In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; (...) rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science. (shrink)

My purpose in what follows is not so much to defend the basic principle of utilitarianism as to indicate the form of it which seems most promising as a basic moral and political position. I shall take the principle of utility as offering a criterion for two different sorts of evaluation: first, the merits of acts of government, social policies, and social institutions, and secondly, the ultimate moral evaluation of the actions of individuals. I do not take it as implying (...) that the individual should live his life on the basis of constant evaluations of this sort. For there are different levels of decision making each with its appropriate criteria. For example, we each inevitably make many of our decisions from the point of view of our own personal self-fulfilment and this cannot regularly take a directly utilitarian form, nor should the utilitarian want it to do so. His claim is at most that we should sometimes review our life from the point of view of a kind of impersonal moral truth of a universalistic utilitarian character. (shrink)

Lawrence Johnson advocates a major change in our attitude toward the nonhuman world. He argues that nonhuman animals, and ecosystems themselves, are morally significant beings with interests and rights. The author considers recent work in environmental ethics in the introduction and then presents his case with the utmost precision and clarity. Written in an attractive, nontechnical style, the book will be of particular interest to philosophers, environmentalists and ecologists.

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, grounding his (...) phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

Despite the concern with oppressive systems and practices there have been few attempts to analyse the general concept of oppression. Recently, Iris Marion Young has argued that it is not possible to analyse oppression as a unitary moral category. Rather, the term ‘oppression’ refers to several distinct structures, namely, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. This paper rejects Young's claim and advances a general theory of oppression. Drawing insight from American chattel slavery and the situation of the German Jews (...) during the 1930's, I argue that to be oppressed is to be unjustly denied the opportunity for what I call ‘resilient autonomy’. I argue that all instances of oppression can usefully be analysed in these terms. I test my analysis against each of Young's five structures of oppression, concluding that in each case they are captured by my analysis. (shrink)

W. B. Gallie's words about Peirce's cosmology—"the black sheep or white elephant of his philosophical progeny" (1952, p. 216)—have often been quoted, usually as a preface to giving a better account of the animal. That he attributed the view to 'contemporary philosophers' and did not assert it himself has usually been ignored. True, Gallie did argue that the "cosmology is a failure, and an inevitable failure" (p. 236), but he also said that Peirce himself "recognized … that his work in (...) this field was imperfect and sketchy" (p. 215), and he concluded the chapter, and his book, with an extremely sympathetic account of all that is nevertheless of enduring value in that failure. After studying Peirce's writings of his.. (shrink)

As the editor noted in the last number Freddie Ayer, or Professor Sir Alfred Ayer, played a considerable part in launching the vast enterprise of the Bentham edition. It is fitting, therefore, that something be said in Utilitas about his achievement as a philosopher and the extent to which he falls within the same broad empiricist and utilitarian tradition to which Bentham and J. S. Mill belonged.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and computer science. While primary emphasis will (...) be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. While most philosophers and psychologists tend to believe that the rise of cognitive psychology has occurred concomitant with the decline of operant psychology, Terry L. Smith contends that nothing could be further from the truth. He maintains that operant psychology has discovered (and continues to discover) reasonably well-confirmed causal principles of intentional behavior, which go beyond what cognitive psychology can provide, while cognitive psychology, in tum, has the potential to supply analyses (and explanations) that account for them. Smith thus advances a surprising but nonetheless illuminating perspective for appreciating the place of operant conditioning within the discipline of psychology in this rich and fascinating work. J. H. F. (shrink)

: This response to my seven critics is organized under five topics: 1. The book's scope and approach; 2. Physicalism, idealism, anthropomorphism; 3. Final causation; 4. Peirce's development; 5. Signs, objects, interpretants. No ground is ceded, but I have found the interchange clarifying and hope that the reader will find it so, too.

The four principles approach to medical ethics plus specification is used in this paper. Specification is defined as a process of reducing the indeterminateness of general norms to give them increased action guiding capacity, while retaining the moral commitments in the original norm. Since questions of method are central to the symposium, the paper begins with four observations about method in moral reasoning and case analysis. Three of the four scenarios are dealt with. It is concluded in the “standard” Jehovah’s (...) Witness case that having autonomously chosen the authority of his religious institution, a Jehovah’s Witness has a reasonable basis on which to refuse a recommended blood transfusion. The author’s view of the child of a Jehovah’s Witness scenario is that it is morally required—not merely permitted—to overrule this parental refusal of treatment. It is argued in the selling kidneys for transplantation scenario that a fair system of regulating and monitoring would be better than the present system which the author believes to be a shameful failure. (shrink)

This response to a variety of criticisms of _Charles Peirce and Modern Science_ restates and attempts to clarify and explain major themes of the book.

