A-t-il suffit à Karl Raimund Popper de dénoncer les «graves erreurs» du positivisme logique pour se féliciter d'être le fossoyeur de Ludwig Wittgenstein? Si leur pomme de discorde philosophique peut a priori donner l'impression que les critiques de Popper ont conduit à la mort du vérificationnisme, il faut admettre qu'elles n'ont pas permis à la critique poppérienne de prospérer. Les auteurs de cet ouvrage invitent à saisir l'intérêt épistémologique du débat entre Popper et Wittgenstein.

This book is a fascinating and accessible summary of Roger Penrose's current thinking on those areas of physics in which he feels there are major...

In the formation of extended noun phrases, expressions are used that describe some dimension. Weight is described by each of the prenominal expressions in heavy rock, too much ballast, 2 lb rock, 2 lbs of rocks. The central claim of this paper is that the position of these types of expressions within the noun phrase limits the kinds of dimensions they may describe. The limitations have to do with whether or not the dimension tracks relevant part-whole relations. An analogy is (...) made between these constraints and the well-known constraints on thematic relations that are incurred by the position of a noun phrase in a clause. A proposal is made about the meanings of expressions like too much and 2 pounds which explains their common cross-categorial distribution and this informs the analysis of their use in noun phrases. A position is taken on the meaning of the count mass distinction which, in conjunction with the hypothesis about dimensions, explains asymmetries in the distribution of prenominal adjectives with count and mass nouns. (shrink)

Mill was one of the most important British philosophers of the nineteenth century; his Utilitarianism is a pivotal work in ethical thought. This book, written specifically for students coming to Mill - and perhaps philosophy - for the first time, will be an ideal guide. Mill on Utilitarianism introduces and assesses: * Mill's life and the background of Utilitarianism * the ideas and text of Utilitarianism * the continuing importance of Mill's work to philosophy This is the first book dedicated (...) to Utilitarianism itself. Concisely written and engaging, it is perfect reading for those studying Mill or moral philosophy. (shrink)

No single text could be considered more important in the history of philosophy than Descartes' Meditations. This unique collection of background material to this magisterial philosophical text has been translated from the original French and Latin. The texts gathered here illustrate the kinds of principles, assumptions, and philosophical methods that were commonplace when Descartes was growing up. The selections are from: Francisco Sanches, Christopher Clavius, Pierre de la Ramee, Francisco Suárez, Pierre Charron, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Scipion Dupleix, Marin Mersenne, (...) Pierre Gassendi, Jean de Silhon, François de la Mothe le Vayer, Charles Sorel, and Jean-Baptiste Morin. (shrink)

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

Efforts to bring science into early 19th century breeding practices in Central Europe, organised from Brno, the Hapsburg city in which Mendel would later turn breeding experiments into a body of timeless theory, are here considered as a significant prelude to the great discovery. During those years prior to Mendel's arrival in Brno, enlightened breeders were seeking ways to regulate the process of heredity, which they viewed as a force to be controlled. Many were specialising in sheep breeding for the (...) benefit of the local wool industry while others were showing an interest in commercial plants, especially fruit trees and vines, and later cereals. Breeders explained their problems in regulating heredity in terms of climatic influences disruption due to crossing sports or saltations. Practical experience led them to the concepts of 'inheritance capacity' and the 'mutual elective affinity' of parents. The former was seen to differ among individuals and also among traits; the latter was proposed as a means of adding strength to heredity. The breeders came to recognise that traits might be hidden and yet transmitted as a 'potential' to future generations. They also grew to understand that heredity would be strengthened when a quality was 'fixed' within a lineage by 'pure blood relations.' Continued selection of the desired quality might then lead to 'a higher perfection.' But the ultimate 'physiological' question about breeding, 'what is inherited and how?,' found no answer. Major figures in this development included Abbot Napp, the one who asked this question and who was due to receive Mendel into the monastery in 1843, and Professor Diebl whose lectures on agriculture and natural science at the Brno Philosophical Institute Mendel would attend in 1846. Here we analyse their progress in theorizing about breeding up until about 1840. In discussing this development, we refer to certain international contacts, especially with respect to information transfer and scientific education, within the wider context of the late Enlightenment. (shrink)

This book recalls, for nonscientific readers, the history of quantum mechanics, the main points of its interpretation, and Einstein's objections to it, together with the responses engendered by his arguments. We point out that most popular discussions on the strange aspects of quantum mechanics ignore the fundamental fact that Einstein was correct in his insistence that the theory does not directly describe reality. While that fact does not remove these counterintuitive features, it casts them in a different light."--page vi.

