This is a paper about the constituents of arguments. It argues that several different kinds of truth-bearer may be taken to compose arguments, but that none of the obvious candidates—sentences, propositions, sentence/truth-value pairs etc.—make sense of logic as it is actually practiced. The paper goes on to argue that by answering the question in different ways, we can generate different logics, thus ensuring a kind of logical pluralism that is different from that of J. Beall and Greg Restall.

The discussion in this paper begins with some observations regarding a number of structural similarities between art and morality as it involves human agency. On the basis of these observations we may ask whether or not incompatibilist worries about free will are relevant to both art and morality. One approach is to claim that libertarian free will is essential to our evaluations of merit and desert in both spheres. An alternative approach, is to claim that free will is required only (...) in the sphere of morality—and that to this extent the art/morality analogy breaks down. I argue that both these incompatibilist approaches encounter significant problems and difficulties—and that incompatibilist have paid insufficient attention to these issues. However, although the analogy between art and morality may be welcomed by compatibilists, it does not pave the way for an easy or facile optimism on this subject. On the contrary, while the art/morality analogy may lend support to compatibilism it also serves to show that some worries of incompatibilism relating to the role of luck in human life cannot be easily set aside, which denies compatibilism any basis for complacent optimism on this subject. (shrink)

German Indologists. Biographies of Scholars in Indian Studies writing in German. Valentina Stache-Rosen. Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi 1981. x + 277pp.

Howard R. Jarrell International Meditation Bibliography 1950-1982. ATLA Bibliography Series No. 12, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ 1985. Distributed by Bailey Bros & Swinfen Ltd, Folkestone. x + 432pp. £35.40.

Le Dasavatthuppakarana: Edited and translated by Jacqueline Ver Eecke. Publications de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Paris, 1976. Distributed by Adrien-Maisonneuve, 11 rue Saint Sulpice, F-75006 Paris. xvi + 155 pp. Fcs. 65.00.

The Last Forbidden Kingdom. Mustang: Land of Tibetan Buddhism. Clara Marullo, photographs by Vanessa Schuurbeque Boeye. Thames and Hudson, London 1995. viii, 134 pp. £25. ISBN 0-500-01676-3.

The Lion-Dog of Buddhist Asia. Elsie P. Mitchell. Fugaisha, New York and Renens 1991. Distributed by Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland, Vermont and, in the UK, by Clifford L. B. Hubbard, Ffynnan Cadro, Ponterwyd, Aberystwyth, Ceredigian Wales. 191pp. $50.00.

: Puritanism and Confucianism have little in common in terms of their substantive teachings, but they do share an emphasis on bounded, authoritative, localized human arrangements, and this profoundly challenges the dominant presumptions of contemporary globalization. It is not enough to say that these worldviews are ‘‘communitarian’’ alternatives to globalism, for that defines away what needs to be explained. This article compares the ontology of certain elements of the Puritan and Confucian worldviews, and, by focusing on the role of both (...) authority and activity in these systems, assesses (with the assistance of Max Weber) the theories of harmony that each invoke. It concludes by identifying the distinct options that these two modes of human existence suggest for those who wish to defend the relevance of boundedness and authority, and thus the very possibility of a human-scaled politics, in today’s world. (shrink)

In The Great Transformation Karl Polyani argues that we have transitioned from being a society with islands of market life to a market with islands of society. As the market has grown, so too, I would argue, has market culture. In this essay, I argue that the modern family is itself one such “society” within the market, and that it is under pressure to incorporate aspects of market culture. It responds to this pressure by resisting, capitulating to or simply playing (...) with it through an ongoing process of symbolization and re-symbolization. The degree to which families resist or welcome market culture depends, I think, on the fit between individuals’ embrace of market culture and their orientation to time. Temporal strategies preferred by employees at the top of the corporate ladders pose market culture’s first port of entry into the home. Or to put it another way, market culture slips into the family through a crack on the edge of the time bind. (shrink)

In Uneasy Virtue, Julia Driver advocates a consequentialist account of the virtues. In so far as her view is , Driver's account is superior to the psychologically rich theories of virtue offered by Aristotle, Hume and Kant. However, Driver is also committed to about virtue: a trait is a virtue only if it has instrumental value. In contrast, I argue for a form of minimalism, according to which a character trait counts as a virtue if it has either instrumental or (...) intrinsic value. The common intuitions about virtue that Driver takes to support her actually fit better with disjunctive minimalism. Admittedly, disjunctive minimalism is a messy account of virtue. However, this messiness would be a problem only if we drew a tight connection between virtue and right action, and we have good independent reasons for thinking there is no such tight link. (shrink)

The ascription of intentional states to the self involves knowledge, or at least claims to knowledge. Armed with the working definition of knowledge as 'the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts' [Hyman, J. Philos. Quart. 49:432—451], I sketch a simple competence model of acting and believing from knowledge and when knowledge is defeated by un-experienced changes of state. The model takes the form of three concentric (...) circles. The 'periphery' is analogous to Fodor's [(1983), The modularity of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] input systems. The 'core' contains copies of peripheral representations, and between these representations there is executive competition. At the 'nucleus', operations are performed on the core representations of, at least, negation and recursion. I argue that this provides a fruitful way in which to conceptualise why theory-of-mind tasks challenge pre-school children, how some degree of first-person authority is mental state attribution is possible, and how executive inhibition is achieved. (shrink)

Most new democracies face a challenge of reshaping the political culture to support the new democratic political order. This can often be a long-term process, complicated by the Realpolitik of governing in a new political (and often economic) system. One of the mechanisms of cultural change is generational change. New generations socialized after a democratic transition are presumably educated into the political norms of the new democratic regime. However, one can also imagine that the young lack clear political cues because (...) they grow up under a system in transition, or even reject the new order if it is accompanied by widespread social dislocation. The study of generational change in new democracies thus provides insights into the processes transforming a nation's political culture. We analyze generational change in the new democracies of East Asia using the Second Wave of the East Asian Barometer. We examine support for a democratic/authoritarian regime and the citizenship norms that underlie a democratic process (such as the rule of law and political tolerance). Our results yield evidence of significant generational change in regime norms in these new democracies, which suggests that the political culture is gradually being transformed. (shrink)

Comment on an article by Peter Zachar An account of emotion must include categories and dimensions. Categories because humans categorize reality, and a person's categorization of their own state influences aspects of that state. Dimensions because humans are always in some state of Core Affect, which varies by degree along dimensions of valence and activation . In Psychological Construction, Core Affect and a host of other "components" are separate on-going processes, always in some pattern. Occasionally the pattern resembles a prototype (...) of a category of emotion sufficiently to count as an instance of that category. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

IN A Theory of Justice, John Rawls deployed a social contract theory to vindicate liberal political principles of civil liberty and distributive justice without appeal to a utilitarian calculus. Rawls described his conception of political justice as "justice as fairness." Rational contractors, deliberating behind a "veil of ignorance," agree to a scheme of justice prior to knowing how the scheme materially affects their individual interests or conceptions of moral or nonmoral good. Perhaps the most striking and certainly one of the (...) most controversial features of Rawls's Theory was his argument that "the right" subordinates not only material interests in the economic sphere, but also individuals' fully considered conceptions of the moral good, human flourishing, and final ends. Hence, Rawls's theory of justice was meant to be a systematic alternative both to the economic pragmatism of other modern contract theorists as well as to the classical tradition of perfectionism in political theory. (shrink)