Bentham and Mill and probably most utilitarians have a good deal in common with Hobbes and Spinoza as moral thinkers. For they share a commitment to deriving ethics from the actual and normal motivitations of human beings as creatures of the natural world rather than, like Kant and many religious moralists, from some transcendent realm to the requirements of which natural man has a duty to submit without expecting any help therefrom in the satisfaction of his natural inclinations. In the (...) present context I shall call all such thinkers ethical naturalists, though I do not mean this expression in any very precise technical sense, only to indicate a commitment to somehow deriving morality from natural fact. (shrink)

If there is such a thing as a genuine property appropriately called "intrinsic value" this property must be such that recognition that something does, or would, possess it, has a necessary tendency to motivate towards sustaining that thing in existence or producing it (if possible). There is just one thing which possesses that property and that is the property of being pleasurable (properly conceived) which, therefore, is the same as intrinsic value. (The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to intrinsic disvalue and (...) painfulness.) Why this seems not to be so is explained. (shrink)

Religion has been described in this book as ‘a truth to live by’. This last chapter considers with reference to each of the philosophers discussed at any length in this book whether his metaphysics could provide anyone who accepted it with such a ‘truth’. Each of them qualifies as religiously significant from this point of view. The truth of the system matters for anyone inclined to adopt it but what matters for others is its ethical effect upon him or her.

This introductory chapter starts the discussion by some general remarks on what makes a belief system a religious one and the criteria for calling something ‘God’. There is a brief discussion of Descartes and of Pascal and the relation between the expressions ‘the Absolute’ and ‘God’ is briefly considered.

This chapter begins with a description of the life of Josiah Royce. It then discusses the following themes from Royce: proof of the existence of God, ethical theory, and the problem of evil in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy; the panpsychism of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; the four conceptions of being in The World and the Individual; time and eternity and the worlds of description and acquaintance mainly in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; and the notion of the beloved (...) community in The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity. Some comments on Royce as a religious thinker and man are presented. (shrink)

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This dialogue is concerned with the problems raised by the Rushdie affair for Western intellectuals, whose thought on social issues derives either from the Christian or the Western liberal tradition. This has brought to a head the many difficulties which beset a Western European country as it develops into a multicultural one. Since the concern of the dialogue is with a crisis in the thinking of Western intellectuals about free speech, censorship, tolerance, etc., the four participants are university teachers of (...) philosophy in a British university. They are: Ambrose Taylor, a self?styled defender of ?British? and ?Christian? values, Archie Runciman, a progressive Christian or religious eclectic, Freddie Stuart Hill, a committed Mill type liberal and Jenny Spring, whose liberalism is tempered by the belief that the state should take a positive role in promoting certain values. The author should not be identified with any of the speakers. (shrink)

The Greek mathematician Diophantos of Alexandria lived during the third century CE. Apart from his age, very little else is known about his life. Even the exact form of his name is uncertain, and only a few incomplete manuscripts of his greatest work, Arithmetica, have survived. In this impressive scholarly investigation, first published in 1885, Thomas Little Heath meticulously presents what can be gleaned from Greek, Latin and Arabic sources, and guides the reader through the algebraist's idiosyncratic style of mathematics, (...) discussing his notation and originality. This was the first thorough survey of Diophantos' work to appear in English. Also reissued in this series are Heath's two-volume History of Greek Mathematics, his treatment of Greek astronomy through the work of Aristarchus of Samos, and his edition in modern notation of the Treatise on Conic Sections by Apollonius of Perga. (shrink)

The relationship between Bentham's ‘enunciative principle’ and his ‘censorial principle’ is famously problematic. The problem's solution is that each person has an overwhelming interest in living in a community in which they, like others, are liable to punishment for behaviour condemned by the censorial principle either by the institutions of the state or by the tribunal of public opinion. The senses in which Bentham did and did not think everyone selfish are examined, and a less problematic form of psychological hedonism (...) than Bentham's is proposed. (shrink)

Peirce persistently proclaimed both idealism and realism, terms that in philosophy's history have had varied meanings, in some of which they designate opposed doctrines; his use of them also varied in meaning. The aim of Robert Lane's important new book is to trace the evolution of Peirce's idealism and realism and to show that, in the end, whatever misadventures occur en route, these doctrines, in Peirce's version of them, are not opposed. Lane explores connections to other Peircean topics: truth, pragmatism, (...) modality, generality, vagueness, continuity. However, he retains his focus, which enables him to examine Peirce's idealism and realism with extraordinary care and thoroughness.Lane's method is, in the first... (shrink)

. This paper is on Ward Goodenough's recent article , suggesting that his points can be clarified by reiterating the distinction between the realms of meaning and relevance. Religion's “truth” is in the form of its ualue; the “proof” which it requires is uindication; and the resulting “faith” must be understood as commitment.