This book examines the presence of idealism in modern philosophy from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. We define idealism proper as the position that reality is ultimately mental or conceptual in nature, to be contrasted to materialism or physicalism. So defined, idealism has hardly been a popular view, at least in the twentieth century. But we distinguish between metaphysical and epistemological arguments for idealism, and argue that while the former have rarely been popular, the latter are (...) so, and present in many philosophers who would hardly call themselves idealists. We conclude that metaphysical arguments in favor of a reduction of all reality to either mind or matter are highly questionable, because we have no reason to believe that we have arrived at an adequate understanding of either. However, epistemological arguments in favor of idealism that point to some version of conceptual idealism or other are indeed difficult to avoid. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that about 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today and at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This state-of-the-art Handbook examines the reasons behind this dramatic loss of linguistic diversity, why it matters, and what can be done to document and support endangered languages. The volume is relevant not only to researchers in language endangerment, language shift and language death, but to anyone interested in the languages and cultures (...) of the world. It is accessible both to specialists and non-specialists: researchers will find cutting-edge contributions from acknowledged experts in their fields, while students, activists and other interested readers will find a wealth of readable yet thorough and up-to-date information. (shrink)

Increasingly, clinical research is evaluated on the quality of its statistical analysis. Traditionally, statistical analyses in clinical research have been carried out from a ‘frequentist’ perspective. The presence of an alternative paradigm – the Bayesian paradigm – has been relatively unknown in clinical research until recently. There is currently a growing interest in the use of Bayesian statistics in health care research. This is due both to a growing realization of the limitations of frequentist methods and to the ability of (...) Bayesian methods explicitly to incorporate prior expert knowledge and belief into the analyses. This is in contrast to frequentist methods, where prior experience and beliefs tend to be incorporated into the analyses in an ad hoc fashion. This paper outlines the frequentist and Bayesian paradigms. Acute myocardial infarction mortality data are then analysed from both a Bayesian and a frequentist perspective. In some analyses, the two methods are seen to produce comparable results; in others, they produce different results. It is noted that in this example, there are clinically relevant questions that are more easily addressed from a Bayesian perspective. Finally, areas in clinical research where Bayesian ideas are increasingly common are highlighted. (shrink)

The use of algorithms and automated systems, especially those leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), has been exploding in the public sector, but their use has been controversial. Ethicists, public advocates, and legal scholars have debated whether biases in AI systems should bar their use or if the potential net benefits, especially toward traditionally disadvantaged groups, justify even greater expansion. While this debate has become voluminous, no scholars of which we are aware have conducted experiments with the groups affected by these policies (...) about how they view the trade-offs. We conduct a set of two conjoint experiments with a high-quality sample of 973 Americans who identify as Black or African American in which we randomize the levels of inter-group disparity in outcomes and the net effect on such adverse outcomes in two highly controversial contexts: pre-trial detention and traffic camera ticketing. The results suggest that respondents are willing to tolerate some level of disparity in outcomes in exchange for certain net improvements for their community. These results turn this debate from an abstract ethical argument into an evaluation of political feasibility and policy design based on empirics. (shrink)

This book tells the story of idealism in modern philosophy, from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann define idealism as the reduction of all reality to something mental in nature. Rather than distinguishing between metaphysical and epistemological versions of idealism, they distinguish between metaphysical and epistemological motivations for idealism. They argue that while metaphysical arguments for idealism have only rarely been accepted, for example by Bishop Berkeley in the early eighteenth (...) century and the British idealists Bradley and McTaggart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, epistemological arguments for idealism have been widely accepted, even in the so-called analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. Guyer and Horstmann discuss many philosophers who have played a role in the development of idealism, from Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, through Kant; the German idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; the British and American idealists such as Green and Royce in addition to Bradley and McTaggart; G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, Neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer; and twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Collingwood, Carnap, Sellars, and McDowell. (shrink)

