Thomas Reid , the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of (...) ideas propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

There is sometimes a sense in which one theory posits ‘less structure’ than another. Philosophers of science have recently appealed to this idea both in the debate about equivalence of theories and in discussions about structural parsimony. But there are a number of different proposals currently on the table for how to compare the ‘amount of structure’ that different theories posit. The aim of this paper is to compare these proposals against one another and evaluate them on their own merits.

The fourteenth-century thinker Thomas Bradwardine is well known in both the history of science and the history of theology. The first of the Merton Calculators (mathematical physicists) and passionate defender of the Augustinian doctrine of salvation through grace alone, he was briefly archbishop of Canterbury before succumbing to the Black Death in 1349. This new edition of his Insolubilia, made from all thirteen known manuscripts, shows that he was also a logician of the first rank. The edition is accompanied (...) by a full English translation. In the treatise, Bradwardine considers and rejects the theories of his contemporaries about the logical puzzles known as 'insolubles,' and sets out his own solution at length and in detail. In a substantial introduction, Stephen Read describes Bradwardine's analysis, compares it with other more recent theories, and places it in its historical context. The text is accompanied by three appendices, the first of which is an extra chapter found in two manuscripts (and partly in a third) that appears to contain further thoughts by Bradwardine himself. The second contains an extract from Ralph Strode's Insolubilia, composed in the 1360s, repeating and enlarging on Bradwardine's text; and the third consists of an anonymous text that applies Bradwardine's solution to a succession of different insolubles"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation and providers are using more sophisticated techniques to reach potential customers. This paper discusses contract cheating industry workflows and introduces terminology to allow complexities of the industry to be more consistently discussed. Examples are provided throughout to indicate the scale and challenge of the contract cheating (...) industry operations.An analysis of contract cheating operations on the micro-outsourcing website Fiverr.com is presented, using comparative data collected in June 2016 and October 2018. The analysis of the data demonstrates how the contract cheating industry is seeing continual change. Specifically, on Fiverr.com, this includes an increase in the number of providers offering essay writing services, particularly those from Kenya and Pakistan. The increase in service availability is accompanied by an associated reduction in essay pricing. The advertised pricing per 1000 words has dropped substantially, from $31.73 USD to $5.73 USD. The accounts used by contract cheating providers are also being replaced at an increased rate.Based on the data, contract cheating providers on Fiverr.com are currently estimated to be taking a minimum of $92,001 USD per year in revenue. This is an example calculated from only one search term on which contract cheating providers advertise on only one micro-outsourcing site used for contract cheating. The actual industry income from micro-outsourcing web sites is likely to be substantially higher. (shrink)

The rhetoric of Principia Ethica, as of not a few philosophy books, is that of the clean break. Moore claims that the vast majority of previous writing on ethics has been misguided and that an entirely new start is needed. In its time, however, the book’s claims to novelty were widely disputed. Reviews in Mind, Ethics, and The Journal of Philosophy applauded the clarity of Moore’s criticisms of Mill, Spencer, and others, but said they were “not altogether original,” had for (...) the most part “already been brought out by other critics,” and were even “the standard criticisms.”1 To the Mind reviewer, “The book indicates throughout how strongly the author has been affected by Sidgwick’s views.”2 Hastings Rashdall rejected as historically inaccurate Moore’s claim that only Sidgwick before him had recognized that “good” is indefinable: “To say nothing of writers who (like Mr. Moore and myself) learned the doctrine largely from Sidgwick, I should contend that it was taught with sufficient distinctness by Plato ..., Aristotle, and a host of other writers who have studied in their school.”3 Rashdall also described Moore’s principle of organic unities as just “a new and striking way of stating a very old truth.”4 Some recent commentators have taken a similar line. Bernard Williams has said that much of Principia Ethica comes from Sidgwick,5 while Thomas Baldwin, discussing the book’s substantive values, has said the principle of organic unities “was expressly stated by Bradley,” while “McTaggart had for some years extolled the value of love, and the value of art is a central theme of romanticism.”. (shrink)

