Enclosed is a guidebook for philanthropists, advocates, and policymakers who want to do the most good possible. This book introduces the philosophy of “longtermism,” the idea that it is particularly important that we act now to safeguard future generations. -/- The future is vast in scale: depending on our choices in the coming centuries, the future could stretch for eons or it could dwindle into oblivion, and be inordinately good or inordinately bad. And yet future generations are utterly disenfranchised in (...) the world today: they cannot participate in our markets, our movements, or our civil society. This presents 21st Century philanthropists with a historically unprecedented opportunity to do good by protecting the long-term future. -/- The essays within are from the pioneers who have developed the intellectual foundations of longtermism, as well as the experts and advocates who are now putting it into practice. Readers will hear the case for longtermism from professors at the University of Oxford and Longview’s own founders; longtermist policy proposals from political philosophers, members of the House of Lords, and the All-party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations; the case for work on biosecurity, artificial intelligence, and climate change from leading experts; and the first ever essay on longtermist cultural change from the former Chief of Cabinet to the Finnish President. -/- Together, these essays chart the path forward toward maximising the good that we do for our grandchildren, our grandchildren’s grandchildren, and every generation beyond. (shrink)

(1970). IV. Davidson's notion of logical form 1. Inquiry: Vol. 13, No. 1-4, pp. 129-139.

Thesis: Even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Hume) Antithesis: A man who knows of at least one case of an X being a Y, and who does not know of any positive reason for thinking that an X might not be a Y, has some reason for thinking that all X's are Y's (p. 81). When (...) I speak of ‘some reason’ I mean the contradictory of no reason at all (p. 85). (‘A Possible Extension of Logical Theory?’ Geoffrey Hunter, Philosophical Studies 1965, pp. 81–8.). (shrink)

There are several styles of ontological argument. Here are examples of the first style. God has all perfections. Existence is a perfection. ∴God exists. All perfect beings exist. God is a perfect being. ∴God exists. God couldn't be improved. A being that doesn't exist could be improved . ∴God exists.

In his paper ‘A Function for Thought Experiments’, T. S. Kuhn asks: Ought we demand of our concepts, as we do of our laws and theories, that they be applicable to any and every situation that might conceivably arise in any possible world? Is it not sufficient to demand of a concept, as we do of a law or theory, that it be unequivocally applicable in every situation which we expect ever to encounter?

The phrase ‘burden of proof’ or ‘onus probandi’ originally referred to something determined by a judge in a legal proceeding. Some claims would be accepted as true by the court, and other relevant claims would require proving. The burden of doing this proving could be assigned to one or another party by the judge. Success or failure to meet this burden could be determined by the judge or the jury, as could consequences of success or failure.

It is a common idea in philosophy that some false propositions such as (C) that Charlottesville is the largest city in Virginia, have the property of being possibly true. It is not a clear idea but an important one which has inspired considerable effort at clarification. One suggestion is that there exist (really, not just possibly) “possible worlds” in which C or some suitable facsimile is true. One further attempt at clarification on offer is that there exists (again, really) a (...) maximal consistent set of propositions containing C. It is argued here that these attempts at clarification are profoundly erroneous. There exist actual powers of imaginative construction which would yield a scenario sufficiently detailed to be recognized by competent reviewers as one in which C is true. (The depiction might be in film or narrative and would avoid analytic falsehoods.) This is a frail clarification, vulnerable to questions, but is the best possible direction for a clear idea of the possibility of the proposition. The notion of possible worlds is associated with very valuable work in mathematical logic. It can only improve our appreciation of this excellent work to separate it from cloudy metaphysics. (shrink)

Contents: Wisdoms of East and West; Method of Analysis; Table of Symbolic Numbers; The Three Columns; Application of Principles to History; Astrology; Twelve ...

A. Pascal's statement of his wager argument is couched in terms of the theory of probability and the theory of games, and the exposition is unclear and unnecessarily complicated. The following is a ‘creative’ reformulation of the argument designed to avoid some of the objections which have been or might be raised against the original.

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 41-42.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

In Principia Ethica Moore held that the meaning of the word ‘good’ is a simple, unanalysable, non-natural property. Several features of this claim might be questioned. It might be questioned whether there are properties at all, and whether, even if there are, they are ever the meanings of words. Again, it might be questioned whether the word ‘good’ expresses a property, even assuming that some other words do. Moore considers this latter question, but not the former . The two questions (...) may seem connected by the fact that a negative answer to the first trivially leads to a negative answer for the second. But this triviality should be a caution to us. Otherwise we may confuse nominalism with ethical non-cognitivism or ‘anti-realism’. (shrink)

McTaggart assumed (1) that propositions cannot change in truth value and (2) if (a) there is real change, then (b) events must acquire the absolute property of being present and then lose this property. He held that {1,2b} is an inconsistent set and thus inferred 2a--that there is no real change. The B theory rejects 2 and the A theory rejects 1. I accept 1, 2, 2a, and consequently, 2b, and argue that this is consistent. There is an absolute property (...) of presentness, but we can never predicate this property without producing an assertion in which that property is "chronologized." If at , we attribute presentness, we thereby attribute presentness-at-. We can grasp the existence of an absolute property which we are unable to attribute absolutely. (shrink)

One skeptical strategy against A’s claim to know that P is to hold that it is logically possible for someone to have the same “base” for P as A does in spite of its not being true that P. Philosophical replies have focussed on showing that these are not genuine possibilities. Whether they are can be an interesting question of metaphysics, but it is argued in this paper that this metaphysical discussion is not the proper focus for an assessment of (...) skepticism. Even if there are the odd logical possibilities, they do not suffice to warrant skeptical doubts. Rather, there has to be good reason to think that there is a genuine chance of the alleged possibility obtaining. This requirement cannot be satisfied generically, and that is what is wrong with generic skepticism. (shrink)

James Cargile ABSTRACT: Many languages have a first person singular subject pronoun. Fewer also have a first person singular object pronoun. The term ‘I’ is commonly used to refer to the person using the term. It has a variety of other uses. A normal person is able to refer...

