-conditions for eternal truths, which lack existential import, to all knowledge, allowing only for non-propositional knowledge of contingent existence. Malebranche's rather implausible Neoplatonic semantics is detailed as consisting of three key semantic relations: illumination by which God's (...) ideas cause mental terms, creation by which God's ideas cause material substances by a kind of ?ontic privation?, and sensation in which brain events occasion states of mental awareness. In contrast, Arnauld distinguishes two types of propositions ? necessary and contingent ? with distinct truth-conditions, one with and one without existential import. Arnauld's more modern semantics is laid out as a theory of reference that substitutes earlier causal accounts with one that adapts the medieval notion of objective being. His version anticipates modern notions of intentional content and appeals in its ontology only to substances and their modes. (shrink)

The purpose of the book is to attempt to ascertain the views of President Barack Obama related to the field of education. This is done by first studying his own personal education and then following his spoken and written comments as a social worker, college professor, and as a state and federal legislator. In addition, there is an analysis of the positions he has taken during his political campaigns. Following this, there is a description of the actions he has taken (...) thus far in the field of education during his presidency. Using this background the author seeks to suggest his likely initiatives in education during the remainder of his presidency. (shrink)

The Port Royal Logic Logic or the Art of Thinking, commonly known as The Port Royal Logic, was written by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole and first published in 1662. Although it was a textbook containing much worked-over material, the Logic was extremely influential, certainly the most important textbook in logic for the next two … Continue reading Port Royal Logic →.

This paper explores the modal interpretation of ?ukasiewicz's n -truth-values, his conditional and the puzzles they generate by exploring his suggestion that by ?necessity? he intends the concept used in traditional philosophy. Scalar adjectives form families with nested extensions over the left and right fields of an ordering relation described by an associated comparative adjective. Associated is a privative negation that reverses the ?rank? of a predicate within the field. If the scalar semantics is interpreted over a totally ordered domain (...) of cardinality n and metric ?, an n-valued Lukasiewicz algebra is definable. Privation is analysed in terms of non-scalar adjectives. Any Boolean algebra of 2 n ?properties? determines an n + 1 valued Lukasiewicz algebra. The Neoplatonic ?hierarchy of Being? is essentially the order presupposed by natural language modal scalars. ?ukasiewicz's ≈ is privative negation, and ? proves to stand for the extensional (antitonic) dual if ? then for scalar adjectives, especially modals. Relations to product logics and frequency interpretations of probability are sketched. (shrink)

Quantifiers in Frege's Grundgesetze like are not well-defined because the part Fx & Gx stands for a concept but the yoking conjunction is horizontalised and must stand for a truth-value. This standard interpretation is rejected in favor of a substitutional reading that, it is argued, both conforms better to the text and is well-defined. The theory of the horizontal is investigated in detail and the composite reading of Frege's connectives as made up of horizontals is rejected. The sense in which (...) the Grundgesetze has a many-valued but classical logic is explained by proving that its propositional fragment (under the standard interpretation) and Bochvar's 3-valued logic are instances of the same metatheoretic methods. Historically, the paper argues for a more naive but well-defined reading of the text. Theoretically, it provides a formally adequate statement of that semantics, as well as developing the abstract metatheory which embraces Bochvar's language and the Fregean fragment. (shrink)

An investigation of Proclus' logic of the syllogistic and of negations in the Elements of Theology, On the Parmenides, and Platonic Theology. It is shown that Proclus employs interpretations over a linear semantic structure with operators for scalar negations (hypemegationlalpha-intensivum and privative negation). A natural deduction system for scalar negations and the classical syllogistic (as reconstructed by Corcoran and Smiley) is shown to be sound and complete for the non-Boolean linear structures. It is explained how Proclus' syllogistic presupposes converting the (...) tree of genera and species from Plato's diairesis into the Neoplatonic linear hierarchy of Being by use of scalar hyper and privative negations. (shrink)

Sociological Theory is an attempt to make sense of an intuited level of order transcending the level on which we as individuals live and think. This implies a dual explanatory task: on one hand, to provide a substantively meaningful third-person framework for the formation of theoretical statements, and, on the other, to provide an intuitively accessible answer to the question of why social order exists in the first place. A coherent linkage between these two forms of explanation, however, requires the (...) introduction of undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims, which undermines the coherence of the Theory. Consequently, there is pressure upon Theorists either to completely jettison one of the two explanatory tasks, or to attempt to redefine them in a way more amenable to this linkage but substantively unsatisfying. (shrink)

