The ‘When Am I?’ problem, introduced by Bourne 2002, 2006, and Braddon-Mitchell 2004, creates a problem for thinking that the past is just like the present, and responses by Forrest 2004 and Forbes 2016, in which activities and processes are distinctive of the present, suggest that the past is settled. This chapter argues that the ‘When am I?’ problem arises because it takes tense metaphysically seriously but not aspect. The solution of invoking processes and activities takes aspect as seriously (...) as tense. A two-dimensional (2D) framework explains the relationship between completed processes (associated with perfective aspect) and ongoing processes (associated with progressive aspect), also explaining cases where facts about the past seem to have changed retrospectively, and cases, building on Forbes and Wildman (2022), where meanings of words have changed over time. It allows that what’s true has changed while accepting that the past is intrinsically settled. (shrink)

The article considers whether arguments involving sentences that make cross-world comparisons ("I could have been taller than I actually am") are better handled by counterpart theory than by standard modal semantics. The author describes a modal object-language in which such statements may be symbolized and gives both a Kripkean and a counterpart-theoretic semantics for it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:162. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1979 The Hume literature from 1925 to 1976 has been thoroughly covered in my book Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship : A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; ¿J 5. 50), which also lists the main earlier writings on Hume. Publications of the years 1977 and 1978 were listed in Hume Studies for the last two Novembers. What follows here will bring the record (...) up to the end of 1979. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions, and to send me offprints of their own articles. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. References to recentlyappearing reviews (of books from earlier lists) are given at the end. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosophical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British Standard (no. 4148). AIKEN, H. D. 'An Interpretation of Hume's Theory of the Place of Reason in Ethics and Polities', Ethics 90, 66-80. 163. ARDAO, A. 'Hume en Latinoamerica', Revista Venezolana de Fil., 143-6. BAIER, A. 'Hume on Heaps and Bundles', APQ 16, 285-96. BAIER, A. 'Good Men's Women: Hume on Chastity and Trust', Hume Studies 5, 1-19. BATTERSBY, C. 'Hume, Newton and "the Hill called Difficulty "', in S. C Brown, Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Royal Inst. Phil. Lectures, 12), 31-55. BATTERSBY, C. 'The Dialogues as Original Imitation: Cicero and the Nature of Hume's Skepticism', in D. F. Norton et al., McGiIl Hume Studies, 239-52. BEAUCHAMP, T. L. 'Self Inconsistency or Mere Self Perplexity ', Hume Studies 5, 37-44. BECK, L. W.? Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant' in D. F. Norton et al.,· op. cit., 63-78. (repr. of 1978 paper. ) BELL, A. 'Some Spurious Hume Documents', Notes & Queries 26, 561. BIRO, J. I. 'Hume's Difficulties with the Self, Hume Studies 5, 45-54. BRANDT, R. 'David Hume: Neuere Bücher, Vorträge, Aufsätze', Philosophische Rundschau 26, 187-97. BROWN, S. C. 'The "Principle" of Natural Order: o£ What the Enlightened Sceptics did not doubt', in S. C. Brown [see BATTERSBY], 56-76. BUTT, J. The Mid-Eighteenth Century, 222-8, 312-14, 354-7. (The Oxf. Hist, of Eng. Lit., 8.) Oxford. CAPALDI, N. 'The Problem of Hume and Hume's Problem', introduction to D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 3-21. CASULLO, A. 'Reid and Mill on Hume's maxim of conceivability ', Analysis 39, 212-19. CLARK, L. M. G. & LANGE, L. The Sexism of Social and Political Theory. Toronto"^ (includes reprints of Burns 1976 and Lacoste 1976) CONNON, R. W. 'The Naturalism of Hume Revisited', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit. 121-45. COTTLE, C E. 'Justice as Artificial Virtue in Hume's Treatise', JHI 40, 457-66. 164. CRAIG, E. J. David Hume: Eine Einführung. in seine Philosophie. (144 pp.) Frankfurt am Main. DAVIE, G. E. 'Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 43-62. DEL BARCO COLLAZOS, J. L. 'Sobre la teoría de la imaginaci ón en la filosofía de Hume', Anuario filosofico 12, 131-43. DELEULE, D. Hume et la naissance du libéralisme économique. (400 pp.) Paris. FLEW, A. 'The Red Queen at Substraction? ', Hume Studies 5, 110-11. FORBES, D. 'Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment', in S. C Brown [see BATTERSBY], 94-109. GASKIN, J. C. A. 'Hume, Atheism, and the "Interested Obligation" of Morality', in D. F. Norton et al., op. cit., 147-59. GAUTHIER, D. 'David Hume, Contractarian', PR 88, 3-38. GAWLICK, G. 'Zwischen Empirizismus und Skeptizismus: Neue Literatur zu David Hume- (I) ', Philosophische Rundschau 26, 161-86. GOOSENS, W. K. 'Stove and Inductive Scepticism', Australas... (shrink)