In charging argumentum ad hominem, we accuse someone of attacking the source of a claim. In charging argumentum ad verecundiam, we attack the source of a claim. This is reason for attending to "attacking the source." It is important to distinguish probabilistic reasons for doubting a claim and evidentiary reasons. Evidence that the source of a claim is likely to be wrong is not evidence against the claim. The tendency to overlook this is the essential feature of the ad hominem (...) fallacy. This is relevant in assessing the view that someone who regards his thinking as made possible by Godless arrangements of matter largely determined by chance is, in taking this attitude, advancing a hypothesis which undermines his theorizing about the world or himself. (shrink)

The ancient semantic paradoxes were thought to undermine the rationalist metaphysics of Plato, and their modern relatives have been used by Russell and others to administer some severe logical and epistemological shocks. These are not just tricks or puzzles, but are intimately connected with some of the liveliest and most basic philosophical disputes about logical form, universals, reference and predication. Dr Cargile offers here an original and sustained treatment of this range of issues, and in fact presents an unfashionable defence (...) of a platonistic ontology. He argues that the paradoxes arise not from mistakes in classical assumptions about truth or from an ontology that includes propositions and properties, but from mistakes in describing what propositions and properties are conveyed by particular linguistic expressions. The book should interest, and may well surprise, philosophers and others concerned with semantics and the foundations of logic. (shrink)

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non‐ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context (...) and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing. (shrink)

Preface: This volume originated in a conference on "The Place of Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy" which was organized by us and held at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, April 18-20, 1986. The idea behind this conference was to encourage philosophers and scientists to talk to each other about the role of thought experiments in their various disciplines. These papers were either written for the conference, or were written after it by commentators and (...) other participants.... We hope that this volume will be of use to other philosophers and scientists who are interested in thought experiments, as well as inspire more work in this area.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 483-487 [Access article in PDF] P. J. Stylianou. A Historical Commentary on Diodorus Siculus Book 15. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xxii 1 602 pp. Cloth, $125. This study is, as the dust jacket informs us, "the fullest ever undertaken for any part of Diodorus." Stylianou therefore very appropriately offers in his introduction (1-139) many comments that apply to the Bibliotheke Historike; as a (...) whole (some of its forty books are lost, some survive only in fragments). He shares in the generally held low opinion of Diodorus' talent, calling Diodorus (who wrote in the last half of the first century B.C.E.) "a second-rate epitomator" (1) with "not an attractive style," one that is marred by "empty and inept rhetoric" and "poverty of vocabulary" (15). Stylianou describes the Bibliotheke as "entirely derivative" and the product of "slipshod" methods (21)--"a work of compilation, and hastily and incompetently carried out" (132), in which "any revision was of the most perfunctory nature" (139). Saying that a "complete list of Diodorus' blunders would be of a very respectable length," Stylianou is content with providing a full page of just those within book 15 (138).Alhough he was a less than competent compiler, Diodorus "used first-rate sources" (1); unfortunately most of those sources are now lost, and students of some of the periods covered by Diodorus' extant books have no choice but to work through the confused and confusing filter his extracts provide. Rejecting recent criticisms as unconvincing, Stylianou adheres to the traditional view that Diodorus follows "one main author at a time" (49); for book 15, that author is Ephorus of Cyme, who wrote, Stylianou believes, in the 330s-320s B.C.E. (110). Allowing for the sort of pro-Athenian, anti-Spartan biases one would expect in a student of Isocrates (114), Stylianou has a generally high opinion of Ephorus, believing that most of the errors to be found in Diodorus' account were produced by inept abbreviation of his mostly reliable main source (124).Book 15 deals with the period 386-360 B.C.E., from just after the imposition of the King's Peace to just before the emergence of Philip of Macedon, a quarter-century filled with many significant events: Sparta's abuses as prostates (enforcer) of the "autonomy" clause of the Peace; the rise of both the Boeotian and Second Athenian Confederacies; the rapid decline of Sparta as a great power, culminating in the disastrous Battle of Leuctra and the first four Theban-led invasions of the Peloponnesus; the meteoric rise and fall of Jason of Pherae; the revolt of the western satraps of the Persian Empire; the climactic (or anticlimactic) Second Battle of Mantinea; the establishment of a Greek "common peace" that excluded the Persian King, etc. This is a period for which the Ephoran tradition in Diodorus is paralleled by the contemporary account in Xenophon's Hellenica. The striking differences between their versions of numerous events have continually fueled scholarly controversies. In most cases (not all; see, e.g., 507-8), Stylianou tends to favor Ephorus over Xenophon--when (as he admits is not always possible) one can discern the Ephoran account [End Page 483] through the mutilations imposed on it by Diodorus. Fortunately help is provided by other sources (contemporary inscriptions and orations, later writers such as Plutarch, etc.). Stylianou seems less inclined to find "doublets" in Diodorus' text than many scholars have been, and he shows plausible ways of explaining some apparent doublets away (242, 382), although he does admit one "minor doublet" in book 15 (439).No one hereafter will be able to deal responsibly with the first half of the fourth century B.C.E. without carefully consulting Stylianou's commentary. Its pedigree of predominantly Oxonian advisors and readers from 1981 dissertation through 1998 publication (vii-viii) is most impressive, yet Stylianou takes issue with his mentors on numerous specific points. Several new and valuable observations are made: for example, corrections of restorations necessitated by reinterpretation of the pose of the statue of the Athenian... (shrink)