The popular and successful rhetorical textbooks produced by the 18th century Scottish philosophical tradition, such as George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and Alexander Bain’s English Composition and Rhetoric have been widely accorded a role in the trajectories of 19th and 20th century literary theory. Scholars have generally overlooked them, however, as philosophical works. The selected writings chosen for this volume show how these rhetorical textbooks were a practical extension of the philosophy (...) of language developed by 18th century Scottish philosophers. Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Alexander Gerard, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, advanced a radically new paradigm of language as an inherently mediated practice, directed simultaneously to personal and social, moral and aesthetic uses. This Scottish philosophy of rhetoric powerfully influenced the teaching of language and literacy as tools for social and educational innovation. This volume — the first of its kind — offers a wide variety of writings on rhetoric and rhetorical theory, selected in a way that reveals their intimate connection with the Scottish philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This paper offers re-assessment of Scottish Common Sense rhetoric and its relationship to pluralist practice and philosophical method. It argues that the rhetorical texts of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Alexander Bain can be read as a practical application of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. This offers a novel means of examining the relationship that Scottish rhetoric has to the philosophy of David Hume and also its own innovative philosophy of language. Finally, I argue that Scottish rhetoric makes a unique contribution (...) to rhetorical methodology's key place in the creation of social and moral consensus. (shrink)

Theories of spatial cognition are derived from many sources. Psychologists are concerned with determining the features of the mind which, in combination with external inputs, produce our spatialized experience. A review of philosophical and other approaches has convinced us that the brain must come equipped to impose a three-dimensional Euclidean framework on experience – our analysis suggests that object re-identification may require such a framework. We identify this absolute, nonegocentric, spatial framework with a specific neural system centered in the hippocampus.A (...) consideration of the kinds of behaviours in which such a spatial mapping system would be important is followed by an analysis of the anatomy and physiology of this system, with special emphasis on the place-coded neurons recorded in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. A tentative physiological model for the hippocampal cognitive map is proposed. A review of lesion studies, in tasks as diverse as discrimination learning, avoidance, and extinction, shows that the cognitive map notion can adequately explain much of the data.The model is extended to humans by the assumption that spatial maps are built in one hemisphere, semantic maps in the other. The latter provide a semantic deep structure within which discourse comprehension and production can be achieved. Evidence from the study of amnesic patients, briefly reviewed, is consistent with this extension. (shrink)

The few people familiar with the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus generally have a low opinion of it. It's easy to see why: the dialogue is a mish-mash of Platonic, Epicurean and Cynic arguments against the fear of death, seemingly tossed together with no regard whatsoever for their consistency. As Furley notes, the Axiochus appears to be horribly confused. Whereas in the Apology Socrates argues that death is either annihilation or a relocation of the soul, and is a blessing either way, "the (...) Socrates of the Axiochus wants to have it both ways": death is both annihilation and a release of the soul from the body into a better realm. This may be used to construct a valid argument for the conclusion that death is not evil, but at the expense of having a contradiction as one of its premises. But D. S. Hutchinson has recently proposed that these inconsistencies shouldn't surprise us if we view the Axiochus as "an unconventional version of a very conventional genre--the consolation letter." In this paper I expand on Hutchinson's brief suggestion and argue that the Axiochus can be rehabilitated by paying attention to its genre. Although the Axiochus does display many similarities to the consolation letter, the shift from letter to dialogue does--pace Hutchinson--significantly affect what's going on. Within the dialogue, Socrates behaves toward Axiochus in a way similar to the way the author of a consolation letter behaves towards the letter's reader: he is willing to use inconsistent arguments, borrowed from any source, in order to soothe the patient. However, in depicting this type of consolatory relationship between Socrates and Axiochus, the dialogue itself is not aiming at consoling its readers. Instead, it should be seen as displaying for the reader's consideration a certain type of consolatory argumentative practice. -/- Socrates notes that Axiochus is "very much in need of consolation" (365a), and he uses any means necessary to accomplish this task. Socrates exhibits many ways in which he is willing to sacrifice argumentative hygiene for the sake of therapeutic effectiveness. These include: -/- * Use of arguments with inconsistent premises, presented in propria persona. * Appeals to emotion * Tailoring arguments to the audience. * Presenting invalid arguments so as to induce unjustified but comforting beliefs. * Evasion. In these respects, I think that Socrates' argumentative practice is best compared to PH III 280-1, where Sextus Empiricus says that the skeptic will deliberately use logically weak arguments as long as they work. Dorothy Tarrant claims that what links the Socrates of the Axiochus to Socrates as he appears elsewhere in the Platonic corpus is his evident care for the welfare of his interlocutor's psyche. But this concern takes a quite different form in the Axiochus than it usually does. As with Sextus, psychic therapy in the Axiochus involves relief from pain. The primary difference between them is that Socrates, unlike Sextus, is not aiming at producing epochê in his patient. (shrink)

