In her review of my book Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law, Glenys Williams raises a number of substantive objections to its argument. In this note I reply to those objections.

This book is the first interlinear bilingual edition of the core Inner Chapters of the book Zhuangzi, which must be counted among the most famous texts in Chinese intellectual and literary history. A special feature of this edition is that it follows the specific rhythm and rhyme of the text in the translation, making it possible to experience the particular style of this most exciting of the ancient Chinese philosophers. -/- An extensive introduction explains the history and the literary nature (...) of the text, and in particular it tells the story of how this text was appreciated and commented upon in China and translated into foreign languages through the ages. Extensive footnotes are provided to enable Western readers to read the text through the eyes of the enthusiastic Chinese commentators who have annotated the text over the centuries: traditional Chinese literary as well as philosophical commentaries are presented in detail in the original classical Chinese and in translation. -/- For the general reader this book will offer a rare opportunity to approach one of the most outrageously unconventional texts of world literature with the philosophical and philological perspectives of the greatest of its literate Chinese connoisseurs. For the student of Chinese this book will serve as a bilingual cornucopia of spirited classical Chinese discourse on a fiercely contested and always controversially discussed crucial text in the Daoist tradition of ancient China. (shrink)

Explores convergences between the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and African American thought.

Canadians frequently have recourse to public commissions as a means of dealing with contentious public policy issues. This essay examines the role of philosophers and philosophy in nine such commissions, all of which have dealt with issues in biomedical ethics. The principal findings of this essay are that philosophers have not been used extensively by these commissions, and that the philosophical aspects of the issues under investigation have been dealt with quite inadequately. The essay concludes with suggestions for an expanded (...) role for philosophers in such commissions. Keywords: bioethics, Canada, commissions, inquiries, philosophers CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In recent years much research has been undertaken regarding the feasibility of the human uterine transplant as a treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility. Should it reach clinical application this procedure would allow such individuals what is often a much-desired opportunity to become not only social mothers, or genetic and social mothers but mothers in a social, genetic and gestational sense. Like many experimental transplantation procedures such as face, hand, corneal and larynx transplants, UTx as a therapeutic option falls firmly (...) into the camp of the quality of life transplant, undertaken with the aim, not to save a life, but to enrich one. However, unlike most of these novel procedures – where one would be unlikely to find a willing living donor or an ethics committee that would sanction such a donation – the organs to be transplanted in UTx are potentially available from both living and deceased donors. In this article, in the light of the recent nine-case research trial in Sweden which used uteri obtained from living donors, and the assertions on the part of a number of other research teams currently preparing trials that they will only be using deceased donors, I explore the question of whether, in the case of UTx, there exist compelling moral reasons to prefer the use of deceased donors despite the benefits that may be associated with the use of organs obtained from the living. (shrink)

Kaplan claims that (1) ‘I am here now’, though analytic, is not a necessary truth. But this sentence is not a proposition, in a sense of proposition in which some, but not all, sentences are propositions. Since it is not a proposition, it is not true, and consequently not analytic. It is in fact a fragment of a proposition, the same fragment as ‘he was there then’ in (2) ‘CJFW said in Oxford on 23 September 1991 that he was there (...) then’. Sentences containing indexicals in general owe their sense to the corresponding fragments of sentences containing ‘quasi‐indexicals’(‘then’, for example, is the quasi‐indexical to ‘now’ as indexical). Someone uttering (1) assertively will thereby make a proposition like (2) true. (2) entails (3) ‘CJFW said in Oxford on 23 September 1993 that CJFW was in Oxford on 23 September 1991′. So by uttering (1) in the appropriate circumstances I made it true that I had asserted the proposition (4) ‘CJFW was in Oxford on 23 September 1991′. What is analytic and necessarily true is the proposition ‘If (3) then (4)’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 224-225 [Access article in PDF] Ross Harrison. Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth-Century Political Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. v + 281. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The title of Ross Harrison's book is taken from Macduff's line in Macbeth, "[c]onfusion now have made his masterpiece," in reference to the discovery of a murdered king. Regicide (...) was a particularly unsettling crime in the day of Shakespeare, as Harrison reminds us, since kings were often associated with divinity (2). And perhaps it was their obvious and fragile mortality, as witnessed by the killing of King Charles I, that served to further unsettle what had previously been taken for granted in the modern world—the very foundations of the state. Today, Jürgen Habermas informs us from the perspective of critical theory that we live in a "postmetaphysical condition," where we can no longer count on the apparatus of Christian natural law or Platonic Ideas to justify the state and its laws. Practically, the difficulty in Iraq of bringing together the various religious perspectives of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians, and others suggests that different religions or even varying interpretations of the same religion provide formidable barriers to the foundation of political systems. How do we bring people of different worldviews and perspectives together into one state? The great virtue of Harrison's book is the reminder that this is not a new problem. Rather, it resides at the core of the greatest challenges for political philosophy in any age. This challenge inspires what Harrison calls "some of the greatest and most important political philosophy ever written" (1).Thomas Hobbes is the first to receive extensive attention. Harrison provides a careful step-by-step analysis of Hobbes's reasoning in Leviathan. His affection for Hobbes is thinly veiled, as he parenthetically refers to Leviathan as "the greatest work of the greatest political philosopher" (62). Much of his account is standard, as he skillfully walks the reader from Hobbes's fascination with science to the sweeping authority of the sovereign. What is particularly worthy of note is his attention to the matter of foundations in Hobbes. Here his characterization reminds us of the eternality of Hobbes's central problem: "... how in a sceptical age to make statements of human reason that can depend on something fixed, or generally agreed" (64). Having found God superfluous to the question, according to Harrison, Hobbes ultimately employs prudence in relation to self-interest to be this fixed object. Since prudence—particularly its response to threats of violence—is the one element shared by all peoples, regardless of their religious or moral commitments, it makes the most sturdy foundation of political reasoning.The second object of extended attention is John Locke. And as was the case with his treatment of Hobbes, Harrison again looks to the foundations. As most readers of Locke are aware, the law of nature plays a central role in his thought, and if one is to get to the foundations of his politics, then one must unravel its mysteries. Locke makes solving these mysteries difficult for readers by denying the existence of innate ideas in the Essay. Locke makes his own task of grounding his theory difficult by doing just the same—denying the existence of innate ideas. Grounding natural law is made even more troublesome by his apparent appeals to these very same innate ideas on two occasions in the Second Treatise (§11, §136). It is perhaps in his own confusion that, according to Harrison, he "falls back, [End Page 224] after all, on revelation" (180). This is particularly unsatisfactory for Harrison, since revelation is characterized by the indeterminacy that led to the political conflict between Protestants and Catholics in modern England and eventually to the works of Hobbes and Locke in the first place.Shorter chapters are devoted to Grotius, Pufendorf, and the less-celebrated sixteenth-century figure, John Ponet. Ponet is found to appeal... (shrink)