‘Unfair to Facts’ is a follow-up on Ch. 5, addressing objections Peter Strawson raised against Austin’s view of truth as a description of the conditions that must be satisfied if we are to say of a statement that it is true. Austin addresses the objection that his description of these conditions is due to a misunderstanding about the use of ‘fact’, arguing, against Strawson, that facts are not pseudo-entities and that the notion of ‘fitting the facts’ is (...) not a useless notion. (shrink)

Cooper, Austin Review(s) of: The Bloomsbury guide to Christian spirituality, by Richard Woods and Peter Tyler, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. viii + 422, $65.00.

this paper was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Bounds of Sense by Peter Strawson, in 1966. My own engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason began a few months later, with a course in the spring semester of 1967 taught by Robert Nozick. The Critique had not been regularly taught at Harvard since the retirement of C. I. Lewis a dozen years before, and Nozick, then a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor, started the course disarmingly (...) by telling us that he was offering the course because he had never read the Critique before and thought that teaching it would be a good way to learn it. Whether he was putting us on, I will never know, but it was... (shrink)

The debate between Derrida and Searle has received much critical attention, with the commentary often being Derrida-friendly. Even when commentators detect weaknesses in Derrida’s argument, they ap...

Dieses Buch gibt anhand von 22 Autoren und 22 ihnen zugeordneten Begriffen einen Überblick über das heute vorhandene Grundlagenwissen zur sprachlichen Interaktionsanalyse. Die Auswahl der Autoren umfaßt neben Linguisten (z.B. Bühler, Benveniste) auch Klassiker der Soziologie (z.B. Weber, Sacks), der Kulturtheorie (z.B. Volosinov) und der Sprachphilosophie (z.B. Wittgenstein, Austin); dazu kommen wichtige Autoren aus jüngerer Zeit (z.B. Bourdieu, Luckmann, Hymes, Geertz). Trotz dieser interdisziplinären Orientierung bleibt der Bezug auf sprachwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen erhalten. Das Spektrum der Grundbegriffe umfaßt Konzepte wie "Handeln", (...) "Sprechakt", "Kultur", "Intertextualität", "Subjektivität", "Performanz" und "Gattung". (shrink)

The imagery debate re-enacts controversies persisting since Descartes. The controversy remains important less for what we can learn about visual imagery than about cognitive science itself. In the tradition of Arnauld, Reid, Bartlett, Austin and Ryle, Pylyshyn’s critique exposes notorious mistakes being unwittingly rehearsed not only regarding imagery but also in several independent domains of research in modern cognitive science.

In 1956 J. L. Austin presented his famous distinction between performative and constative.1 Roughly, whereas in a constative utterance you report an already obtaining state of affairs—you say something—in a performative utterance you create something new: you do something.2 Paradigm examples of performatives were utterances by means of which actions such as baptizing, congratulating and greeting are performed.

_The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics_ is the most authoritative survey of the central issues in contemporary aesthetics available. The volume features eighteen newly commissioned papers on the evaluation of art, the interpretation of art, and many other forms of art such as literature, movies, and music. Provides a guide to the central traditional and cutting edge issues in aesthetics today. Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, including Peter Kivy, George Dickie, Noël Carroll, Paul Guyer, Ted Cohen, Marcia (...) Eaton, Joseph Margolis, Berys Gaut, Nicholas Wolterstrorff, Susan Feagin, Peter Lamarque, Stein Olsen, Francis Sparshott, Alan Goldman, Jenefer Robinson, Mary Mothersill, Donald Crawford, Philip Alperson, Laurent Stern and Amie Thomasson. Functions as the ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in aesthetics, art theory, and philosophy of art. (shrink)