According to columnar higher-order vagueness, all orders of vagueness coincide: any borderline case is a borderline borderline case, and a third-order borderline case, etc. Bobzien has worked out many details of such a theory and models it with a modal logic closely related to S4. I take up a range of questions about the framework and argue that it is not suitable for modelling the structure of vagueness and higher-order vagueness.

Unlike mainstream Cyrenaics, the Annicereans deny that friendship is chosen only because of its usefulness. Instead, the wise person cares for her friend and endures pains for him because of her goodwill and love. Nonetheless, the Annicereans maintain that your own pleasure is the telos and that a friend’s happiness isn’t intrinsically choiceworthy. Their position appears internally inconsistent or to attribute doublethink to the wise person. But we can avoid these problems. We have good textual grounds to attribute to the (...) Annicereans a doctrine of “non-hedonic habits,” which allows them to abandon psychological hedonism while still maintaining hedonism regarding well-being. (shrink)

This paper examines evidentiality and epistemic modality in Quechua narrative discourse from the central highlands of Peru. Huamalíes Quechua falls into the broad Quechua ‘I’ dialect grouping established by Alfredo Torero ; evidential usage here can be compared to that of southern Conchucos Quechua as studied by Diane and Daniel Hintz while it differs in interesting ways from the Quechua ‘II’ dialects of southern Peru as studied by Faller. The analysis focuses on an orally performed traditional narrative that deals with (...) the theme of social interaction between a human protagonist and a spirit being of the ‘other world’. It describes the human protagonist’s gradual realization of the nature of the spirit being with whom he has become involved; evidential and epistemic markings grammatically structure this transition from conjecture, to supposition, to direct witness. The aim is to show how the story’s cultural content, and the way in which evidentials and epistemic modality are operationalized, are mutually entailing. Form and content taken together throw light both on how evidentiality and epistemic modality work in social interaction and on how Amerindian understandings of the interface between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds, and between ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, inform grammatical usage. (shrink)

Living a morally good life today is a challenge. But we become fully and authentically human precisely by the decisions we make every day—some of them relatively simple, others complex and difficult. Once a choice is made, we still must claim the moral resolve and strength of character to implement it. Virtues are precisely the sustained habits that help us maneuver life’s many choices and to become the good people that we want to be. St. Thomas Aquinas offers the classic (...) Christian presentation of the four principal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. But these are precisely cardinal or “hinge” virtues that provide the foundational framework for Aquinas’s much broader presentation of a multitude of other virtues. Neglect of this larger array of moral attitudes for good living would miss the breadth of Aquinas’s insights into a human life truly well-lived. Virtues Abounding explores, in contemporary language, the practical insights that Aquinas offers for the moral life today. Whether in university, seminary, or adult faith formation settings—whether for a deeper intellectual understanding of virtues or for personal reflection and growth—Virtues Abounding will provide new insight into a classic but too often overlooked storehouse of moral riches. (shrink)

Most expressions in natural language are vague. But what is the best semantic treatment of terms like 'heap', 'red' and 'child'? And what is the logic of arguments involving this kind of vague expression? These questions are receiving increasing philosophical attention, and in this book, first published in 2000, Rosanna Keefe explores the questions of what we should want from an account of vagueness and how we should assess rival theories. Her discussion ranges widely and comprehensively over the main (...) theories of vagueness and their supporting arguments, and she offers a powerful and original defence of a form of supervaluationism, a theory that requires almost no deviation from standard logic yet can accommodate the lack of sharp boundaries to vague predicates and deal with the paradoxes of vagueness in a methodologically satisfying way. Her study will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy of language and of mind, philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Spatial Representation presents original, specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers on a fascinating set of topics at the intersection of these two disciplines. They address such questions as these: Do the extraordinary navigational abilities of birds mean that these birds have the same kind of grip on the idea of a spatial world as we do? Is there a difference between the way sighted and blind subjects represent the world 'out there'? Does the study of brain-injured subjects, such (...) as 'blind seers', tell us anything about the working of normal spatial consciousness? -/- The essays are arranged into five sections, each of which reflects a central area of research into spatial cognition, and opens with a short introduction by the editors, designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary reading. The volume as a whole offers a rich and compelling expression of the view that to advance our understanding of the way we represent the external world it is necessary to draw on both philosophical and psychological approaches. (shrink)