In August 2017, a group of activists erected in Ottawa's downtown a tent as a first overdose prevention site as a response to what the public and the activists perceived as an epidemic—a devastating wave of opioid and fentanyl overdoses in Canada. The Ontario premier was urged to declare an emergency that would provide increased funding for harm reduction and also send a message to survivors and families that the lives of their loved ones mattered. Thus, the discourses around the (...) so‐called opioid crisis used a language of moral sentiments to legitimate political action. This “new humanitarianism” is considered a priori as good, but in this article, I ask what is politically at stake if we base our actions on the logic of humanitarian reason. The new universalism of humanitarian organizations is based on the individualism of human rights and thus on a moral imperative that replaces the political. Initiatives like the OPS movement often fill the gaps in social services in the absence of the state and address social problems as emergencies and public health issues, thereby transforming them into medical problems—performing the medicalization of sociopolitical problems. This is what I call the NGOization of the opioid crisis. This form of humanitarianism is a universalism of the temporal present without any universal promise for a better future or the amelioration of human conditions—it is a humanitarianism of emergency. What characterizes new humanitarianism is that it responds to situations of suffering that are the result of increasing inequality and injustices without addressing the root causes of this suffering. Not addressing these causes means to be complicit in perpetuating the inequalities and to restrict visions of possible alternatives. (shrink)

to appear in Larry May, ed., War and Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Throughout his philosophical development, Wittgenstein was more concerned with language than with any other topic. No other philosopher has been as influential on our understanding of the deep problems surrounding language, and yet the true significance of his writing on the subject is difficult to assess, since most of the current debates regarding language tend to overlook his work. In this book, Thomas McNally shows that philosophers of language still have much to learn from Wittgenstein's later writings. The book (...) examines the finer details of his arguments while also clarifying their importance for debates outside the field of Wittgenstein studies. Presenting the issues thematically, the book explores how the arguments in the Philosophical Investigations remain relevant, compelling us to reflect in novel and challenging ways on the nature of language. (shrink)

Dans la vie d'un lecteur, certains auteurs occupent une place à part : lectures inaugurales, compagnons de tous les jours, sources auxquelles on revient. La collection "Les auteurs de ma vie" invite de grands écrivains contemporains à partager leur admiration pour un classique, dont la lecture a particulièrement compté pour eux. Dans sa jeunesse, Thomas Mann a lu et médité Schopenhauer, philosophe de la volonté et du pessimisme, qui a largement influencé l'oeuvre de celui qui deviendra l'un des plus (...) grands écrivains modernes de la décadence. Cet hommage à son maître nous offre une clé précieuse de son parcours intellectuel. (shrink)

The cluster account of art is a purportedly non-definitional account of art, inspired by Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, and recently defended by Berys Gaut. Gaut does not provide good reasons to think that art is not definable, and his approach to possible counterexamples to the cluster account would, applied consistently, preclude this. The cluster account's theory of error, its resources for accounting for borderline cases, and its heuristic usefulness are not impressive. Reasons strong enough to warrant accepting the cluster (...) account, it is concluded, have not been given. (shrink)

This volume comprises essays presented to Alvin Plantinga on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

Time-limited trials of intensive care have arisen in response to the increasing demand for intensive care treatment for patients with a low chance of surviving their critical illness, and the clinical uncertainty inherent in intensive care decision-making. Intensive care treatment is reported by most patients to be a significantly unpleasant experience. Therefore, patients who do not survive intensive care treatment are exposed to a negative dying experience. Time-limited trials of intensive care treatment in patients with a low chance of surviving (...) have both a small chance of benefiting this patient group and a high chance of harming them by depriving them of a good death. A ‘rule of rescue’ for the critically unwell does not justify time-limiting a trial of intensive care treatment and overlooks the experiential costs that intensive care patients face. Offering time-limited trials of intensive care to all patients, regardless of their chance of survival, overlooks the responsibility of resource-limited intensive care clinicians for suffering caused by their actions. A patient-specific risk–benefit analysis is vital when deciding whether to offer intensive care treatment, to ensure that time-limited trials of intensive care are not undertaken for patients who have a much higher chance of being harmed, rather than benefited by the treatment. The virtue ethics concept of human flourishing has the potential to offer additional ethical guidance to resource-limited clinicians facing these complex decisions, involving the balancing of a quantifiable survival benefit against the qualitative suffering that intensive care treatment may cause. (shrink)