O artigo discute como Nietzsche compreende a instituição da lei e da moral em distinção a Kant e à tradição cristã. Ele argumenta que Nietzsche é, em grande medida, inspirado pela mudança de paradigma em direção a um pensamento biológico evolutivo, introduzido por diversos de seus colegas ao final do século XIX, entre os quais F. A. Lange, que vê esta mudança como uma sóbria alternativa científico-materialista a Kant. Em Nietzsche, a imperativa moral kantiana é substituída pela noção de uma (...) moralidade emergente graças a processos civilizatórios históricos ou pré-históricos, impostos a um ser humano de mente débil sem quaisquer disposições racionais inerentes a obedecer à Lei. Ela também é um processo que, em vez de universalizar o ser humano, o cinde em uma dualidade, em que uma parte obedece a antigos e imediatos interesses próprios, e a outra parte obedece a novos 'comandos', que lhe foram gritados 'aos ouvidos' por um chamado 'comandante'. A obediência à lei conduz a duas formas radicalmente diferentes em Nietzsche: indivíduos servis e medíocres precisam ser expostos à disciplina e à punição, para adotar a Lei; enquanto os chamados indivíduos 'soberanos' são capazes de impor a lei a si mesmos. A figura do 'soberano' vem consequentemente sendo o motivo de vigoroso debate, especialmente quanto à tradição anglo-saxônica em pesquisa por Nietzsche, uma vez que seu aparente 'respeito pela lei' e 'senso de dever' reiteram típicas qualidades kantianas. Em relação a essas discussões, sugiro que o 'soberano' de Nietzsche (em um contexto) seja idêntico ao 'comandante' (em outros contextos). Quando o 'soberano', como tal, impõe a lei a si mesmo e aos demais, sua ação é convencional e arbitrária (como a linguagem em Saussure), e é mais irracional que racional, como em Kant. Sua vontade não é uma vontade boa, nem uma vontade racional, com visão para a autonomia humana. Seu comando de si mesmo e dos outros é performativo, portanto, sem valor de verdade (como atos ilocucionários de fala em Austin e Searle). The article discusses how Nietzsche understands the institution of law and morals in distinction to Kant and the Christian tradition. It argues that Nietzsche to a large extent is inspired by the paradigm-shift toward a evolutionary biological thinking introduced by several of his peers in the late 19th century, among else F. A. Lange, who sees this shift as a sobering scientific-materialistic alternative to Kant. In Nietzsche, the Kantian moral imperative is replaced with a notion of a morality emerging thanks to historical, or pre-historical, civilizational processes, imposed on a feebleminded human without any inherent rational dispositions to obey Law. It is also a process, which rather than universalizing the human, splits it in a duality where one part obeys old immediate self-interests and another part obeys new 'commands,' having been shouted 'into the ear' by a so-called 'commander.' The compliance with law takes two radically different forms in Nietzsche: servile and mediocre individuals need to be exposed to discipline and punishment in order to adopt Law; while so-called 'sovereign' individuals are able to impose law upon themselves. The figure of the 'sovereign' has consequently been an issue for vigorous debate in especially the Anglo-Saxon tradition of Nietzsche research, since his apparent 'respect for law' and 'sense of duty' reiterate typical Kantian qualities. Relating to these discussions, I suggest that Nietzsche's 'sovereign' (in one context) is identical his 'commander' (in other contexts). When the 'sovereign' as such imposes law upon himself and others, his act is conventional and arbitrary (like language in Saussure), and is rather irrational than rational as in Kant. His will is not a good will, nor a rational will with a vision of human autonomy. His command of himself and others is a performative, thus without truth-value (like illocutionary speech-acts in Austin and Searle). (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories (...) and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This paper examines the contribution of the PhD dissertation of the American cytologist Michael F. Guyer (1874-1959) to the early establishment (in 1902-1903) of the parallel relationship between cytological chromosome behaviour in meiosis and Mendel's laws. Guyer's suggestions were among the first, which attempted to relate the variation observed in the offspring in hybridisation studies by a coherent cytological chromosome mechanism to meiosis before the rediscovery of Mendel's principles. This suggested for the first time that the chromosome mechanism (...) involved a conjugation of maternal and paternal chromosomes during the synapsis followed by a segregation of parental chromosomes in the final germ cells and a random union of the final germ cells in the fertilization. It shows that this early suggestion was similar to William Austin Cannon's later chromosome proposal attempting to explain Mendel's principles and had some influence on Walter Sutton's cytological suggestion explaining correctly the behaviour of Mendel's particle by 1903. (shrink)