The basic work for this book was carried out during the spring of 1989 in Edinburgh, where I had been granted a research position at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I should like to express here my indebtedness to the Institute for the opportunity thus afforded me. I should also like to say how very grateful I am for the stimulating conversations I had there with Professor Timothy Sprigge and Dr. Elizabeth Telfer. Dr. Telfers’s own treatise Happiness (...) has been a major influence on my view of the questions involved. The basic view of health and illness presented in this book is more fully set out in my On the Nature of Health. As in the case of my previous larger projects, I have received a great amount of support and may wise comments from Professor Ingmar Pörn, Helsinki. Three Danish experts – Anton Aggernaes, Erik Ostenfeld and Peter Sandøe – have made valuable comments. Professor Heng ten Have, Nijmegen, has improved my reading of the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I should also like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Health and Society, University of Linköping, for helping me to avoid a number of the pitfalls that can so easily stumble into when it comes to a treatise like this. Especially I should like to mentioned Per-Erik Liss, Ingemar Nordin and Bo Petersson, all three of whom have read and commented on the entire manuscript. A Swedish version of this book, Livskvalitet och hälsa, came out in 1991. I have been made quite a number of corrections and additions, one type of addition being replies to critical points made in reviews of the Swedish version. I should like to thank Malcolm Forbes for valuable help putting my English into publishable condition. Linköping, May 1993 Lennart Noredenfelt. (shrink)

