An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. -/- In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality (...) nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but, Betti contends, among these entities there are no facts. -/- Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Betti examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, which she distinguishes as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. She criticizes compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong's truthmaker argument. She then criticizes propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what she calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. Betti argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language. (shrink)

Le monde occidental s'interroge aujourd'hui sur la passion de la mort qui pousse de jeunes terroristes au suicide et au crime. Le présent essai traite d'une autre fascination, non moins troublante : celle qui travaille sourdement les grands textes de notre modernité. Après Alexandre Kojève, l'écriture de Georges Bataille, de Maurice Blanchot, de Jacques Derrida ou de Jacques Lacan, laisse transparaître un lyrisme de la destruction, un engouement pour l'abîme, qu'il faut savoir reconnaître sous la rigueur de la pensée. D'où (...) vient cette esthétique du malheur? Quels enjeux recouvre-t-elle? Au fil d'une minutieuse lecture, l'auteur s'attache à dénuder un complexe de valeurs et d'affects qui remontent aux origines symboliques de notre civilisation. On entrevoit peu à peu que cette revendication de la mort pourrait bien n'être que le signe inversé de la grande protestation humaine, de sa soif d'infini et de son désir d'être. Betty Rojtman, née à Paris, a dirigé le département de littérature française à l'université hébraïque de Jérusalem. Elle situe sa recherche au carrefour de la pensée contemporaine et de l'exégèse juive traditionnelle. Parmi ses publications : Feu noir sur feu blanc. Essai sur l'herméneutique juive (1986); Une grave distraction (préface de Paul Ricoeur, 1991) ; Une rencontre improbable (2002) et Moïse, prophète des nostalgies (2007). (shrink)

Diese Studie beschäftigt sich mit dem Status von empirischen Naturgesetzen in Immanuel Kants kritischer Philosophie. Insbesondere geht es um die Beantwortung der Frage, welche argumentativen Ressourcen Kant im Rahmen seines Ansatzes bereitstellt, um empirischen Naturgesetzen den Status der Notwendigkeit zuzusprechen. Außerdem wird geklärt, welche Art Notwendigkeit dabei erfüllt wird.

How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fitting the scope of its subject matter. (...) As a step toward such an investigation, we trace the use of the bigram “conceptual scheme” in about 42,000 US journal articles in social sciences from 1888-1959 by using a novel method combining a quantitative procedure aided by basic computational techniques with qualitative elements informed by Betti and van den Berg (2014)’s ‘model approach to the history of ideas’. (shrink)

More than 3.5 million people participate in cheerleading in the United States, with 97 percent being female. A staple of American schools, American life, and popular culture, the cheerleader, however, has received scant attention in scholarly research. In this article, the authors argue that a feminist poststructuralist reading of cheerleading situates cheerleading as a discursive practice that has changed significantly in the past 150 years to accommodate the shifting and often contradictory meanings of normative femininity. They maintain that the ideal (...) girl of the new millennium embodies both masculinity and femininity and that cheerleading offers a culturally sanctioned space for some girls to embody ideal girlhood. They argue that cheerleading is a gendered activity representing in some ways a liberatory shift in reconstituting normative femininity while simultaneously perpetuating a norm of femininity that does not threaten dominant social values and expectations about the role of girls and women in society. (shrink)

SummaryIn Ethiopia, despite some recent improvements, the health and nutritional status of children is very poor. A better understanding of the main socioeconomic determinants of child health and nutrition is essential to address the problem and make appropriate interventions. In the present study, an attempt is made to explore the effect of maternal characteristics on the health and nutritional status of under-five children using the 2005 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey. The health and nutritional status of children are measured using (...) the two widely used anthropometric indicators height-for-age and weight-for-height. In the ordinary least squares estimation, it is observed that maternal characteristics have a significant impact on child health and nutritional status. The magnitudes of the coefficients, however, are found to slightly increase when maternal education is instrumented in the 2SLS estimation. Moreover, in the quantile regression estimation, the impacts of maternal characteristics are observed to vary between long-term and current child health and nutritional status. (shrink)

