Peter Brian Herrenden Birks 1941-2004Hugh Redwald Dacre 1914-2003William Hugh Clifford Frend 1916-2005John Andrew Gallagher 1919-1980Philip Grierson 1910-2006Stuart Newton Hampshire 1914-2004William McKane 1921-2004John Malcolm Sabine Pasley 1926-2004Benjamin John Pimlott 1945-2004Robert Duguid Forrest Pring-Mill 1925-2005John Edgar Stevens 1921-2002Peter Strawson 1919-2006Henry William Rawson Wade 1918-2004Alan Harold Williams 1927-2005Bernard Arthur Owen Williams 1929-2003John James Wymer 1928-2006.

Orthodox Bayesian decision theory requires an agent’s beliefs representable by a real-valued function, ideally a probability function. Many theorists have argued this is too restrictive; it can be perfectly reasonable to have indeterminate degrees of belief. So doxastic states are ideally representable by a set of probability functions. One consequence of this is that the expected value of a gamble will be imprecise. This paper looks at the attempts to extend Bayesian decision theory to deal with such cases, and concludes (...) that all proposals advanced thus far have been incoherent. A more modest, but coherent, alternative is proposed. Keywords: Imprecise probabilities, Arrow’s theorem. (shrink)

This book explains and defends a naturalized reading of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power. By providing a new interpretation of the term, Brian Lightbody argues that other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as his ontology, epistemology and ethics become clearer and more coherent.

Trading on non-public material information is fertile ground for a discussion of ethical behavior. The long-running legal tug-of-war over what constitutes illegal insider trading delivers challenges to regulatory authorities charged with detecting and enforcing the law, and is likely one of the reasons that prosecution of insider trading events remains rather uncommon. One can observe both increased volume in the equity and option markets and run-ups in the stock price prior to the announcement of the acquisitions; however, the detection of (...) illegal or unethical insider trading can be difficult. Given the legal uncertainty around insider trading and the circumstantial evidence from the trading activity, it is almost impossible to identify unethical insider trades unless there is a whistleblower or trades are large in size and impeccable in timing. Using call option trading around two merger announcements with similar firms that resulted in different ultimate treatment from the SEC, we illustrate the struggle regulators and prosecutors have with identifying and enforcing unethical insider trades. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that an encounter with a tick can produce both fear and wonder. I make a distinction between the legitimate danger of tick borne-diseases and the non-danger of our entanglement with the nature revealed by the tick’s bite in order to highlight the goodness of the tick and the possibilities for post-human existences beyond narratives of conquest and control. Ultimately, I argue that wonder is a helpful mechanism for thinking through the goodness of the tick by (...) allowing an ungrounding of our assumptions about climate change, hospitality, and the danger of non-human agencies. (shrink)

None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin.Henry Thoreau, Walden.

This 2001 book is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Moore's ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Moore's arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Moore's anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing (...) it, sceptical about the very enterprise of philosophy itself, and in this regard, as Brian Hutchinson reveals, was much closer in his thinking to Wittgenstein than has been previously realized. This book shows Moore's ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged. (shrink)

The essays in this collection demonstrate American philosopher John Dewey's wide-ranging influence on rhetoric in an intellectual tradition that addresses the national culture's fundamental conflicts between self and society, freedom and responsibility, and individual advancement and the common good. Editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark propose that this influence is at work both in theoretical foundations, such as science, pragmatism, and religion, and in Dewey's debates with other public intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. (...) Du Bois. Jackson and Clark seek to establish Dewey as an essential source for those engaged in teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses to the diverse and often-contentious rhetorical situations that develop in a democratic culture. What prepares people to intervene constructively in such situations is instruction in those rhetorical practices of democratic interaction that is implicit throughout Dewey's work. Dewey's writing provides a rich framework on which a distincly American tradition of a democratic rhetorical practice can be built - a tradition that combines the most useful concepts of classical rhetoric with those of modern progressive civic engagement. Jackson and Clark believe Dewey's practice takes rhetoric beyond the traditional emphasis on political democracy to provide connections to rich veins of American thought such as individualism, liberalism, progressive education, collectivism, pragmatism, and postindustrial science and communication. They frame Dewey's work as constituting a modern expression of continuing education for the "trained capacities" required to participate in democratic culture. -- from back cover. (shrink)

I’m not sure how much knowledge everyone already has, so I’d like to start with a little questionnaire. On a card, say for each of the following topics whether you’re familiar with the topic, have heard of it but aren’t familiar with it, or have never heard of it.