This ain’t your grandma’s virtue theory.In Michael Austin’s bold new collection, Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics, gone are the pretentions of defining right action generically as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances, while acting in and from character, provided that a virtuous person would end up in those circumstances. Instead, we find detailed explorations of specific virtues and vices related to specific fields of activity and problems, with attention (some of it careful (...) – some less so) to relevant empirical literature and elbowroom for alternative normative approaches and conceptions. Aristotle tells us about courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, even temper, pride, justice, and friendship. The first wave neo-Aristotelians such as Peter Geach (The Virtues. Cambridge University Press, 1977) tell us about prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity. Contributors to the present volume tell us about inst .. (shrink)

Paul Hirst claimed that Richard Peters ?revolutionised philosophy of education?. This does not accord with my experience in the Antipodean periphery. My experience of the work of Wittgenstein, Austin and Kovesi before reading Peters and Dewey, Kuhn and Toulmin subsequently meant that Peters was a major but not revolutionary figure in my understanding of philosophy of education.

Exploratory experiments are widely characterized as experiments that do not test hypotheses. Experiments that do test hypotheses are characterized as confirmatory experiments. Philosophers have pointed out that research programmes can be both confirmatory and exploratory. However, these definitions preclude single experiments being characterized as both exploratory and confirmatory; how can an experiment test and not test a hypothesis? Given the intuition that some experiments are exploratory, some are confirmatory, and some are both, a recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and (...) confirmatory experimentation is needed. I discuss ‘phase IV’ trials to show what this recharacterization could look like. Phase IV trials can be exploratory and confirmatory insofar as they concurrently test hypotheses and explore for unforeseen phenomena. Even if it is uncontroversial that a single experiment can have multiple aims, the recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation is still required for these aims to be held together coherently. I offer an alternative characterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation where the former remains a distinct kind of experimentation but is not characterized as non-hypothesis-testing. (shrink)

Esta coletânea é um tributo a Peter Frederick Strawson pelo centenário de seu nascimento (1919-2019). Diferentemente de outras coletâneas, esta propõe colocar em relevo a interlocução de Strawson com a tradição filosófica. Em outras palavras, por um lado, queremos evidenciar as discussões que Strawson travou com os seus contemporâneos (Austin, Quine, Russell e Wittgenstein), e, por outro, a influência que recebeu e as críticas que dirigiu àqueles que o precederam na história da filosofia (Aristóteles, Descartes, Hume, Kant). Poderíamos (...) ter enriquecido a lista acima com o nome de muitos outros filósofos com os quais Strawson teve contato, mas julgamos que o trabalho ficaria bastante extenso. Por esse motivo, optamos por aqueles nomes mais significativos que figuram na construção da história intelectual de Strawson. O presente volume reúne nove capítulos que levam como título o nome de Strawson e do filósofo com o qual ele dialogou ao longo de suas obras. Essa opção na nomeação dos capítulos por si só já permite colocar em evidência os principais filósofos pelos quais Strawson se interessou e com os quais se confrontou ao longo de seu trabalho filosófico. Com exceção do capítulo sobre Wittgenstein, que é uma versão revisada de um texto publicado anteriormente, todos os outros capítulos são inéditos e foram escritos especialmente para esta coletânea. O volume inclui na abertura a tradução de “Um fragmento de autobiografia intelectual”, de P. F. Strawson. Quando elegemos como título desta obra, Strawson e a tradição filosófica, não estamos insinuando que Strawson é um historiador da filosofia e muito menos que se interesse por historiografia. O título desta obra apenas quer indicar que Strawson, por um lado, transita na história da filosofia com alguma facilidade, além de nutrir um grande apreço por ela e, por outro, que ele discute com os principais nomes da história da filosofia no que concerne aos temas de seu interesse. A sua proposta filosófica é alimentada e irrigada por esse conhecimento, o que lhe dá a possibilidade de assumir na maioria das vezes posições ponderadas e equilibradas acerca de temas complexos por ele tratados. ​ ISBN: 978-85-5696-689-6. Nº de pág.: 244. (shrink)

