What is new here is the detailed discussion of several important results in the classical foundations of mathematics and of the relation of logic to mathematics. As regards logical questions, the central thesis of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is well known, both from the earlier posthumous volume and from the writings of his many disciples. In the Investigations the thesis is applied to the "logic of our expressions" in everyday contexts; here he discusses in the same spirit the more specialized language (...) used in talking about the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

Abstract:McMahan, Nussbaum, and Johannsen have recently suggested that humans should seek to eliminate predators from the wild or avoid reintroducing them if this can be done without great harm to an ecosystem. This is because predators cause a great deal of pain to those sentient animals which are their prey. This paper will first challenge the pragmatic aspects of such a position on the global level, arguing that it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to remove predators from the (...) environment without doing great ecological harm. Because removal of predators might be considered more feasible on the micro scale this paper will go on to challenge the axiological foundations of such a view. In particular defenders of the removal of predators from the environment tend to base their position on the preferencing of the disvalue of pain over the value of life. Yet if life itself has value it can be a good even with those beings that cause pain to others. Moreover, there is a value to diverse forms of life that must also be acknowledged. An ecosystem with diverse habits and life forms exercising different ways of being has great value even if again this comes at the cost of suffering and pain to some of the creatures in it. Once these things are understood it is clear that predators should not be eliminated from the wild and indeed should be reintroduced into ecosystems where they once flourished. (shrink)

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A conception of the relation between reasons for belief, justified belief, and knowledge is outlined on which a belief is justified, in the sense of being well‐founded, only if there is an adequate reason to believe it, reasons to believe something are constituted by truths, and a reason to believe something justifies one in believing it only if it is constituted by a truth or truths that one knows. It is argued that, contrary to initial appearances, perceptual justification does not (...) pose a problem for this view. The discussion touches upon the relation between believing for reasons and reflective knowledge. (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

A central reason that undergirds the significance of evo-devo is the claim that development was left out of the Modern synthesis. This claim turns out to be quite complicated, both in terms of whether development was genuinely excluded and how to understand the different kinds of embryological research that might have contributed. The present paper reevaluates this central claim by focusing on the practice of model organism choice. Through a survey of examples utilized in the literature of the Modern synthesis, (...) I identify a previously overlooked feature: exclusion of research on marine invertebrates. Understanding the import of this pattern requires interpreting it in terms of two epistemic values operating in biological research: theoretical generality and explanatory completeness. In tandem, these values clarify and enhance the significance of this exclusion. The absence of marine invertebrates implied both a lack of generality in the resulting theory and a lack of completeness with respect to particular evolutionary problems, such as evolvability and the origin of novelty. These problems were salient to embryological researchers aware of the variation and diversity of larval forms in marine invertebrates. In closing, I apply this analysis to model organism choice in evo-devo and discuss its relevance for an extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

In her dedicated promotion of feminism and pacifism, especially during the 1930s, Vera Brittain (1893–1970) was strongly influenced by Ber­trand Russell’s writings, especially Marriage and Morals (1929) and Which Way to Peace? (1936). Both were members of the Peace Pledge Union, and she continued as a sponsor after Russell abandoned his pac­ifism soon after the beginning of the Second World War. She admired his political and social activism in the aftermath of that war, endorsing it as much as her family (...) situation allowed; and, as chairman of the Peace News board, Brittain intervened in Russell’s support when a dispute broke out between him and the editor. Although their rela­tionship was personally limited, Russell’s influence on her opinions and actions was profound. (shrink)

In her recent article, Does autonomy count in favor of labeling genetically modified food?, Kirsten Hansen argues that in Europe, voluntary negative labeling of non-GM foods respects consumer autonomy just as well as mandatory positive labeling of foods with GM content. She also argues that because negative labeling places labeling costs upon those consumers that want to know whether food is GM, negative labeling is better policy than positive labeling. In this paper, we argue that Hansens arguments are mistaken in (...) several respects. Most importantly, she underestimates the demands of respecting autonomy and overestimates the cost of positive labeling. Moreover, she mistakenly implies that only a small minority of people desire information about GM content. We also explore the extent to which her arguments would apply to the US context, and argue that any discussion of the relationship between autonomy and labeling should include not just considerations of consumer autonomy but also considerations of what we call citizen autonomy. (shrink)

An important part of Grodzinsky's claim regarding the neurology of syntax depends on agrammatic data partitioned by the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), which is a combination of trace-deletion and default strategy. However, there is convincing evidence that the default strategy is consistently avoided by agrammatics. The TDH, therefore, is in no position to support claims about agrammatic data or the neurology of syntax.

'The New Pragmatism' explains what it is about Pragmatism that makes it such an attractive prospect to so many thinkers, even in previously hostile traditions. This work sets out the guiding thoughts behind the Pragmatist approach to philosophy & shows how these thoughts have faired in the hands of those responsible for the revival.

