Colors are of philosophical interest for two kinds of reason. One is that colors comprise such a large and important portion of our social, personal and epistemological lives and so a philosophical account of our concepts of color is highly desirable. The second reason is that trying to fit colors into accounts of metaphysics, epistemology and science leads to philosophical problems that are intriguing and hard to resolve. Not surprisingly, these two kinds of reasons are related. The fact that colors (...) are so significant in their own right, makes more pressing the philosophical problems of fitting them into more general metaphysical and epistemological frameworks. (shrink)

Scholars and policy-makers have expressed concerns about the crediting of coauthors in research publications. Most such problems fall into one of two categories, excluding deserving contributors or including undeserving ones. But our research shows that there is no consensus on “deserving” or on what type of contribution suffices for co-authorship award. Our study uses qualitative data, including interviews with 60 US academic science or engineering researchers in 14 disciplines in a set of geographically distributed research-intensive universities. We also employ data (...) from 161 website posts provided by 93 study participants, again US academic scientists. We examine a variety of factors related to perceived unwarranted exclusion from co-author credit and unwarranted inclusion, providing an empirically-informed conceptual model to explain co-author crediting outcomes. Determinants of outcomes include characteristics of disciplines and fields, institutional work culture, power dynamics and team-specific norms and decision processes. (shrink)

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Vulnerability does not mean much for our contemporary morality. It is antithetical to our emphasis on individualism and rationality; it requires that we attend to the body and to our feelings. Yet only by recognizing the depth and breadth of our vulnerability can we affirm our humanity.

Acceptance of Humean Supervenience and thereductive Humean analyses that entail it leadsto a litany of inadequately explained conflictswith our intuitions regarding laws andpossibilities. However, the non-reductiveHumeanism developed here, on which law claimsare understood as normative rather than factstating, can accommodate those intuitions. Rational constraints on such norms provide aset of consistency relations that ground asemantics formulated in terms offactual-normative worlds, solving theFrege-Geach problem of construing unassertedcontexts. This set of factual-normative worldsincludes exactly the intuitive sets ofnomologically possible worlds associated witheach possible (...) set of laws. The extension ofthe semantics to counterfactual and subjunctiveconditionals is sketched. Potential objectionsinvolving subjectivity, mind-dependence, andnon-factuality are discussed. (shrink)

The model developed in the target article is not as comprehensive as might be desired on two counts: (1) in that how the transition from proximal stimulation at the skin gives rise to the perception of external objects is taken for granted; and (2) in that another population of participants, the blind, constitute an important group from which we can understand somatosensory processing and neural plasticity.

"I have come to think that the laws of physics are real because my experience with the laws of physics does not seem to me to be very different in any fundamental way from my experience with rocks. For those who have not lived with the laws of physics, I can offer the obvious argument that the laws of physics as we know them work, and there is no other known way of looking at nature that works in anything like (...) the same sense.". (shrink)

As both a substantive academic contribution to this growing field and a useful reference tool, this book offers a theoretical introduction to the many languages ...

The essays in this volume explore the full range of Husserl's work and reveal just how systematic his philosophy is. There are treatments of his most important contributions to phenomenology, intentionality and the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of language, ontology, and mathematics. An underlying theme of the volume is a resistance to the idea, current in much intellectual history, of a radical break between 'modern' and 'postmodern' philosophy, with Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians. Husserl is (...) seen in this volume as a philosopher constantly revising his system in order to be able to integrate philosophy with ideas emanating from science and culture. The so-called rift between analytic and 'continental' philosophy emerges as an artificial construct. (shrink)

Analytic moral philosophy's strong divide between empirical and normative restricts facts to providing information for the application of norms and does not allow them to confront or challenge norms. So any genuine attempt to incorporate experience and empirical research into bioethics – to give the empirical more than the status of mere 'descriptive ethics'– must make a sharp break with the kind of analytic moral philosophy that has dominated contemporary bioethics. Examples from bioethics and science are used to illustrate the (...) problems with the method of application that philosophically prevails in both domains and with the conception of rationality that underlies this method. Cues from how these problems can be handled in science then introduce summaries of richer, more productive naturalist and constructivist accounts of reason and normative knowledge. Liberated by a naturalist approach to ethics and an enlarged conception of rationality, empirical work can be recognized not just as essential to bioethics but also as contributing to normative knowledge. (shrink)

I have two criticisms of Vallicella's "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense." One is that its argument for property self-exemplification fails because it ignores the distinction between "what" clauses employing first-level quanti-fication and those employing second-level quantification. The second criti-cism is that his rejection of logically simple propositions stems from a failure to see that the argument for those propositions is based on a logical premiss, not a grammatical one.

Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has enlivened recent discussion of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Yet it is quite possible to disengage his interpretive thesis from its supporting argumentation. Doing so leaves one with an intriguing sceptical argument which Kripke first powerfully advances, then tries to halt. But contrary to the impression his argument may leave, Kripke's solution and the position it concedes to the Sceptic are deeply allied. Here I shall demonstrate their common assumption, and on that basis argue (...) that Kripke's solution begs the Sceptic's question. Furthermore, I believe we can live with the Sceptic. The sceptical argument can be turned into a reasonable contribution to a kind of nominalism in the philosophy of meaning and truth. (shrink)

Summary Ian Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history (...) of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form. (shrink)

Examines the relevance of Foucault's work for developing an understanding of those issues which lie beyond the limits of Marxist theory and analysis - issues such as 'individualising' forms of power, power-knowledge relations, the rise of ...