Narrative explanations in evolutionary biology have seemed fundamentally different from other scientific explanations, and similar to historical explanations. This investigation of the structure of narrative explanations in evolutionary biology reveals that narrative explanations do have a deductive-nomological base, but that their structure contains two significant additional elements as well. The additional elements are: the multidimensional recursive connection between the different sub-explanations in a narrative explanation; and a set of generic explanations which make possible the integration of multiple co-existing processes.

How do thought and language manage to be 'about' aspects of the world? J. Robert G. Williams investigates how representation arises out of a fundamentally non-representational world, showing the explanatory relations between the representational properties of language, of thought, and of perception and intention.

Discusses heaven, the Creation, forgiveness, vanity, the theology of romantic love, responsibility, and the life of Jesus.

such light matter as you fancy, or the work of light or chance persons; and Cratylus is right in thinking that things have names by nature, and that not every man is an artificer of names, but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature.

Neil E. Williams develops a systematic metaphysics centred on the idea of powers, as a rival to neo-Humeanism, the dominant systematic metaphysics in philosophy today. Williams takes powers to be inherently causal properties and uses them as the foundation of his explanations of causation, persistence, laws, and modality.

Ethical discourse is typically inconclusive, and with good reason. But this inconclusiveness is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to helping publicly accountable policy-makers in the health care system provide an ethical justification for their decisions. It is suggested that instead of ending with platitudinous statements such as that a balance has to be struck between the rival ethical considerations, empirical research should be undertaken to elicit the quantitative trade-offs that the affected general public would be prepared to accept when (...) striking this balance. In the expected absence of any consensus, it is further suggested that the views of the median person be taken as the best approximation to the group view. Finally it is argued that, far from this quantitative approach lacking humanity by treating individuals as “mere statistics”, it shows greater compassion than the proponents of those approaches whose fellow feeling can only be stirred by information pertaining to identified individuals. (shrink)

Neil Levy argues that the importance of acquiring cultural knowledge in our evolutionary past selected for conformist and deferential social learning, and that contemporary bad beliefs – roughly, popular beliefs at odds with expert consensus – result primarily from the rational deployment of such conformity and deference in epistemically polluted modern environments. I raise several objections to this perspective. First, against the cultural evolutionary theory from which Levy draws, I argue that humans evolved to be highly sophisticated and vigilant social (...) learners. Given this, the ubiquity of bad beliefs in the modern world is puzzling: if humans are so smart and suspicious, why do these characteristics seem so rare in domains such as politics? I argue that the answer rests on the incentives that underlie bad beliefs, and I favorably contrast this explanation with Levy’s appeal to epistemic pollution. (shrink)

What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline , Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams (...) was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline is one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument was published in the fall of 2005. The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy is being published shortly after the present volume. (shrink)

For Moore, it is a paradox that although I would be absurd in asserting that (it is raining but I don.