This book aims to give a coherent interpretation of the whole dialogue, paying particular attention to these etymologies.The book discusses the rival theories ...

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

Many advocates of non-classical logic for reasons external to mathematics claim that their proposed revisions are consistent with the use of classical logic within pure mathematics. Doubts are raised about such claims, concerning the applicability of pure mathematics to natural and social science. -/- .

When I take off my glasses, the world looks blurred. When I put them back on, it looks sharpedged. I do not think that the world really was blurred; I know that what changed was my relation to the distant physical objects ahead, not those objects themselves. I am more inclined to believe that the world really is and was sharp-edged. Is that belief any more reasonable than the belief that the world really is and was blurred? I see more (...) accurately with my glasses on than off, so visual appearances when they are on have some cognitive priority over visual appearances when they are off. If I must choose which kind of visual appearance to take at face value, I will choose the sharp-edged look. But what should I think when I see a mist, which looks very blurred however well I am seeing? Indeed, why choose to take any of the looks at face value? Why not regard all the choices as illegitimate projections of ways of seeing the world onto the world itself? (shrink)

§0. A familiar if obscure idea: an indicative conditional presents its consequent as holding in the actual world on the supposition that its antecedent so holds, whereas a subjunctive conditional merely presents its consequent as holding in a world, typically counterfactual, in which its antecedent holds. Consider this pair.

Some commentators have criticized bioethics as failing to engage religion both as a matter of theory and practice. Bioethics should work toward understanding the influence of religion as it represents people's beliefs and practices, but bioethics should nevertheless observe limits in regard to religion as it does its normative work. Irreligious skepticism toward religious views about health, healthcare practices and institutions, and responses to biomedical innovations can yield important benefits to the field. Irreligious skepticism makes it possible to raise questions (...) that otherwise go unasked and to protect against the overreach of religion. In this sense, bioethics needs a vigorous irreligious outlook every bit as much as it needs descriptive understandings of religion. (shrink)

The paper outlines and explores a possible strategy for defending both the action/omission distinction (AOD) and the principle of double effect (PDE). The strategy is to argue that there are degrees of actionhood, and that we are in general less responsible for what has a lower degree of actionhood, because of that lower degree. Moreover, what we omit generally has a lower degree of actionhood than what we actively do, and what we do under known-but-not-intended descriptions generally has a lower (...) degree of actionhood than what we do under known-and-intended descriptions. Therefore, we are in general less responsible for what we omit than for what we do—which is just what AOD says. And we are in general less responsible for what we do under known-but-not-intended descriptions than for what we do under known-and-intended descriptions—which is just what PDE says. (shrink)

Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry is a concise introduction to the growing field of philosophy of psychiatry. Divided into three main aspects of psychiatric clinical judgement, values, meanings and facts, it examines the key debates about mental health care, and the philosophical ideas and tools needed to assess those debates, in six chapters. In addition to outlining the state of play, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry presents a coherent and unified approach across the different debates, characterized by a rejection of reductionism and (...) an emphasis on the ineliminability of uncodified skilled judgement. The first part, Values, outlines the debate about whether diagnosis of mental illness is essentially value-laden and argues that the prospects for reducing illness or disease to plainly factual matters are poor. It also explains the important role of skilled contextual judgement, rather than a principles-based deduction, in ethical judgement. The second part, Meanings, examines the central role of understanding and a shared first person perspective, both against attempts to reduce meaning to basic information-processing mechanisms and to explain away the difficulties of understanding psychopathology in recent models of delusion. The third part, Facts, shows the importance of uncodified clinical judgements, both in assessing the validity of psychiatric taxonomy and in the application of Evidence Based Medicine. Despite advances in the codifaction of practice and operationalism of diagnosis, an element of judgement remains in the assessment both of what, at one level, is good evidence for diagnosis and treatment and what, at a higher level, is good evidence for the validity of classification overall. (shrink)

St Thomas Aquinas saw religion as part of the natural human propensity to worship. His ability to recognize the naturalness of this phenomenon and simultaneously to go beyond it, to explore spiritual revelation, makes his work fresh and highly readable today. While drawing on a strong distinction between theology and philosophy, Aquinas interleaved them intricately in his writings, which range from an examination of the structures of thought to the concept of God as the end of all things. This accessible (...) new translation chooses substantial passages not only from the indispensable Summa Theologicae, but from many other works, fully illustrating the breadth and progression of Aquinas's philosophy. (shrink)

SOME PHILOSOPHERS RESORT TO RELATIVE IDENTITY IN ORDER TO DEFEND THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY AGAINST ACCUSATIONS OF INCOHERENCE: THEY CLAIM THAT FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT ARE NUMERICALLY THE SAME DEITY BUT ALSO NUMERICALLY DISTINCT PERSONS. I ARGUE THAT THEIR CLAIM IS EITHER INCOHERENT OR IMPOSSIBLE TO MOTIVATE. I ALSO ARGUE THAT THE SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE TRINITY, ACCORDING TO WHICH FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT ARE DISTINCT "SIMPLICITER", IS NOT OBVIOUSLY UNORTHODOX.