Justice and Power in the Sociolegal Studies asks what interdisciplinary work in the law and society tradition tells us about the relationship of law and justice, as well as the way power operates in and through law. The fundamental concepts of justice and power provide points of departure for leading scholars to explore the various domains of socio-legal research. As they note the explicitness of the engagement with issues of power and the relative silence about -- or indirectness in taking (...) on -- questions of justice found in most law and society research, they ask how engagement with issues of power and silence about justice constituted law and society as a research field caught between a desire to have political impact and, at the same time, to maintain its scientific respectability. (shrink)

This introduction to the philosophy of social science provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events. Instead, theory aims to provide an (...) understanding of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of social science, and social scientists from a range of disciplines. (shrink)

If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational learning. Here, we analyze two models the evolution of psychological capacities that allow cumulative cultural evolution. Both models suggest that the conditions which allow the evolution of (...) such capacities when rare are much more stringent than the conditions which allow the maintenance of the capacities when common. This result follows from the fact that the assumed benefit of the capacities, cumulative cultural adaptation, cannot occur when the capacities are rare. These results suggest why such capacities may be rare in nature. (shrink)

Philosophers have not taken the evolution of human beings seriously enough. If they did, argues Peter Munz, many long standing philosophical problems would be resolved. One of philosophical concequences of biology is that all the knowledge produced in evolution is a priori, i.e., established hypothetically by chance mutation and selective retention, not by observation and intelligent induction. For organisms as embodied theories, selection is natural and for theories as disembodied organisms, it is artificial. Following Popper, the growth of knowledge (...) is seen to be continuous from the amoeba to Einstein'. Philosophical Darwinism throws a whole new light on many contemporary debates. It has damaging implications for cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and questions attempts from within biology to reduce mental events to neural processes. More importantly, it provides a rational postmodern alternative to what the author argues are the unreasonable postmodern fashions of Kuhn, Lyotard and Rorty. (shrink)

Law in Crisis is an unsettling history of natural disaster and political subject formation in the modern world.

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity consists of culturally transmitted ideas and skills that underpin the operation of institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution in early human populations the Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural (...) evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in simple societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior cross-culturally, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity. (shrink)

Peter Anstey rejects the widespread view that all knowledge for Locke is propositional. He argues, instead, that Locke accepts a form of non-propositional knowledge. The perception of the agreement and disagreement of ideas, according to Anstey's interpretation, is akin to what Bertrand Russell called “knowledge by acquaintance.” He presents a careful, four-step analysis of Locke’s view of the acquisition of knowledge, which is designed to show how the mind proceeds from perceiving to affirming, then to assenting, and finally to (...) verbalizing propositions. This comprehensive account takes into account a variety of remarks Locke makes about perception, knowledge and true or false propositions, and Anstey claims that overall this interpretation is a better fit than the orthodox view that Locke held all knowledge to be propositional. (shrink)

Bringing together powerful new tools from set theory and the philosophy of language, this book proposes a solution to one of the few unresolved paradoxes from antiquity, the Paradox of the Liar. Treating truth as a property of propositions, not sentences, the authors model two distinct conceptions of propositions: one based on the standard notion used by Bertrand Russell, among others, and the other based on J.L. Austin's work on truth. Comparing these two accounts, the authors show that while (...) the Russellian conception of the relation between sentences, propositions, and truth is crucially flawed in limiting cases, the Austinian perspective has fruitful applications to the analysis of semantic paradox. In the course of their study of a language admitting circular reference and containing its own truth predicate, Barwise and Etchemendy also develop a wide range of model-theoretic techniques--based on a new set-theoretic tool, Peter Aczel's theory of hypersets--that open up new avenues in logical and formal semantics. (shrink)