Two laboratories which offered the new career of scientific work to women at the beginning of the twentieth century were the Biometric Laboratory and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory at University College London. The scientific careers of two women, Dr. Alice Lee and Dr. Ethel Elderton , are examined. Intellectual and economic factors involved in the choice of a career in eugenics are described, together with some aspects of the relationship between eugenics and feminism.

This is the first book to address philosophically the moral and political underpinnings of terrorism and anti-terrorism. It brings together authors with different attitudes and original perspectives on attitudes and ethical and practical justifications for terrorism.

We discuss the role of short-term auditory verbal storage within a working memory system. Data from single case studies of patients with left parietal lesions and selective impairment of memory span are discussed in order to address the question of the functions of short-term memory in language processing. The backup resource of auditory verbal short-term memory is required for those tasks that necessitate backtracking in order to integrate a verbal message within a developing central cognitive representation.

The editors of the new fragment of Gallus draw attention to line 6, ‘fecerunt carmina Musae’. They say ‘“fecerunt” is unusual in such a context, and to a Roman reader would inevitably suggest ; the Muses of Gallus provided craftsmanship as well as inspiration’. It is possible to be more precise: cf. Euphorion fr. 118 Powell.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. VI: Theology: The Old Covenant. By HANS Uns VoN BALTHASAR. Trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ed. John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Pp. 443. In this penultimate-volume of The Glory of the Lord, von Balthasar sets forth a " biblical aesthetics " in which the manner of the emergence of the Glory of God in (...) the world of man is spelled out. He proceeds by examining the bewildering variety of the manifestations of God's Glory in the Old Testament, but always as unified in their historical convergence upon Jesus, the Christ, the final and definitive presence in history of the divine Glory in whom Word and Image, Messiah and Servant, Son of Man and Son of God, are at one. This manner of proceeding is little consonant with contemporary Catholic exegesis, which prefers to regard the Old Testament as a free-standing hook, and is rather fastidious about reading it as " literally " the prologue and the Sitz im Leben of the New. For such exegetes, the literal and the historical senses are entirely distinct, because of their methodological enlistment in the historical pessimism of the Enlightenment. Balthasar, of course, is not of their camp. Balthasar's mastery of Old Testament exegesis is on a par with the effortless command of the Western philosophical, theological, and literary tradition which he has displayed in the earlier volumes of this work. While he relies heavily upon von Rad, a glance at the index shows that his knowledge of Old Testament scholarship is based upon a wide reading, upon which he levies throughout the book with practiced ease. The exegetical method implicit in his analysis is the one employed by scholars such as de Lubac, Guillet, and Ligier; its classic Augustinian understanding of the free unity of history, and of the consequently free meaning of Old Testament and the New as fulfilled in the Kingdom of God, needs no apology. The currently common supposition that the " literal " sense of Scripture is that which an Enlightened positivism will permit needs only to be recognized to be rejected. In the opening pages of the Introduction Balthasar sets the theme which will dominate the book: the rationally irresolvable dialectical 139 140 BOOK REVIEWS tension between God and all that is not God, a tension inherent in the revelation of the Glory of God. In keeping with the emphasis of his earlier volumes, Balthasar is insistent upon the radical gratuity of the revelation of the Glory of God. The revelatory manifestation of God as God, who is beyond all perception, all knowing, all communication, and yet is communicated, perceived the more surely where the more veiled, and definitively revealed on the Cross. The revelation of God's Glory is of God as the Absolutely Other, as formless, and so as in tension with all form which would mediate the revelation. This communication, this mediation, is utterly ex nihilo; it relies upon no capacity in man, upon no natural process of spiritual development, and is unrelated to, because absolutely transcendent to, all human projects. Impossible to prepare for, the manifestation is constantly new, arising out of no prior possibility in man or his world, and responding to nothing in him which might make the revelation capable of anticipation. The paradox of God's self communication of his formless Glory is then beyond all utterance, and yet is uttered, given form: the final Form is, of course, the Christ. This is the basic datum, the ground upon which all theology rests, and is pure grace, a gift beyond all expectation, incapable of being imagined. All the preparatory Old Testament images finally fail. The paradox, the self communication of God who is beyond all utterance, yet is uttered, has its resolution only in the Form, the personal unity, of Christ. The revelation always at once transcends and assimilates the concrete historical forms by which it is mediated. The pagan materials are transformed by their historical deployment in the revelatione.g., the pagan myths of creation, of divine wars and marriages, the pagan wisdom-and in their deployment, they converge, hut not within the Old... (shrink)