There is no arguing the impact of Inoue Tetsujirō on the development of philosophy in Japan from the Meiji Restoration through the end of the Pacific War. He was the first Japanese to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Germany and the first native-born chair of the philosophy department at Tokyo Imperial University, the training center for almost all the major Japanese philosophers who graduated before 1915. Inoue was instrumental in making German idealism the Western philosophy of choice for Japan, (...) but he also appreciated Asian traditions as well, having no qualms about claiming there was true philosophy in India, China, and premodern Japan. He set the foundation for academic philosophy in Japan not so much through his own rather simplistic personal philosophy, but especially through his contributions to the organization of the field. This article focuses mainly on Inoue’s troubled relation with Confucianism. On one hand, in seeking a premodern philosophy to serve as the bedrock for modern Japan, Inoue looked to the Edo-period Confucian traditions originating in China. He divided them into Shushigaku, Yōmeigaku, and what he named Kogaku, the school focusing on classical texts preceding neo-Confucian developments and interpretations. In many respects, like so many others of his generation, Inoue was by training and personal preference a Confucian. That is not the whole story, however. Inoue understood Confucianism’s primary purpose as cultivating the social values and order that would ensure an efficient society of human flourishing, stability, and harmony. Yet, he also likely suspected that the people of the new Japan, with its modernization and plethora of Western ideas, would not unquestioningly accept the authority of the Confucian classics, nor be willing to undertake the rigors of textual study that are the hallmark of the Confucian scholar. In Edo-period Japan, that study had been the responsibility of the samurai class, but in their democratization program, the Meiji reformers had abolished the old class system. Education of the young would now shift from the Confucian academies to the new public school system. Always cooperative with the government to the point of being obsequious, Inoue took a leading role in the National Morality program and its installment in the nationwide school curriculum. That curriculum combined a Shinto-based reverence for the sacred nature of the emperor in the kokutai ideology along with practical moralistic values that could be loosely called Confucian. Yet, if schooling for most was limited to the elementary level and if there was no longer a samurai class to oversee the moral behavior of the society, who could nurture and enforce the moral order? Through a set of fortuitous events, Inoue “discovered” bushidō, the Way of the warrior. If there were no longer a samurai warrior class, perhaps all Japanese could become de facto samurai—at least in their mindset. Most may no longer have the scholarly skills and time to glean their spiritual and moral insights from Confucian texts. Yet, they could find the virtues of loyalty, sincerity, filiality, and compliance with seniority within the distinctively mindful heart and spirit of ancient Japan carried within the Japanese bloodline. What happened to the Confucianism of Inoue Tetsujirō? Some of its values were absorbed into bushidō and National Morality, but the praxis of the Confucian scholar and the ideal of the kunshi seem to have been lost, much to Japan’s detriment. (shrink)

In his book Philosophy of Logic, Putnam (1971) presents a short argument which reads like—and indeed, can be reconstructed as—a formal proof that a nominalistic physics is impossible. The aim of this paper is to examine Putnam’s proof and show that it is not compelling. The precise way in which the proof fails yields insight into the relation that a nominalistic physics should bear to standard physics and into Putnam’s indispensability argument.

The most interesting, and problematic, claim made by film-philosophy, for me, is the proposition that film thinks. This claim is interesting because it asserts that film has something philosophical to offer that philosophy itself lacks. It is problematic because we tend to think that where there is thinking, there must be a someone doing that thinking. And whatever film is, it is not a someone. This paper brings Karl Poppers model of objective knowledge what he calls knowledge in the absence (...) of a knowing subject to bear on the proposition that film thinks, in order to sketch out an account of film as a process of objective thinking distinct from that of philosophy or any other merely human mode of thought. (shrink)

States of Consciousness extends Thomas Natsoulas' development of the psychology of consciousness by giving sustained attention to the stream of consciousness and its component 'pulses of experience'. Natsoulas' unrivalled scholarship across psychology, philosophy and cognate fields means that very often surprising connections are made between the works of leading theorists of consciousness, including Brentano, Mead, Bergmann, Strawson, James, Freud, Skinner, Hebb, Gibson, O'Shaughnessy and Woodruff Smith. At a time when interest in consciousness and the brain is growing rapidly, this (...) book provides an in-depth analysis of sophisticated psychological accounts that pertain to consciousness. Its breadth of coverage and interdisciplinary nature will be of interest to postgraduates and specialists in a range of fields, particularly the history of psychology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Thomas Richardson and Peter Spirtes. Scoring Ancestral Graph Models.

