Examines an important and controversial topic in lexical semantics: polysemy, the capacity of words to manifest a range of different meanings when employed in different contexts."--Publishers website.

Privacy is defined within a symbolic interaction framework in terms of identity definition and maintenance processes. It is argued that defining privacy within a symbolic interaction framework both generates a number of hypotheses involving the concept of privacy and allows the theorist to draw together several social psychological concepts within the one conceptual schema.

This is an original and stimulating collection of articles by scholars trained in classics, moral philosophy, political science, literature, and intellectual history. Its principal objective is to convey to the modern reader a sophisticated understanding of Homeric and Classical Greek morality and how it differs from our own. Some of the articles focus primarily on Greek value concepts, especially the concept of arete. Others compare those concepts to modern notions of virtue and tolerance, as well as to the work of (...) contemporary literary figures and philosophers, including T.S. Eliot, Alasdair Macintyre, John Wallace, and Philippa Foot. Throughout, the juxtaposition of ancient and modern ideas and the worldviews they presuppose makes these readings both intellectually exciting and revealing. (shrink)

“Nay, I will go farther, and assert, that he could not so much as prove by any probable arguments, that the future must be conformable to the past. All probable arguments are built on the supposition, that there is this conformity betwixt the future and the past, and therefore can never prove it. This conformity is a matter of fact, and if it must be proved, will admit of no proof but from experience. But our experience in the past can (...) be a proof of nothing for the future, but upon a supposition, that there is a resemblance betwixt them. This therefore is a point, which can admit of no proof at all, and which we take for granted without any proof.”David Hume, Anof a Treatise of Human Nature p. 15In Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits Bertrand Russell recognizes and attempts to deal with what is one of the central questions of philosophy since Descartes, “The relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge.” He states that his purpose is “to discover the minimum principles required to justify scientific inferences.” The search for such principles arises from his belief that “data are private and individual.” He has only scorn for those who, “finding these problems distasteful” have “tried to deny that these problems exist.”. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce, who contributed the term pragmatism to the language of philosophy, insisted always that the term was intended to designate a method. Pragmatism, he warned, is not a Weltanschauung, nor a doctrine of metaphysics, nor even an “attempt to determine any truth of things.” It is simply a method of ascertaining meanings, of making them clear, and of pointing a way for the successful determination of the truth of things. Peirce's practice consistently belied his preaching in this regard, (...) for his exposition of the method involved a metaphysical system of considerable scope; and this, it seems to me, was unavoidable. Yet it was as a method that Peirce first presented his distinctive point of view, and it is primarily as a method that I wish to consider it here. Into metaphysics, or Weltanschauung, we shall surely be led; despite Peirce's pronouncement, I make no apology for that. (shrink)

We think that science is special: its products ‐ technological spin‐offs ‐ dominate our lives. Sometimes it enriches our lives; sometimes it impoverishes them or even takes them away. For better or for worse, no institution has had more impact on the character of our existence this millennium than science. Penicillin, computers, atomic bombs make modern life modern life.

In this comment on John Yolton's Is There a History of Philosophy? (Yolton, 1985) I review his account of the development during the 17th to 19th centuries of a common sense of the range of philosophical problems and of the canon of philosophical works. I suggest that his account may be read in light of Rorty's four genres of historiography (Rorty, 1984). I criticize his view of the place of the history of philosophy in philosophy as too timid, though correct (...) as far as it goes. I then suggest, but do not attempt to establish, a bolder thesis. Finally, I raise some doubts about the adequacy of Yolton's reading of Descartes and Berkeley set out in two of his Puzzlements. The Puzzlements themselves are supposed to illustrate typical misreading of major figures in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

As they appear in E.J. Kenney's Cambridge edition, these lines are: iam triplex animi est igitur natura reperta, nec tamen haec sat sunt ad sensum cuncta creandum, nil horum quoniam recipit mens posse creare sensiferos motus et mens quaecumque volutat. 240 quarta quoque his igitur quaedam natura necessest adtribuatur ….