The paper shows that in the Art of Thinking (The Port Royal Logic) Arnauld and Nicole introduce a new way to state the truth-conditions for categorical propositions. The definition uses two new ideas: the notion of distributive or, as they call it, universal term, which they abstract from distributive supposition in medieval logic, and their own version of what is now called a conservative quantifier in general quantification theory. Contrary to the interpretation of Jean-Claude Parienté and others, the truth-conditions do (...) not require the introduction of a new concept of ‘indefinite’ term restriction because the notion of conservative quantifier is formulated in terms of the standard notion of term intersection. The discussion shows the following. Distributive supposition could not be used in an analysis of truth because it is explained in terms of entailment, and entailment in terms of truth. By abstracting from semantic identities that underlie distribution, the new concept of distributive term is definitionally prior to truth and can, therefore, be used in a non-circular way to state truth-conditions. Using only standard restriction, the Logic’s truth-conditions for the categorical propositions are stated solely in terms of (1) universal (distributive) term, (2) conservative quantifier, and (3) affirmative and negative proposition. It is explained why the Cartesian notion of extension as a set of ideas is in this context equivalent to medieval and modern notions of extension. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that herzberger's general theory of presupposition may be successfully applied to category mistakes. The study offers an alternative to thomason's supervaluation treatment of sortal presupposition and as an indirect measure of the relative merits of the two-Dimensional theory to supervaluations. Bivalent, Three-Valued matrix, And supervaluation accounts are compared to the two-Dimensional theory according to three criteria: (1) abstraction from linguistic behavior, (2) conformity of technical to preanalytic distinctions, And (3) ability to capture classical logic. (...) A matrix like characterization of thomason's theory is reported. (shrink)

Quarterly publication discussing various topics in environmental ethics, including features, discussion papers, book reviews, editorial commentaries, and other text related to environmental philosophies. Some issues also include announcements and other news related to the environmental studies community.

An analysis is proposed for the common argument that something should be preserved because it is irreplaceable. The argument is shown to depend on modal elements in irreplaceable, existence assumptions of preserve, and the logic of obligation. In terms of this theory it is argued that utilitarianism can account for most, but not all instances of persuasive appeals to irreplaceability. Beingessentially backwards looking, utilitarianism cannot in principle justify preservation of objects irreplaceable because of their history or genesis.

Though acknowledged by scholars, Plato’s identification of the Beautiful and the Good has generated little interest, even in aesthetics where the moral concepts are a current topic. The view is suspect because, e.g., it is easy to find examples of ugly saints and beautiful sinners. In this paper the thesis is defended using ideas from Plato’s ancient commentators, the Neoplatonists. Most interesting is Proclus, who applied to value theory a battery of linguistic tools with fixed semantic properties—comparative adjectives, associated gradable (...) adjectives, mass nouns, and predicate negations—all with a semantics that demand a privative scale of value. It is shown how it is perfectly possible to interpret value terms Platonically over privative Boolean algebras so that beautifuland good diverge while at higher levels other value terms are coextensional. Considerations are offered that this structure conforms to actual usage. (shrink)

Social conditions of race and class continue to combine in ways that raise systemic questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of liberal, capitalist democracy in America. More radical alternatives, however, are still generally held to be irrelevant in the American context. The following is an effort to correct this widespread misrepresentation of socialism’s relevance to America generally, and to matters of race in particular. I consider the work of C.L.R. James who, fifty years ago, developed a class-oriented, explicitly Marxist theory (...) in which the aspirations and struggles of African-Americans were given a central place, both analytically and politically. (shrink)

A note correcting some technical terminology from linguistics found in ‘Distributive Terms, Truth, and The Port Royal Logic’, this journal, Jan. 17, 2013, 133–54.

An interpretation in modal and tense logic is proposed for Boethius's reconciliation of God's foreknowledge with human freedom from The consolation of philosophy, Book V. The interpretation incorporates a suggestion by Paul Spade that God's special status in time be explained as a restriction of God's knowledge to eternal sentences. The argument proves valid, and the seeming restriction on omnipotence is mitigated by the very strong expressive power of eternal sentences.

Apart from the predictable end-of-the-century tendency to look backwards in time, it is not surprising that much commentary on contemporary American politics has taken on a reflective tone as we approach the end of the 20th century. Unresolved issues of race, class, and culture continue to raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy and functioning of modern liberalism. This is as true today as it was at the beginning of the century when the capitalist social order took on its characteristically modern (...) form in America. Thus, one finds increasing numbers of contemporary academics and activists struggling to understand from whence we have come so as to provide insight and guidance for the future. (shrink)