A good place to start in assessing a theory of truth is to ask whether the theory under discussion is consistent with Aristotle’s commonsensical definition of truth from Metaphysics 4: “What is false says of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is; and what is true says of that which is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not.”1 Philosophers of a realist bent will be delighted (...) to see that Anselm unambiguously adopts the Aristotelian commonplace. A statement is true, he says, “when it signifies that what‐is is.”2 But the theory of truth that Anselm builds on this observation is one that would surely have confounded Aristotle. For no matter what the topic, Anselm’s thinking always eagerly returns to God; and the unchallenged centrality of God in Anselm’s philosophical explorations is nowhere more in evidence than in his account of truth. Indeed, we see in the student’s opening question in De veritate that the entire discussion has God as its origin and its aim: “Since we believe that God is truth, and we say that truth is in many other things, I would like to know whether, wherever truth is said to be, we must acknowledge that God is that truth.”3 The student then reminds Anselm that in the Monologion he had argued from the truth of statements to an eternal Supreme Truth. Does this not commit Anselm (the student seems to be asking) to holding that God himself is somehow the truth of true statements? But what definition of truth could make sense of such an odd claim? Anselm is happy to take up the challenge of showing that his description of God as “Supreme Truth” is no mere metaphor, but the expression of the deepest insight into the nature of truth. An account of truth is just theology under a different name. This first distinctive characteristic of Anselm’s theory, the centrality of God as Supreme Truth, helps account for a second distinctive characteristic: its strong insistence on the unity of truth. All truth either is God or somehow reflects God; thus, one simple being provides the.... (shrink)

Opatrzność, przypadek, boska przyczynowość i molinizm: odpowiedź Łukasiewiczowi Esej Dariusza Łukasiewicz Opatrzność Boga a przypadek w świecie ma dowodzić, że silne tradycyjne rozumienie opatrzności nie da się utrzymać, zwłaszcza w świetle współczesnego naukowego obrazu świata. W jego miejsce Łukasiewicz proponuje koncepcję Opatrzności, która dopuszcza autentycznie przypadkowe zdarzenia, których Bóg nie kontroluje. Argumentuję, że argument Łukasiewicza jest nieudany. Następnie rozważam dwa sposoby, w jakie chrześcijanin mógłby uwzględnić większość atrakcyjnych składników rewizyjnej koncepcji Łukasiewicza, unikając filozoficznych i teologicznych wad jego stanowiska.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 139-141.

We present finitary formulations of two well known results concerning infinite series, namely Abel's theorem, which establishes that if a series converges to some limit then its Abel sum converges to the same limit, and Tauber's theorem, which presents a simple condition under which the converse holds. Our approach is inspired by proof theory, and in particular Gödel's functional interpretation, which we use to establish quantitative versions of both of these results.

Changing Generations, a study of intergenerational relations in Ireland undertaken between 2011 and 2013 by the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, and the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology, NUI Galway, used the Constructivist Grounded Theory method to interrogate support and care provision between generations. This article draws on interviews with 52 women ages 18 to 102, allowing for simultaneous analysis of older and younger women’s perspectives. The intersectionality of gender and class emerged as central to the (...) analysis. Socioeconomic positions shape contrasting forms of interdependency among family generations, ranging from “enmeshed” lives among lower socioeconomic groups to “freed” lives among higher socioeconomic groups. Women are initiating changes in how care and support flow across generations. Older women in higher socioeconomic groups are attuned to how emotional capital women expend across family generations can constrain women’s lives. In an expression of solidarity, older women are renegotiating the place of care labor in their own lives and in the lives of younger women. A new reciprocity emerges that amounts to women “undoing gender.” This process is, however, deeply classed as it is women in higher socioeconomic groups whose resources best place them to renegotiate care. (shrink)

The fusion of law and virtue is a distinctive feature of the ethical writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly of his most mature and most detailed ethical treatise, the secunda pars of the Summa Theologiae. By way of preface to his treatises on virtue and on law in the Summa, Thomas states that the former is an intrinsic, the latter an extrinsic, principle by which man is led to his end. It is evident from even these brief remarks (...) that virtue and law are integral parts of an overarching moral pedagogy intended to lead man to his ultimate end. The end consists, as Thomas says, in the contemplation of the divine essence, but the possession of the intellectual and moral virtues is a prerequisite to the experience of the beatific vision. Hence, moral instruction, of which the secunda pars is an exemplary instance, is directed to the inculcation of the virtues--to the formation of character. ;In this context, the role of natural law is to circumscribe the parameters of the moral life and to provide a background to moral deliberation. Submission to human, divine, and finally eternal law marks the various stages in man's education in moral perfection. The hierarchy of the laws is thus parallel to the hierarchy of the virtues, natural and infused. Law, as the Thomistic dictum runs, is for the sake of virtue. Thomas' view of law, then, is teleological, not deontological; that is, laws are intelligible in light of an overarching conception of the goods of a community or of human nature. But the goods or practices which the laws are intended to succour are themselves embodiments of virtues such as justice. ;While a comprehensive treatment of the secunda pars is beyond the scope of this investigation, we will provide an analysis of exemplary instances of moral pedagogy in the Summa. From this examination of representative passages, it will be possible to defend certain conclusions concerning the doctrinal structure and rhetorical intent of the Summa. (shrink)