In this paper, I take a closer look at Hans Reichenbach’s relation to metaphysics and work out some interesting parallels between his account and that of the proponents of inductive metaphysics, a tradition that emerged in the mid- and late 19th century and the early 20th century in Germany. It is in particular Hans Reichenbach’s conception of the relation between the natural sciences and metaphysics, as displayed in his treatment of the question of the existence of the external world, that (...) shows some very interesting similarities with inductive metaphysics. By a comparison with the position of the inductive metaphysician Erich Becher and his handling of the problem of realism, I work out the parallels between Reichenbach’s program and inductive metaphysics. I come to the conclusion that while there are certainly some respects in which Reichenbach’s logical empiricism is closer to the positions of the representatives of the Vienna Circle, it turns out that with regard to his views on metaphysics there is a greater affinity with the program of inductive metaphysics. (shrink)

This is a book about speech and the silencing of speech; about who gets to speak and who does not; about who is listened to and who is ignored. In this down-to-earth analysis of the democratic principle of freedom of speech, Betty McLellan insists that, if this prized democratic principle is to have any continuing credibility, free speech must be free for all.

Gustav Theodor Fechner was one of the main proponents of inductive metaphysics in the 19th century. The idea of inductive metaphysics is to use empirical sources and inductive forms of inference in metaphysics. Although this sounds like a research program which might well appeal to scientifically minded philosophers, some of Fechner’s metaphysical conclusions look very suspicious from a scientific viewpoint. For example, Fechner famously argues that the planets and stars are animated by a soul and that the same holds for (...) the whole universe. In the present article it is shown that Fechner’s mystical cosmological views are based on a principle of analogy which is too permissive and that as a result of that his central argument to the conclusion that the earth is animated by a soul is not correct. As the article argues, the principle Fechner bases his inference on has to be supplemented by a causal condition along the lines of Mary Hesse’s account of analogical inferences, a condition Fechner at least implicitly recognizes but fails to meet. (shrink)

In his 1912 book _The Problems of Philosophy_, Bertrand Russell advocates an indirect realism with regard to physical objects. Only two years later, in his book _Our Knowledge of the External World_ and the paper “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics”, he changes his method in philosophy. Instead of inferring the existence of physical objects, he now sets out to construct them out of sense-data. As I will argue in this article, the main argument from _The Problems of Philosophy_ can (...) be rationally reconstructed as an inference to the best explanation which infers to unobservable objects. The main motivation for the new approach in _Our Knowledge of the External World_, on the other hand, is to establish a more direct variant of realism, in particular because Russell became skeptical with regard to inferences to unobservable objects. As I will argue, the resulting theory of the physical world loses so much in simplicity that it becomes an unattractive alternative to his earlier position, and Russell’s reason for rejecting simplicity as a criterion of theory choice turns out to be inconsequential. (shrink)

While it is widely assumed that greater diversity in corporate governance will enhance a firm’s corporate social performance, this study considers an alternative thesis which relates managerial control to corporate philanthropy. The study empirically evaluates both board diversity and managerial control of the board as possible predictors of corporate philanthropy. The demonstration of a positive relationship between managerial control and corporate philanthropy contributes to our understanding that corporate social performance results from a complex set of economic and social motives. Possible (...) future research and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

In the extensive methodology of his Logik, Wilhelm Wundt examines in detail the methodological procedure in the individual sciences. As will be shown in this article, these investigations are not only intended to clarify or improve the procedures in the individual sciences, but also to be of benefit to philosophy and especially to metaphysics. Wundt belongs to the traditional line of inductive metaphysics, whose representatives were of the opinion that metaphysics should be based on the results and methods of the (...) individual sciences. In this sense, Wundt's detailed investigation of the methods of the individual sciences should be understood as a prelude to an inductive metaphysics. By means of a central example, namely the introduction of the concept of causality based on an inference to the best explanation, this article shows how Wundt conceives the construction of a metaphysics based on the foundations of the individual sciences. (shrink)

Meaning addresses the fundamental question of human language interaction: what it is to mean, and how we communicate our meanings to others. Experienced textbook writer and eminent researcher Betty J. Birner gives balanced coverage to semantics and pragmatics, emphasizing interactions between the two, and discusses other fields of language study such as syntax, neurology, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence in terms of their interfaces with linguistic meaning.