One of the most important philosophers of recent times, Elizabeth Anscombe wrote books and articles on a wide range of topics, including the ground-breaking monograph Intention. Her work is original, challenging, often difficult, always insightful; but it has frequently been misunderstood, and its overall significance is still not fully appreciated. This book is the first major study of Anscombe's philosophical oeuvre. In it, Roger Teichmann presents Anscombe's main ideas, bringing out their interconnections, elaborating and discussing their implications, pointing out (...) objections and difficulties, and aiming to give a unified overview of her philosophy. Many of Anscombe's arguments are relevant to contemporary debates, as Teichmann shows, and on a number of topics what Anscombe has to say constitutes a powerful alternative to dominant or popular views. Among the writings discussed are Intention, "Practical Inference," "Modern Moral Philosophy," "Rules, Rights and Promises," "On Brute Facts," "The First Person," "The Intentionality of Sensation," "Causality and Determination," An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, "The Question of Linguistic Idealism," and a number of other pieces, including some that are little known or hard to obtain. A complete bibliography of Anscombe's writings is also included. Ranging from the philosophy of action, through ethics, to philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of logic and language, this book is a study of one of the most significant bodies of work in modern philosophy, spanning more than fifty years, and as pertinent today as ever. (shrink)

The calculus of relations was created and developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Augustus De Morgan, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ernst Schröder. In 1940 Alfred Tarski proposed an axiomatization for a large part of the calculus of relations. In the next decade Tarski's axiomatization led to the creation of the theory of relation algebras, and was shown to be incomplete by Roger Lyndon's discovery of nonrepresentable relation algebras. This paper introduces the calculus of relations and (...) the theory of relation algebras through a review of these historical developments. (shrink)

Grâce aux œuvres, qui amplifient notre expérience du monde, des êtres et des choses qui le peuplent, nous découvrons que notre attention n'est pas uniforme dans ses accueils et ses inflexions, mais qu'elle se constelle autour de foyers. Certains de ces foyers sont établis, partagés. D'autres sont singuliers, labiles, résultats d'une élaboration subjective qui opère par rapprochements et découpages au sein des catégories artistiques, esthétiques, historiques. Le présent essai porte sur l'un de ces foyers, que le néologisme « intranquillité » (...) est venu nommer, autour duquel se groupent les écrits du poète portugais Fernando Pessoa et de ses « hétéronymes », une série de dessins réalisés par Tatiana Trouvé, la pensée poéthique selon Jean-Claude Pinson et le Monsieur Hulot de Jacques Tati. Il s'attache à restituer l'enquête menée auprès de ce foyer, afin d'éclairer les raisons de sa formation, et d'en dégager un sens susceptible, à son tour, d'être partagé. (shrink)

In this note, I point out a mathematically well-defined way of non-trivially comparing the sizes of uncountable sets of equal cardinality.

Early in the 1240s the University of Paris hired a recent graduate from Oxford, Roger Bacon by name, to teach the arts and introduce Aristotle to its curriculum. Along with eight sets of questions on Aristotle's natural works and the Metaphysics he claims to have authored another eight books before he returned to Oxford around 1247. Within the prodigious output of this period we find a treatise on logic titled Summulae dialectices, and it is this that is here annotated (...) and presented in translation. The book is unique in several respects. First, there is the breadth of its sources. Not only do we find explicit reference to the usual authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, Porphyry, Cicero, and Priscian, we also find unexpected reference to Augustine, Bernardus Silvestris, Donatus, Terence, and Themistius, along with mention of the Muslim philosophers Algazel and Ibn Rushd. Second, it is clear that Bacon is drawing on or reacting to an extraordinarily wide variety of medieval sources: Garland the Computist, Hugh of St. Victor, Master Hugo, Hugutius of Pisa, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Damas, Nicholas of Paris, Richard of Cornwall, Robert Kilwardby, Robert of Lincoln, and Robert the Englishman. Third, it unexpectedly presents a full-blown treatment of Aristotle's theory of demonstration. And finally, Bacon reveals a highly unorthodox view of the signification of common terms. Bacon, here, takes his students and us deeper into medieval sources and controversy than any of his rivals do. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