In this study, Brian Carrier provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that seismic language plays within the Matthean Gospel narrative. After reconstructing what connotations seismic language likely carried in Matthew's cultural context, the author utilizes an historically informed author-oriented narrative criticism that is complemented with redaction criticism to analyze the relationships that Matthew's seismic references display with regards to each other and to the overall narrative. This analysis leads to the conclusion that Matthew's seismic references collectively indicate that (...) the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus together represent the partial fulfillment of the Old Testament eschatological Day of the Lord. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Brian Boyd responds:In responding to my critical discussion, Lisa Zunshine restates the argument of Why We Read Fiction at some length but replies to none of my specific criticisms. These criticisms are all based on the evidence of the texts that she offers as case studies, especially Mrs Dalloway and Lolita. Although I—and the textual evidence—contradict her claims, she provides no answers to the criticisms.Let me respond to (...) two restatements. First: "Fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations" (p. 190). This is often, but almost tautologically, true in the case of experimental fiction, as the work of Richardson, Woolf, and Nabokov (to cite Zunshine's key examples) was in their time. It is not necessarily true in the sense Zunshine especially means it—that authors give us a demanding cognitive workout of our capacity for Theory of Mind by incorporating multiple embedding, A's thoughts of B's thoughts of C's thoughts of D's thoughts of E—even in the case of fictional experimenters like Defoe, Tolstoy, or Joyce, and it is not true of the vast bulk of fiction, from folk tale or jokes to soap operas or pulp [End Page 196] novels, and it cannot therefore be an explanation for "why we read fiction," though it may explain why some of us read some fiction. And to identify overloaded embedding when it is not present, as Zunshine does in discussing Mrs Dalloway, constitutes a simple misreading.Second: "Our Theory of Mind makes literature as we know it possible" (p. 191). Granted, without Theory of Mind we would not have fiction. But nor would we have fiction without many other features of human nature: without sociality, episodic memory, language, childhood pretend play, empathy, the brain's inhibitory mechanisms, folk physics, our mental databases for individuals, and much, much more. An evolutionary and cognitive understanding of fiction needs to take into account many aspects of our capacity for understanding events and stories, not just one.Apart from one three-word phrase, Zunshine's sole quotation from my review is this: "To what extent has Zunshine benefited from the methodology, rather than results, of science?" (I refer to "the results of science" here because I note that although, for instance, she relies most heavily on Simon Baron-Cohen among Theory of Mind researchers, while ignoring major figures in the field like Janet Astington or Josef Perner, she does not even cite the book or any of the more than twenty papers of which Baron-Cohen has been primary author since his 1995 Mindblindness.) Her quotation from my review continues: "Alas, she appears to have learned less than one would have hoped.... Her formulations are often weak and indecisive, hedgings, rather than strong testable hypotheses. Rather than apply scientific stringency to her literary analysis, she seems more interested in exploiting than testing what she can find." She confesses herself puzzled by this charge. Let me explain one simple point.Science's core methodological principle is that claims should be subjected to the test of evidence, and accepted or rejected on the basis of their compatibility with the relevant evidence. Leo Spitzer long ago pointed out that good reading follows scientific method: we read, we make hypotheses about the text, and we either confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses according to what we find in the text, and search for ampler hypotheses when previous ones have been discredited.1 Literary scholarship has long been vitiated by a far flabbier methodology, by the naïve assumption that evidence for a proposition suffices: "I see a and b in the text, therefore my claim C is a valid interpretation." But if reading or interpretation C is incompatible with counter-evidence d and e in the text, it is a falsified hypothesis and needs to yield to a better [End Page 197] reading, an interpretation that can incorporate this counter-evidence. I showed that Zunshine's claims about her prime examples were not compatible with evidence in the texts. She does not challenge the textual counter-evidence I provide, but just ignores it. That is where literary criticism most urgently needs to learn from scientific... (shrink)