This paper focuses on two questions: (I) why do the Cyrenaics deny that we can gain knowledge concerning "external things," and (II) how wide-ranging is this denial? On the first question, I argue that the Cyrenaics are skeptical because of their contrast between the indubitable grasp we have of own affections, versus the inaccessibility of external things that cause these affections. Furthermore, this inaccessibility is due to our cognitive and perceptual limitations--it is an epistemological doctrine rooted in their psychology--and not (...) (pace Zilioli) due to any metaphysical theses regarding the external world. On the second question, I argue (pace Tsouna and Warren) that the scope of the Cyrenaics' skepticism is quite wide. Our reports on the Cyrenaics are inconsistent, but the most charitable and plausible reading results in attributing to the Cyrenaics skepticism not merely about the properties of external things (e.g., that the fire that warms me is really hot) of also of their nature and identity (e.g., that the object that warms me is a fire). However, it does not extend to skepticism regarding the existence of an external world. (shrink)

Thomism constitutes the only full-scale attempt to systematize an ontological theology which will ground literal statements; ie, its ontological method of ...

A framework of degrees of belief, or credences, is often advocated to model our uncertainty about how things are or will turn out. It has also been employed in relation to the kind of uncertainty or indefiniteness that arises due to vagueness, such as when we consider “a is F” in a case where a is borderline F. How should we understand degrees of belief when we take into account both these phenomena? Can the right kind of theory of the (...) semantics of vagueness help us answer this? Nicholas J.J. Smith defends a unified account, according to which “degree of belief is expected truth-value”; this builds on his Degree Theory of vagueness that offers an account of the semantics and logic of vagueness in terms of degrees of truth. I argue that his account fails. Degree theories of vagueness do not help us understand degrees of belief and, I argue, we shouldn’t expect a theory of vagueness to yield a detailed uniform story about this. The route from the semantics to psychological states needn’t be straightforward or uniform even before we attempt to combine vagueness with probabilistic uncertainty. (shrink)

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms -- such as 'tall', 'red', 'bald', and 'tadpole' -- have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate.This anthology collects for the first time the most important papers in the field. After a substantial introduction that surveys (...) the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent the best recent work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

This essay explores and interprets two texts from Parochial and Plain Sermons in light of Newman’s understanding of religious imagination—specifically, the act of realization. Both texts suggest that for Newman, realization is a type of self-appropriation by which a fact or an object is assimilated . One sermon concerns the Passion, the other the Resurrection. He indicates that when the object of the imagination is Christ, realization comes about through meditation on Scripture, and produces a stronger or weaker vision of (...) Jesus in the soul based on one’s personal dispositions. It is often employed when the mind engages in conflicting ideas, such as Christ as both God and man. (shrink)

Logical Pluralists maintain that there is more than one genuine/true logical consequence relation. This paper seeks to understand what the position could amount to and some of the challenges faced by its formulation and defence. I consider in detail Beall and Restall’s Logical Pluralism—which seeks to accommodate radically different logics by stressing the way that they each fit a general form, the Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT)—arguing against the claim that different instances of GTT are admissible precisifications of logical consequence. I (...) then consider what it is to endorse a logic within a pluralist framework and criticise the options Beall and Restall entertain. A case study involving many-valued logics is examined. I next turn to issues of the applications of different logics and questions of which logic a pluralist should use in particular contexts. A dilemma regarding the applicability of admissible logics is tackled and it is argued that application is a red herring in relation to both understanding and defending a plausible form of logical pluralism. In the final section, I consider other ways to be and not to be a logical pluralist by examining analogous positions in debates over religious pluralism: this, I maintain, illustrates further limitations and challenges for a very general logical pluralism. Certain less wide-ranging pluralist positions are more plausible in both cases, I suggest, but assessment of those positions needs to be undertaken on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)