In rhetoric, an orator needs both a large vocabulary and a stock of commonplaces and arguments. Erasmus put them together in his De duplici copia verborum ac rerum . In this sixth volume of the first Ordo of the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus, Betty Knott has edited the Latin text and added an English introduction and commentary, providing philological and historical information which helps the reader to understand the text and identify its sources.

Betty Powell; XII*—Descartes' Machines, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

The common discourse on intellectual property rights rests mainly on utilitarian ground, with implications on the question of justice as well as moral significance. It runs like this: Intellectual property rights are to reward the originators for his/her intellectual labour mainly in monetary terms, thereby providing incentives for originators to engage in future innovative labouring. Without such incentives, few, if not none, will engage in creative activities and the whole human community will, thereby, suffer because of reduced inventions. However, such (...) utilitarian argument on piracy as de-motivation may not be necessarily justified. In fact, intellectual property arrangement is one among different institutions concerning how the society may handle new ideas and creative works. In reality, private ownership over one's intellectual product is merely a modern western concept that is being ' advertised' as being normative, which, by itself, is highly debatable. Alarming still, such normative argument assumes both justness and moral dimensions. This article will analyse whether such argument is philosophically sound. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Defence of Starmaking Constructivism: The Problem of Stuff” by Bin Liu. Abstract: Bin Liu defends a theory he calls “starmaking constructivism,” according to which all features of the world are constructed by us. I will first show that the general way Liu defends and argues for constructivism is strongly reminiscent of the tradition of inductive metaphysics, a tradition that emerged in the mid- and late 19th century and the early 20th century in Germany. (...) I will then highlight an argument from this tradition against phenomenalism and for realism. Then I will argue that this argument is at least in part an objection that also applies to starmaking constructivism, thereby shifting the burden of arguing back to the constructivist’s side. (shrink)

Kant claims that the understanding prescribes the existence and necessity of empirical laws to nature, while it does not prescribe which particular empirical laws hold. That is to say, the understanding prescribes the general form of nature and the form of the empirical laws without prescribing the material content. But how is this possible? How can the understanding guarantee that there are necessary empirical laws without prescribing particular empirical laws to nature? In this paper, I want to answer this question (...) by analyzing Kant’s argument for the Second Analogy of Experience in combination with an analysis of his conception of actuality. As I want to show, an application of Kant’s conception of actuality to the argument for the Second Analogy not only fills a gap in this argument, but also leads to an explanation of how the understanding can prescribe lawfulness to nature without prescribing particular laws. (shrink)

Starting from the problem of evil, Norbert Hoerster argues for an atheistic position. He discusses several historical and current attempts to reconcile the existing evils with the existence of God and comes to the negative conclusion that all of these attempts fail. From this, he concludes that the existing evils speak against the existence of God. In this article I argue that Hoerster's arguments are not sufficient for an atheistic conclusion. Rather, they only strengthen the case for agnosticism, the position (...) according to which we cannot know whether God exists. I want to work out that Hoerster does not recognize this because he does not clearly distinguish the position of agnosticism from the position of atheism, and thereby gives away important potential for differentiation. (shrink)

The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A computational history (...) of ideas must be built upon a sound theoretical foundation for its methodology, and the only such foundation is given by the use of models , i.e., fully explicit and revisable interpretive frameworks or networks of concepts developed by the historians of ideas themselves. (ii) Data Organisation. Interpretive models in our sense must be seen as topic-specific knowledge organisation systems (KOS) implementable (i.e. formalisable) as e.g. computer science ontologies. We thus require historians of ideas to provide explicitly structured semantic framing of domain knowledge before investigating texts computationally, and to constantly re-input findings from the interpretive point of view. In this way, a computational history of ideas maximally profits from computer methods while also keeping humanities experts in the loop. We elucidate our proposal with reference to a model of the notion of axiomatic science in 18th -19th century Europe. (shrink)