The central theme of this collection of essays, first published in 1978, is the basic tension in Nietzsche, and so in his work, between the urge to weave a satisfying web out of reality and the equally strong compulsion to expose its painful truths. The book aims to stress, not to play down, the embarassing and fruitful fact that he cannot be neatly pigeonholed either as a literary figure or as a professional philosopher. The book meets a long-felt need for (...) a study in English of both the literary and the philosophical aspects of Nietzsche's work, based on his authentic texts, and will be welcomed by all students of modern European thought and Literature. (shrink)

I am grateful to Alan Madry and Joel Richeimer for their intelligent and stimulating critique of my article “Heidegger and the Theory of Adjudication.” It is the most interesting commentary I have seen on the paper, and I have learned much from it. It may facilitate discussion, and advance debate, to state with some clarity where exactly we agree and disagree. I leave to the footnotes discussion of certain minor points where Madry and Richeimer are guilty of some critical overreaching.

Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so (...) much greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Professor Brian V. Johnstone, CSsR, has been quietly and unobtrusively contributing to the intellectual life of Catholicism, especially in the field of moral theology, for nearly four decades. Having published numerous theological articles on many topics, including biomedical ethics, peace and war, and fundamental moral theology, and directed many doctoral dissertations, it is no exaggeration to say that he has dedicated his entire life to teaching and writing theology. In honor of Johnstone's work, this felicitation volume covers a wide (...) range of themes in the Christian moral life with original articles written by internationally recognized theologians. In the spirit of Johnstone's thought and work, each article challenges the reader to reflect upon the present while contemplating the future of moral theology. (shrink)

Brian Hedden defends a radical view about the relationship between rationality, personal identity, and time. On the standard view, personal identity over time plays a central role in thinking about rationality, because there are rational norms for how a person's attitudes and actions at one time should fit with her attitudes and actions at other times. But these norms are problematic. They make what you rationally ought to believe or do depend on facts about your past that aren't part (...) of your current perspective on the world, and they make rationality depend on controversial, murky metaphysical facts about what binds different instantaneous snapshots into a single person extended in time. Hedden takes a different approach, treating the relationship between different time-slices of the same person as no different from the relationship between different people. On his account, the locus of rationality is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This impersonal, time-slice-centric approach to rationality yields a unified approach to the rationality of beliefs, preferences, and actions where what rationality demands of you is solely determined by your evidence, with no special weight given to your past beliefs or actions. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text (...) within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. (shrink)

Professor Brian Goodwin (1931-2007) was a visionary biologist, mathematician and philosopher. Understanding organisms as dynamics wholes, he worked to develop an alternate view to extreme Darwinism based solely on genetic factors. He was a pioneer in the field of theoretical biology.

It is morally negligent or reckless to believe without sufficient evidence. The foregoing proposition follows from a rule that is a modified expression of W. K. Clifford's ethics of belief. Clifford attempted to prove that it is always wrong to believe without sufficient evidence by advancing a doxastic counterpart to an act utilitarian argument. Contrary to various commentators, his argument is neither purely nor primarily epistemic, he is not a non-consequentialist, and he does not use stoicism to make his case. (...) Clifford's conclusion is a universal generalisation that is in a precarious position because of potential counterexamples. But the counterexamples do not preclude a rule against going beyond the available evidence and it is worthwhile making a moral case for such a rule. (shrink)

It seems impossible that organisms selected to maximize their genetic legacy could also be moral agents in a world in which taking risks for strangers is sometimes morally laudable. Brian Zamulinski argues that it is possible if morality is an evolutionary by-product rather than an adaptation.Evolutionary Intuitionism presents a new evolutionary theory of human morality. Zamulinski explains the evolution of foundational attitudes, whose relationships to acts constitute moral facts. With foundational attitudes and the resulting moral facts in place, he (...) shows how they ground a plausible normative morality, give answers to meta-ethical questions, and provide an account of moral motivation. He explains the nature of moral intuitions and, thus, of our access to the moral facts. He shows that the theory makes confirmed empirical predictions, including the observable variation in moral views. The combination of intuitionism and evolutionary ethics enables Zamulinski to overcome the standard objections to both.Evolutionary Intuitionism is a unified theory of human morality that explains how an objective morality could develop naturally in a physical world like ours, among organisms like us. (shrink)

Brian Leiter draws on empirical psychology to defend a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts play almost no significant role in our actions. Nietzsche emerges as not just a great philosopher but a prescient psychologist.