Focuses on a neglected aspect of the Heidegger controversy: the question of Martin Heidegger's relationship to the industrialization of death as symbolized by Auschwitz. Contributors seek to comprehend the meaning of Heidegger's post-war silence about the Holocaust, as well as the meaning of his several explicit references to the Extermination, in the light of his preoccupation with the nihilism that he believed to be the hallmark of our technological world. Essays reflect the editors' concern to avoid both censorship and partisanship (...) in their selections—resulting in a wide diversity of viewpoints, and the full spectrum of views, that have arisen in the course of the ongoing Heidegger debate. (shrink)

BL With revised Latin text and English translationBL New historical notes and rewritten Introduction Columba is one of the best-known saints of the early Celtic church; through his foundation of the abbey of Iona he had a far-reaching influence on medieval Christianity. In about 700, a century after his death, the Life of Columba was written by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona. It has long been valued as the major primary source on the subject, for the light it throws on (...) early medieval Scotland and Ireland, and as an important work of literature. The 1961 edition of the Life, by Alan and Marjorie Anderson, has long been unavailable. Marjorie Anderson has now revised both the Latin text and the English translation, provided new historical notes, and rewritten the Introduction to take account of recent work in the area. This new edition of a source indispensable for the study of the early medieval church meets a major scholarly need. (shrink)

The correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld was judged by Leibniz himself to be very useful for understanding his philosophy. Historians have concurred in this judgment. Leibniz did not find any philosophy of independent interest in the letters Arnauld sent him. Historians have, for the most part, also concurred in this finding. I shall argue that on one set of issues at least — modal metaphysics and free will — Arnauld accomplished more than facilitating Leibnizian elucidations. He held his own in (...) this dispute. Indeed, were it not for the general sophistication and superior handling of such issues as identity, unity, and the nature of body enjoyed by the Leibnizian system, the Cartesian position on modal metaphysics and free will espoused by Arnauld might have won the day in the eyes of later philosophers. A proper appreciation of the Cartesian framework should also make it of considerable interest to philosophers presently at work on the metaphysics of modality. I shall argue that Descartes and some Cartesians like Arnauld espoused a strongly actualist doctrine. This means they thought that all philosophically interesting uses of possibles were analyzable into facts about actually existing things. (shrink)

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that is (...) to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant. (shrink)

Counterfactuals are a species of conditionals. They are propositions or sentences, expressed by or equivalent to subjunctive conditionals of the form 'if it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B', or 'if it had been the case that A, then it would have been the case that B'; A is called the antecedent, and B the consequent. Counterfactual reasoning typically involves the entertaining of hypothetical states of affairs: the antecedent is believed or presumed to (...) be false, or contrary-to-the-fact, but its truth is imagined or supposed. Counterfactual reasoning is thus a form of modal reasoning, kindred to reasoning about necessity or possibility, and in contrast to reasoning about the way things actually are. The philosophical study of conditionals goes back at least as far as the Stoics of ancient Greece, although their systems of logic apparently did not accord the counterfactual any emphasis. The rise in interest in counterfactuals has been a rather recent phenomenon, as it started to become clear to philosophers that counterfactuals are implicated in a host of other important concepts—laws of nature, confirmation, causation, scientific explanation, knowledge, perception, dispositions, free action, etc. The significance of counterfactuals has also become increasingly appreciated in the.. (shrink)

The authors focus on the ways in which various models of the distribution of power in society treat interest groups and evaluate their significance.

Although best known for the hugely influential Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick eschewed the label 'political philosopher' because the vast majority of his writings and attention have focused on other areas. Indeed the breadth of Nozick's work is perhaps greater than that of any other contemporary philosopher. This book is the first to give full and proper discussion of Nozick's philosophy as a whole, including his influential work on the theory of knowledge, his notion of 'tracking the truth', his (...) metaphysical writings on personal identity and free will, his evolutionary account of rationality, his varying treatments of Newcomb's paradox and his ideas on the meaning of life. Illuminating and informative, the book will be welcomed as an authoritative guide to Nozick's philosophical thinking. (shrink)

From the time of the earliest self-conscious emergence of modern painting around 1905, there have not been widely accepted criteria by which to judge the artistic significance and value of the abstract and nonobjective styles that displaced the traditions of representational art. This circumstance has made the education of artists problematic. For the arts of literature and music, modernism was a relatively short-lived phase of innovation and experimentation that was played out in works that defied easy appreciation. The attention of (...) readers was soon exhausted by literary works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, as was the attention of listeners exhausted by Arnold Schoenberg’s serialism. Authors returned to writing... (shrink)