It should be clear that Lyell's scientific contemporaries would hardly have agreed with Robert Munro's remark that Antiquity of Man created a full-fledged discipline. Only later historians have judged the work a synthesis; those closer to the discoveries and events saw it as a compilation — perhaps a “capital compilation,”95 but a compilation none the less. Its heterogeneity made it difficult to judge as a unity, and most reviewers, like Forbes, concentrated on the first part of Lyell's trilogy. The (...) chapters on glaciation were admired by Lyell's friends but had relatively little appeal to more general readers. His discussion of the species question hedged far too much to please those who accepted the cogency of Darwin's evidence and arguments. This last section of the book blatantly lacks originality or commitment and certainly has no claim to classical status in anthropology.We are left, then, with the first twelve chapters, for it was this portion that dictated the book's title and that amassed the available evidence favoring the antiquity of the human species. Did it do anything more than marshall the evidence that others had discovered? I think not. Lyell could write with style and verve. Principles of Geology is a remarkably readable book. But Antiquity is the work of a geologist, not of a systematic student of man. Despite its occasional touches of power, it never captures the freshness and immediacy of Lubbock's Pre-historic Times nor the theoretical brilliance of E. B. Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865).96 Antiquity utilizes little of the comparative method whereby Lyell's contemporaries used data from modern “savagery” to elaborate the possible social functions of the prehistoric remains being uncovered. It contains little social theory and has virtually no integrated framework. Even the first twelve chapters do not really hang together. As Hooker, commenting to Darwin on Lubbock's review, sadly wrote: “Lubbock in [the] N[atural] H[istory] Review, had in a note called attention to Lyell's ... ‘doing injustice’ to Prestwich & Falconer. I modified this expression ‘injustice’ in Lubbock's paper (which was friendly and apologetic). I am deeply sorry for it, but what can one do? I do think Lyell's first XII chapters a complete mess.”97 In another letter to Darwin, Hooker described this first portion of Antiquity as “confused and confusing.”98Part of the problem, of course, lay in the subject's novelty for Lyell and for most of his contemporaries. At a deeper level, however, I believe that the book accurately reflects Lyell's uncertainties about Darwin's work and its implications for man.99 Leonard Wilson's edition of Lyell's Scientific Journals provides a unique insight into Lyell's mind during the years just before he began to write Antiquity.100 Preoccupied with the human implications of evolutionary biology, Lyell was not clear how many of those implications were compatible with his deep convictions about the dignity of man's place in the cosmos. With a certain naiveté, Lyell complained in 1873 that many of his readers had failed to see the “natural connections” among the three portions of Antiquity.101 Connections could indeed be drawn between man's antiquity and his evolutionary origins; Lyell's private Scientific Journals movingly demonstrate that he was well aware of this fact. But he never fully made the connections in his published writings. Antiquity of Man is more appropriately seen as the last gasp of the heroic period in British geology than as the opening salvo in a new, post-Darwinian anthropological synthesis. Between the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and the middle of the nineteenth century, geology was recognized as one of the most exciting and innovative scientific fields in Britain.102 Lyell himself had contributed much to that drama, and by the 1860's he was a public figure of venerable proportions. More then any other man he represented a geology that had extended the boundaries of process, time, and life. The fundamental achievements of Lyell and his colleagues had been assimilated into the wider Victorian consciousness, yet the earlier public debates about “genesis and geology” had left untouched in its essentials the concept of Man as a moral, responsible, created being.103Lyell never abandoned this view of his own species, and in 1863 it was a completely responsible creature which, under the weight of empirical evidence, Lyell admitted had lived on earth far longer than had previously been thought. Certainly this more generous allowance for human existence was constitutive to what Burrow calls the evolutionary social theory of midcentury Britain.104 Unlike Lyell, the younger representatives of this anthropology quietly accepted both man's antiquity and his aboriginal animality. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), as well as the other volumes of his grand Synthetic Philosophy, presented as part of the cosmic process the development of human from prehuman beings.105 Tylor's discussion of what in his Researches (1865) he called the “gesture-language” presupposed the gradual and de novo origin of language in early human populations.106 Lubbock's young and polished mind was untroubled by the human implications of Darwin's work, and he cast his Prehistoric Times into such a perfect mold that it and its companionpiece (On the Origin of Civilization, 1870) went through seven editions each between 1865 and World War I, with their original theoretical structures intact. In a way that Lyell could not grasp, Lubbock was intrigued by questions concerning the origins of moral and religious beliefs and did not flinch at the thought of an amoral, atheistic creature as an ancestor.107 Indeed, as the German naturalist Carl Vogt pointed out in his Lectures on Man, translated into English the year after Antiquity, both Darwin's theories and the primitive flint knives of the Stone Age bore witness to a time beyond that imaginable from the condition of the lowest present-day “savage”:From such a low condition [little better than anthropomorphous apes], compared to which that of the so-called savages of the old and new world is a refined civilisation, has the human species gradually extricated itself, in a bitter struggle for existence, which it was well able to maintain, by being gifted with a larger amount of brain and intelligence than that possessed by the surrounding animal world.108The easy integration of biological and social themes was perhaps the distinguishing hallmark of Victorian anthropology of the 1850's and 1860's. After his fashion, Lyell got both themes into Antiquity, but he carefully separated them with a seven-chapter wall of glacial ice. Lyell's anthropology was not that of a thoroughgoing evolutionist like Lubbock, Tylor, or Spencer. For Lyell prehistoric man was not a product of biological evolution. Rude and superstitious he may have been, but he possessed ritual and a belief in a future state, and thus deserved “the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race: as Nature first made man/when wild in woods the noble savage ran.”109As a systematic argument, Lyell's book was at best a significant failure. As a popularization, it was a success — largely because of the personal stature of its author and the particular moment of its appearance. It helped establish the fact of man's antiquity with a wider Victorian audience, in itself no mean achievement. But Lyell was unable to exploit the fuller implications of his material in the service of a secular science of man. Ironically, he exploited only his colleagues' discoveries. Though the aging Lyell, with failing eyesight but unfailing mental powers, can still be seen as a man of considerable importance, his Antiquity belongs to the carefully circumscribed world of British geology rather than to the less disciplined world of Victorian anthropology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought to recuperate (...) anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

