My essay “Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention: When and Why the Churches Failed to Discern Moral Hazard” (JRE 40.2) called for more questioning engagement with R2P than the broadly uncritical welcome given by the churches to the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008. In response to Luke Glanville's reply, this essay identifies further reasons for caution before accepting R2P and so-called humanitarian wars alongside defensive wars as paradigmatically justified. It is structured with reference to the tests (...) in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, the Report by the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, as recommended to the General Assembly when considering whether to authorize or apply military force: seriousness of risk, intention, last resort, proportional means, balance of consequences. (shrink)

In this note we present a three-valued intensional logic, which is an extension of both Montague's intensional logic and ukasiewicz three-valued logic. Our system is obtained by adapting Gallin's version of intensional logic (see Gallin, D., Intensional and Higher-order Modal Logic). Here we give only the necessary modifications to the latter. An acquaintance with Gallin's work is pressuposed.

An assessment is made of Rudolf Otto's criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher's claim that religious feeling is to be interpreted as essentially involving a feeling of absolute dependence. Otto's criticisms are divided into two kinds. The first suggest that a feeling a dependence, even an absolute one, is the wrong sort of feeling to locate at the heart of religious consciousness. It is argued that this criticism is based on misinterpretations of Schleiermacher's view, which is in fact much closer to Otto's (...) than the latter appreciated. The second kind of criticism suggests that the feeling of absolute dependence cannot play the foundational role assigned to it by Schleiermacher, since it is itself a secondary response. It is argued not only that Otto provides no justification for this criticism, but that Otto's own position is incoherent unless Schleiermacher's view is accepted. (shrink)

Positivists have excelled at destructive criticism. This criticism has been useful for pruning away absurd and superfluous theories but it is liable to be used to prune away everything else. The latest exponents, the Logical Positivists, are no less adept at criticism than their predecessors. The doctrines of this school have been surrounded with an air of mystery and inquirers have been frightened off by alarming technical apparatus. We all know that the Logical Positivists had proved that everybody else talked (...) nonsense, but we did not know what they themselves talked. Mr. A. J. Ayer's exposition of the doctrine, Language, Truth and Logic , is therefore welcome as it is simple. (shrink)

Everybody is to some extent pacific, as everybody prefers to attain his ends by peaceful means if he can. Even the most bloodthirsty militarist uses threats of war rather than war, if threats will do the work. Though most people prefer persuasion to violence and peace to war, they are prepared as a last resort to go to war and use violence, when that seems the only means to attaining some end they consider to be of vital importance. The one (...) hundred per cent pacifist, however, refuses to engage in war or support warlike action under any circumstances whatever. It is his case that I wish to consider. It is not my purpose to try to persuade anyone to be a pacifist or to be the opposite, but to point out that absolute pacifism carries with it certain logical consequences which are not particularly palatable. The opposed view, which I shall call the case for civic virtues, also carries unpalatable though different consequences. These two appear to be simple and clear-cut opposed views which I propose to state as fairly as I can, with their consequences. Certain qualifications and modifications will have to be considered later, but I do not think that there is actually any possible mean position which avoids the dilemma I am concerned to present. I shall state the case for civic virtue first and the pacifist case second. (shrink)

Abstract Newcomb's problem is regularly described as a problem arising from equally defensible yet contradictory models of rationality. Braess? paradox is regularly described as nothing more than the existence of non?intuitive (but ultimately non?contradictory) equilibrium points within physical networks of various kinds. Yet it can be shown that Newcomb's problem is structurally identical to Braess? paradox. Both are instances of a well?known result in game theory, namely that equilibria of non?cooperative games are generally Pareto?inefficient. Newcomb's problem is simply a limiting (...) case in which the number of players equals one. Braess? paradox is another limiting case in which the ?players? need not be assumed to be discrete individuals. The result is that Newcomb's problem is no more difficult to solve than (the easy to solve) Braess? paradox. (shrink)

In this paper I want to examine a view of the Darwinian theory of evolution which was put forward fairly recently by A. R. Manser. His approach is of interest not only in itself, but also because it may be expanded to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of the science of biology in general. I shall not consider these further implications here, but shall concentrate on an examination of his thesis in the context in which it is raised. (...) My paper falls into two sections. In the first I shall state Manser's thesis and some of the arguments with which he supports it, and shall try to show how a series of objections raised by A. G. N. Flew and K. Connolly may be answered. In the second I shall offer on my own account a positive argument to provide a possible basis for his point of view, with the aim of indicating why the theory should be of the kind he suggests, and what form the study of evolution must take. (shrink)

In her careful consideration of my book, The Problem of Perception, Susanna Siegel highlights what she takes to be a number of shortcomings in the work. First, she suggests that a sense-datum theorist has two options—what she calls the “complex sense-data option” and the “two-factor option”—that survive the argument of my book unscathed. I consider these two options in the first two sections of this reply. Secondly, she criticizes my suggestion that there are three and only three basic and independent (...) sources of perceptual consciousness: an issue I take up in my third section. Thirdly, she expresses reservations about my response to the argument from hallucination. In particular, she argues that the phenomenological considerations on which I put so much weight cannot settle the fundamental issue here. I address this criticism in the fourth section of this reply. Finally, she spends a certain amount of time discussing the notion of a “veridicality-relevant property”, a topic to which I devote the concluding section of this reply. (shrink)