G. C. J. Midgley; XIV—Linguistic Rules, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 271–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

The Buddhist philosophy of causality is primarily a theory (naya) of the human world. Its methodology, however, is objective and critical. It rejects the weight of mere authority or tradition, relies upon experience and reason, and emphasizes the critical examination and verification of all opinions. Although the Buddhist conception of knowledge and truth has a strong empirical and pragmatic bias (cf. Nyāya‐bindu 1.1), its conception of experience does not exclude introspection, rational intuition or mystical intuition (cf. Nyāya‐bindu 1.7–11). Although its (...) conception of reason creates a logical gulf between reason and experience, the gulf is bridged by a transcendental illusion (avidyā). Its employment of reason is highly analytical and it seeks to discover the ultimate elements constituting the structures of objects and experience. The constituent elements as the locus of causation are regarded as more real than their composite structures – dharma, dhātu or kṣana as contrasted with saṅghāta or santāna. At the same time, it raises dialectical questions and seriously considers the possibility of the empirical world being merely a working illusion. It discounts the apparent stability of objects, stressing their transience, finally defined as momentariness (see, for example, Ratnakīrti's Kṣaṇa‐bhaṅgasiddhi). It rejects the category of substance for that of process. Causality is thus regarded not as a dynamic interaction between substances, but as a functional, many‐one relationship of order characterized by invariance and uniformity within any given type of process. (shrink)

Knowledge of the ethical and legal basis of medicine is as essential to clinical practice as an understanding of basic medical sciences. In the UK, the General Medical Council requires that medical graduates behave according to ethical and legal principles and must know about and comply with the GMC’s ethical guidance and standards. We suggest that these standards can only be achieved when the teaching and learning of medical ethics, law and professionalism are fundamental to, and thoroughly integrated both vertically (...) and horizontally throughout, the curricula of all medical schools as a shared obligation of all teachers. The GMC also requires that each medical school provides adequate teaching time and resources to achieve the above. We reiterate that the adequate provision and coordination of teaching and learning of ethics and law requires at least one full-time senior academic in ethics and law with relevant professional and academic expertise. In this paper we set out an updated indicative core content of learning for medical ethics and law in UK medical schools and describe its origins and the consultative process by which it was achieved. (shrink)

In his recent paper, “What a Real Argument is”, Ben Hamby attempts to provide an adequate theoretical account of “real” arguments. In this paper I present and evaluate both Hamby’s motivation for distinguishing “real” from non-“real” arguments and his articulation of the distinction. I argue that neither is adequate to ground a theoretically significant class of “real” arguments, for the articulation fails to pick out a stable proper subclass of all arguments that is simultaneously both theoretically relevant and a proper (...) subclass of all arguments. (shrink)

Originally published in 1921, updated in 1932 and re-issued in 1966 with an introduction by Stephan Körner, this book remains a classic introduction to the study of ethics. It clearly explains both the Aristotelian and the Kantian approach to ethical problems, by combining the advantages of a historical and systematic introduction. Much of the book is devoted to Aristotle and Kant, whose moral theories are important and who are influential forces in contemporary moral philosophy.

A brief review of the conceptual difficulties met by the quantum formalism is presented. The main attempts to overcome these difficulties are considered and their limitations are pointed out. A recent proposal based on the assumption of the occurrence of a specific type of wave function collapse is discussed and its consequences for the above-mentioned problems are analyzed.

These documents, published here for the first time, present the Treasury's counter-arguments during the period when Keynes was developing the ideas that led to the Keynesian revolution in economic policy. Keynes spent much effort trying to persuade the Treasury to adopt policies designed to raise employment and stabilise prices, and to create an international monetary system that would favour these objectives. His arguments are set out fully in the Royal Economic Society's 30-volume set of The Collected Writings of John Maynard (...) Keynes. In contrast, the views of his Treasury critics have hitherto been much less accessible.Economists and historians have tended to assume that Keynes was right and the Treasury was wrong; this volume shows that the Treasury anticipated the political problems that would be encountered in putting Keynes's ideas into practice. Much of what Keynes published was deliberately polemical: he believed that words should be 'a little wild', for they were 'the assault of thought on the unthinking'. Treasury officials were by no means as unthinking as Keynes tended to portray them, and they had a coherent and intellectually respectable understanding of public finance. Ministers in the inter-war period and early in the Second World War were sensitive to the use that political opponents might make of Keynes's arguments; officials had to provide counter-arguments, and in doing so they revealed much about their views on economics and public finance. Once Keynes became an adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1940, the debate became internal to the Treasury, but officials continued to subject Keynes's ideas to critical analysis.The documents in this volume show Treasury responses to Keynes on a range of issues crucial to understanding the period and the context of the Keynesian revolution in public policy. The topics covered include: the return to the gold standard; the use of public expenditure to cure unemployment in the inter-war period; how to avoid inflation in the war; planning for the post-war international economy; and the 1944 white paper on employment policy. This edition is an essential tool for the study of a formative period of British history and a great intellectual debate. (shrink)

With reference to recently proposed theoretical models accounting for reduction in terms of a unified dynamics governing all physical processes, we analyze the problem of working out a worldview accommodating our knowledge about natural phenomena. We stress the relevant conceptual differences between the considered models and standard quantum mechanics. In spite of the fact that both theories describe systems within a genuine Hilbert space framework, the peculiar features of the spontaneous reduction models limit drastically the states which are dynamically stable. (...) This fact by itself allows one to work out an interpretation of the formalism which makes it possible to give a satisfactory description of the world in terms of the values taken by an appropriately defined mass density function in ordinary configuration space. A topology based on this function and which is radically different from the one characterizing the Hilbert space is introduced, and in terms of it the idea of similarity of macroscopic situations is precisely defined. Finally, the formalism and the interpretation are shown to yield a natural criterion for establishing the psychophysical parallelism. The conclusion is that, within the considered theories and at the nonrelativistic level, one can satisfy all sensible requirements for a completely satisfactory macro-objective description of reality. (shrink)

Many defenders of the possibility of time travel into the past also hold that such time travel places no restrictions on what said time travelers can do. Some hold that it places at least a few restrictions on what time travelers can do. In attempting to resolve this dispute, I reached a contrary conclusion. Time travelers to the past cannot do other than what they in fact do. Using a very weak notion of can, I shall argue that the correspondingly (...) strong cannot do otherwise applies in the case of backwards time travel. I defend this result from objections. (shrink)

The Cambridge Capital Controversy was one of the most significant debates in Twentieth Century economics. First published in 1972, this book provides an accessible reconstruction of the controversy with detailed discussion of the major points raised by its primary protagonists: Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson on the post-Keynesian side and Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson on the neo-classical side. The book is now considered to be a classic. This fiftieth anniversary edition comes with a new preface by the author and (...) two new afterwords that reflect on the author's contribution to the field and the significance of the book in the history of economics. Topics covered include the measurement of capital, the revival of interest in Irving Fisher's rate of return on investment, the double-switching debate, Sraffa's prelude to a critique of neoclassical theory, and the 'new' theories of the rate of profits in capitalist society. (shrink)