[Graeme Forbes] In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon', are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon (...) or an immortal gorgon', are invalid. Since 'a gorgon' and 'a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon' are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems.) /// [Jennifer Saul] This paper discusses the question of which verbs are intensional transitives. In particular, I ask which verbs Forbes should take to be intensional transitives. I argue that it is very difficult to arrive at a clear and plausible understanding of what an intensional transitive is-making it difficult to answer these questions. I end by briefly raising some questions about the usefulness of the category of intensional transitives. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, (...) and events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

This paper discusses some recent responses to Kripke’s modal objections to descriptivism about names. One response, due to Gluer-Pagin and Pagin, involves employing "actually" operators in a new way. Another, developed mainly by Chalmers, involves distinguishing the dimension of meaning modal operators affect from the dimension other operators, especially epistemic ones, affect. I argue that both these moves run into problems with "mixed" contexts involving factive verbs such as "know", "establish", "prove", etc. In mixed contexts there are both modal and (...) epistemic operators, and it seems that some contradictory examples, such as "possibly (Hesperus has a moon and someone establishes that Hesperus has no moon)", are classified as true according to these views. (shrink)

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that (...) she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Many' people in the community including myself are concerned at the continuation of the single member electorate system for election of members to the House of Representatives, and its failure to result in proper representation of the diversity of interests in the community. A multimember electorate system, or single electorate for each State or Territory, with random rotation of names on ballot papers, is long overdue after over a century of debate over existing undemocratic practices. The Australian Constitution allows that (...) "each State shall be one electorate" in the absence of. (shrink)

Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek', 'imagine', and 'worship'. Forbes offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

This volume of twenty-two original papers commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Arthur Prior’s death. Eight of the papers are based on presentations at a conference held in New Zealand to the same end. The contents testify to the range of Prior’s interests and influence. After an informative biographical sketch by Copeland, which emphasizes Prior’s early discovery of accessibility-relation semantics and its ability to prove the soundness of modal systems of various strengths, there follows a group of papers on temporal logic (...) by Prior, Copeland, Gabbay and Hodkinson, Rodriguez and Anger, and Sylvan; a group on modal logic by Meredith and Prior, van Benthem, Fine and Schurz, and Humberstone; a group on agency by Belnap, Oddie, and Segerberg; a group on proof theory by Bull, Bunder, and Tennant; a group on individuation and quantification by Harré, Lambert, Loptson, Richard, and R. Teichman; and two on the a priori, by. (shrink)

This paper examines Nancy Chodorow's theory of feminine connection and masculine separation in The Reproduction of Mothering. First it demonstrates that, contrary to many feminists' interpretations, Chodorow's theory does not portray masculine separation as a social problem to which feminine connection is the solution. Then it shows that Chodorow's apparently intended theory is incoherent. Finally, it argues that Chodorow's claims imply another theory that is coherent and that deserves feminists' attention.