This article is an edited transcript of the keynote session at the 16th annual Philosophy of Management conference in Oxford on 23 June 2024. The keynote took the form of a dialogue between Roger Crisp (Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford) and Chris Cowton (Emeritus Professor and former Dean of the Business School at the University of Huddersfield and formerly Associate Director of the Institute of Business (...) Ethics). The dialogue was facilitated by Nigel Laurie, formerly managing partner at London Facilitators and founder of the Philosophy of Management journal and the annual conference (Laurie and Cherry 2001). This dialogue joins a long-lasting conversation in the journal of Philosophy of Management on philosophy and its applications to management practice and theory (Eabrasu, 2023; Tsahuridu, 2023) by offering insightful personal perspectives especially as seen through institutional lenses. (shrink)

Roger Crisp presents a comprehensive study of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics, a landmark work first published in 1874. Crisp argues that Sidgwick is largely right about many central issues in moral philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics, consequentialism, hedonism about well-being, and the weight to be given to self-interest. He holds that Sidgwick's long discussion of 'common-sense' morality is probably the best discussion of deontology we have. And yet The Methods of Ethics can be hard to (...) understand, and this is perhaps one reason why, though it is a philosophical goldmine, few have ventured deeply into it. What does Sidgwick mean by a 'method'? Why does he discuss only three methods? What are his arguments for hedonism and for utilitarianism? How can we make sense of the idea of moral intuition? What is the role of virtue in Sidgwick's ethics? Crisp addresses these and many other questions, offering a fresh view of Sidgwick's text which will assist any moral philosopher to gain more from it. (shrink)

In this lucid and engaging introductory volume on the nature of society, Roger Trigg examines the scientific basis of social science and shows that philosophical presuppositions are a necessary starting point for the study of society.

This dissertation is based on the compositional model theoretic approach to natural language semantics that was initiated by Montague (1970) and developed by subsequent work. In this general approach, coordination and negation are treated following Keenan & Faltz (1978, 1985) using boolean algebras. As in Barwise & Cooper (1981) noun phrases uniformly denote objects in the boolean domain of generalized quanti®ers. These foundational assumptions, although elegant and minimalistic, are challenged by various phenomena of coordination, plurality and scope. The dissertation solves (...) these problems by developing a ¯exible process of meaning composition, as ®rst proposed by Partee & Rooth (1983). Flexible interpretation involves semantic operations without any phonological counterpart, which participate in the interpretation process and change meanings of overt expressions. The dissertation introduces a novel ¯exible system where a small number of operations describe the behaviour of complex phenomena such as `non-boolean' and, the scope of inde®nites and the semantics of collectivity with quanti®cational NPs. The proposed theory is based on a distinction between two features of meanings in natural language. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes and the Cartesians are likely in agreement that logic is an ars cogitandi whose aim is to perfect the ingenium by the exercise of its operations: ideating, judging, discoursing, and ordering. We can see that these elements are the underpinning of both the Regulae and the Discourse on Method, and thus, like Adrien Baillet and others in the seventeenth century, we can understand these two works as embodying Descartes’ “logic,” despite Descartes’ notorious anti-logic Renaissance rhetoric in (...) both writings. (shrink)

_Ideas of Human Nature_ presents twelve of the most influential Western thinkers on the topic of human nature. Roger Trigg examines the thinkers in their historical context and discusses their relevance to contemporary controversies.

As part of a review symposium on DARWIN'S ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY: FROM ARTIFICIAL TO NATURAL SELECTION (2021), the journal METASCIENCE invited Roger White, Jon Hodge and me to submit a response to the thoughtful commentaries on our book by Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, David Depew and Andrew Inkpen.

The following is an edited version of Roger Penrose's lecture at the Fifth Mind and Brain Symposium at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, on 29 October 1994, introducing the themes of his recent book Shadows of the Mind. The talk begins by outlining some options for the modelling of the relationship between consciousness and computation, and provides evidence for a model in which it is not possible even in principle to simulate mathematical understanding computationally. It is argued that mathematical (...) understanding is on a continuum with consciousness in general, and that non-computability is a feature of all consciousness. The talk then goes on to outline some of the problems of the relationship between quantum and classical physics and proposes a new theory of `objective reduction' by quantum gravity to bridge the explanatory gap. The talk concludes by examining cytoskeletal microtubules as a possible site for quantum-coherent events in the brain. It is suggested that this might be the physical basis of conscious events. (shrink)