Response to commentaries on keynote article.

This paper looks at what David Kaplan's work on indexicals can teach us about logic and the philosophy of logic, and also what Kaplan's logic (i.e. the Logic of Demonstratives) can teach us about indexicals. The lessons are i) that logical consequence is not necessary truth-preservation, ii) that that the linguistic doctrine of necessary truth (also called conventionalism about modality) fails, and iii) that there is a kind of barrier to entailment between non-context-sensitive and context-sensitive claims.

“Free riding,” used as a descriptive term, refers to taking a jointly produced benefit without contributing towards its production. Used as a term of criticism, it refers to the wrongful failure to contribute towards the joint production of benefits that one receives. On either usage, the central interest of moral philosophy in free riding is the same: to specify the conditions under which not contributing towards the joint production of benefits that one receives is wrong, and to explain why.

The age of maturity of children to consent for medical research is under debate, as different authorities regard the capacity of young teenagers as either satisfactory or not to grant consent without parental participation in the process. The present paper contrasts the generally accepted guideline for ethics in paediatric research in Canada with what the same children are allowed and expected to be able to do as babysitters. This comparison reveals deep incongruences in the way the maturity of the same (...) children is appreciated for two different tasks. (shrink)

In this seminal essay, Gentile gives an account of the way in which western philosophy gradually shed the myth of a transcendent reality. 'The Method of Immanence' is an outstanding example of Gentile's writing and one of the central texts in the actual idealist canon. In it Gentile displays boldness , historical erudition and remarkable single-mindedness as he works to set a host of ostensibly very different philosophers in a single tradition culminating in actual idealism.

This response to two academic conferences—“Local Knowledge and Microidentities,” held in England in 2004, and “Patrie d’origine et patries électives,” held in France in 2009—argues that “the idea of the local can only arise from a supralocal perspective” and, thus, that there is no local knowledge without a cosmopolitan knowledge more widely shared. Contributions to the conferences remarked on the widespread existence in Greek and Roman antiquity of bicultural identity and of hypermultiple citizenship. Therefore, despite much evidence of strong attachments (...) by ancient Greeks and Romans to local places and traditions, this brief essay concludes that the concept of microidentity is “hopelessly simplistic.”. (shrink)

First published in 1930, this book presents an imagined account of conversation between Plato and ‘A Modern Young Man’. In the first part, political and social institutions are considered and property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war and education, are discussed. The second part examines the idea of real Goods including the concepts of truth, art and love. In this work, the author sees Plato reaffirming his belief that real Goods come from some higher world, which it (...) is the destiny of the spirits to pursue. (shrink)