_Grounding_ is meant to be a metaphysically explanatory relation of non-causal constitutive determination. Recently there has been significant interest in the idea that there might be ‘laws of metaphysics’ for grounding, analogous to the laws of nature for causation. In this paper I argue that current accounts of the structure of law-based grounding (focusing on Jonathan Schaffer’s structural equation modeling account) do not capture grounding’s directionality—a central feature. The formal account must be supplemented to satisfy this demand and give a (...) successful general account of directed grounding relations. I thus propose two alternative supplements: Priority-Inextricable Grounding and Priority-Extricable Grounding (itself divided into two alternatives—Priority by Absolute Fundamentality and Priority by Relative Fundamentality). Each supplement offers a distinct image of grounding—most illustratively, modally: for each, the structure of grounding contrastingly constrains the metaphysical compossibility of worlds that share facts or grounding relations. As such, I conclude that the supplements offer incompatible strategies for sourcing grounding directionality and grounding theorists ought to decide between them. (shrink)

It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

Dunbar, the character from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, tries to extend his life by making it boring. I use Dunbar’s case to pose a challenge to those who think our phenomenology gives us reason to defend time’s passage as a metaphysical view. I argue that the reason phenomenology gives for us to defend time’s passage cannot be that our brains detect time’s passage, unless we take Dunbar’s metaphysics more seriously than it deserves. Instead we must resort to the ordinary practice (...) of trying to make sense of things in order to reach such a metaphysically substantive view. (shrink)

Gedankenübertragung. Gegenübertragung. Thought-transference and counter-transference have rarely been considered together. One is a key instrument in much contemporary psychoanalytic practice and the other simply occultism. This essay traces the striking parallels in Sigmund Freud's interests in both. Its tale is the uncanny narrative of his essay ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’. The story starts from Freud's engagements with Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung to speculate that his unpublished paper may be the article on counter-transference he promised but never wrote. The repressed returns (...) in the history and practice of psychoanalysis — and in Shoshana Felman's uncanny reading effect. (shrink)

This paper is about a substitution-failure in attitude ascriptions, but not the one you think. A standard view about the semantic shape of ‘that’-clause attitude ascriptions is that they are fundamentally relational. The attitude verb expresses a binary relation whose extension, if not empty, is a collection of pairs each of which consists in an individual and a proposition, while the ‘that’-clause is a term for a proposition. One interesting problem this view faces is that, within the scope of many (...) attitude verbs, ‘that’-clauses are not interchange able with certain other terms which stand for the same propositions as the clauses are supposed to. For example, (1a) below may be true, but (1c) is probably not: (1) a. Holmes {fears/suspects} that Moriarty has returned. b. That Moriarty has returned is the proposition that Moriarty has re turned. c. Holmes {fears/suspects} the proposition that Moriarty has returned. For only the exceptionally timorous fear propositions, and, excluding contexts in which we speak of a ‘suspect premise’, only the unusually paranoid suspect them. The truth-conditional change eVected by substituting propositional descrip tion for ‘that’- clause illustrated in (1) occurs with a wide range of attitude verbs. If you understand that the window of opportunity is closing, perhaps you should act before it is too late, but if you mere-. (shrink)

This paper is about the cluster of issues that orbit a well-known thesis of Quine’s, as it applies to attitude ascriptions.

The concepts of necessary being, or necessary existence, and contingent being, or contingent existence, continue to occupy a central position in philosophical appraisals of Christian theism. Some philosophers have been concerned of late to emphasize a crucial ambiguity in the terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent', an ambiguity which threatens seriously to bedevil assessment of the claim that God's existence is necessary and not contingent. An important consequence of getting clear on this point, it is suggested, is that certain brisk attempts to (...) demolish the concept of a necessary being may be seen at least to be premature, leaving untouched,, as they do, an apparently viable sense in which God can be said to be a, indeed the, necessary being.This, substantially, is the position advocated by Professor J.H. Hick in recent discussions of this point. Hick maintains that it is of the greatest importance to distinguish two fundamentally different and contrasting notions of necessary being or necessary existence. (shrink)