This note concerns a recent paper by Hud Hudson on the nature of 'receptacles'. It simplifies the mathematics in Hudson's paper, and it eliminates almost all of the topology in Hudson's arguments.

The essays in this book contextualize religion within a variety of cultural transformations. The methodological proposals of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, S.J. provide the inspiration and framework for these studies; and each makes its own distinct contribution beyond Lonergan's original work.

Let us sum up. We began with the question, “What is the interest of a model-theoretic definition of validity?” Model theoretic validity consists in truth under all reinterpretations of non-logical constants. In this paper, we have described for each necessity concept a corresponding modal invariance property. Exemplification of that property by the logical constants of a language leads to an explanation of the necessity, in the corresponding sense, of its valid sentences. I have fixed upon the epistemic modalities in characterizing (...) the logical constants: to be a logical constant in the language of a population is to be invariant over a modality describing complete possible epistemic states of that population (or an idealized analogue thereof). The grounds for this characterization are these: (1) It leads, I believe, to an extensionally reasonable demarcation of the logical constants, including clear cases and excluding clear non-cases. It gives a principled criterion for deciding unclear cases. (2) It provides an analysis of the topic-neutrality of logic. (3) It leads to an explanation of the epistemic necessity of the logical truths in terms of the topic-neutrality of the logical constants.All the same, it is reasonable to ask, even if the suggested demarcation of logic is extensionally correct, whether it can reasonably be expected to be fundamental. The epistemic invariance of an expression is a rather striking property, one which we should want to explain. What is missing, then, is an explanation of the distinguishing epistemic properties of the constants in terms of more fundamental properties involving their understanding and use. It would be these that properly define the nature, not just the extent, of logic. (shrink)

The Bible, a religious text, is also often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume explores how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied, often problematically, in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics, and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's roles, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word.

In 2015 IACR held its annual conference at Notre Dame (USA) around the theme of Re-Imagining Social Science. It is rather fashionable to acknowledge that there is a crisis in the social sciences to...

Depuis le début de ce siècle, l'art et la littérature n'ont cessé de déborder leurs limites et de bousculer leurs catégories. Cette démarche radicale a contribué, en retour, à réveiller une théorie jusqu'alors quelque peu engourdie dans des conceptions héritées de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, aux confins des âges classique et romantique. Les études ici réunies témoignent de ce renouveau de l'esthétique, particulièrement dans la philosophie de tradition analytique. Leur trait commun est le caractère relativiste de leurs critères. Les (...) "symptômes" de la relation artistique sont de l'ordre de l'usage, de la circonstance, de la fonction : il n'y a d'oeuvre qu'à la rencontre d'une intention et d'une attention. Pour le public comme pour les créateurs, l'art est aussi une pratique. (shrink)

This brief annotated bibliography is intended to help students get started with their research. It is not a substitute for personal investigation of the literature, and it is not a comprehensive bibliography on the subject. For those just beginning to study Bayesian reasoning, I suggest the starred items as good places to start your reading.

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel (...) method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect. (shrink)

We investigate the extent to which structures consisting of sequences of forests on the same underlying set are well-quasi-ordered under embeddings.

ㅤThis article is part of a symposium on Jc Beall's "Christ-A Contradiction.".

A concept of informational equivalence between relations is explicated to generalize some suggestions by Geach. It is shown that two relations are informationally equivalent if and only if each can be defined in terms of the other without the use of quantifiers. It is shown that there is a general method for listing the ./-place relations informationally equivalent to an arbitrary given /-place relation if and only if i (...) the invariants of the group of invertible quantifier-free definitions, for / =j. Quantifier-free definition is contrasted with general first-order definition by means of an example of two first-order interdefinable relations which are not interdefined by any pair of mutually inverse first-order definitions. (shrink)

Some commentators confer the right to children on those who gestate them because of the personal intimate relationship they say obtains in gestation.1 Benjamin Lange criticises two variants of that argument.2 He argues against the view that gestation creates a sui generis relationship that in its distinctiveness confers the right to the child on its gestator and the right of the child to its gestator. He also argues against the view that gestation involves a relationship whose dissolution necessarily causes morally (...) significant harm. I do not dispute these lines of reasoning, but the analysis goes further than Lange indicates. The reasons that Lange deploy to reject the relationship involved in gestation as conferring any kind of proprietary right to children also undercut that relationship as a ground of a presumptive duty towards those children. In the first instance, Lange disputes the idea that gestation produces a non-instrumental good that both the gestator and child have an interest in maintaining. In part, he argues that this kind of relationship lacks the emotional complexity, intimacy and intensity that underwrite other kinds of relationships, namely the very qualities that constitute the value of those relationships. More tellingly, he says, there is no unambiguous evidence that …. (shrink)