This selection of D. H. Mellor's work demonstrates the wide ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers are on aspects of the mind: on our 'selves', their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature and (...) how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relation between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction, and argue for an objective interpretation of decision theory. (shrink)

It is demonstrated that neither the arguments leading to inconsistencies in the description of quantum-mechanical measurement nor those “explaining” the process of measurement by means of thermodynamical statistics are valid. Instead, it is argued that the probability interpretation is compatible with an objective interpretation of the wave function.

I show that the connotations of causation - temporal, explanatory, predictive and means-end - are preserved in indeterministic causation only to the extent that effects have a greater chance of occurring in the circumstances if their causes do than if they don’t.

Dans ce volume considérable, on été réunies les contributions d'un Congrès international tenu à Louvain en 1998 pour marquer l'achèvement de la première édition de la Théologie Platonicienne de Proclus. Ces contributions, toutes rigoureusement centrées sur la Théol. Plat. concernent (1) les principes et les sources de la Théol. plat. (2) Les méthodes théologiques de Proclus (3) La postérité de la Théol. plat. dans le monde grec, païen comme chrétien, et dans le monde islamique. Des indices très détaillés permettent de (...) retrouver tous les passages cités et commentés dans ce volume. (shrink)

Two minuscule codices carrying collections of grammatical and rhetorical treatises and extracts from such treatises, one written at Monte Cassino between A.D. 779 and 796 ), the other at Benevento towards the middle of the following century, contain among their uncial tituli the three words INCIPIT THVESTES VARII. There follows in both codices a twenty-four-word sentence stating the full name of Varius, the literary character of the Thyestes, an aesthetic judgement on the work, the date of a public performance in (...) a Roman theatre, and the price paid: Lucius Varius cognomento Rufus Thyesten tragoediam magna cura absolutam post Actiacam uictoriam Augusti ludis eius in scaena edidit pro qua fabula sestertium deciens accepit. (shrink)

This paper compares clinical intuition and phenomenological intuition. I begin with a brief analysis of Husserl’s conception of intuition. Second, I review the attitude toward clinical intuition by physicians and philosophers. Third, I discuss the Aristotelian conception of intellectual intuition or nous and its relation to phronesis. Phronesis provides a philosophical ground for clinical intuition by linking medicine as both a techné and praxis. Considering medicine as a techné, Pellegrino and Thomasma exclude clinical intuitions from their philosophy of medicine. However, (...) in modeling clinical reasoning on phronesis, they link Aristotelian nous with clinical reasoning. While supporting the application of phronesis to clinical reasoning, I consider Pellegrino and Thomasma’s model deficient for eliminating intuition as an inalienable element of clinical reasoning. Rather, clinical intuitions are necessary in linking medicine as both art and practice. This becomes more obvious through the phenomenological analysis of clinical intuitions. Clinical reasoning and phenomenological intuitions are similar in joining the perceptual and intellectual aspects of human judgment. Furthermore, clinical intuitions can be extended to become phenomenological intuitions through phenomenological reflection. Clinical intuitions may be examined phenomenologically for their originary foundations. In this way, medicine acts as a phenomenological clue. Phenomenology provides a method to restore the Hippocratic synthesis of empirical observation and wholism associated with clinical intuitions. (shrink)

Plutarch's Timoleon has received little attention from scholars who in recent years have studied the sources of his Lives and sought to determine the methods which he followed in their composition. The reasons for this neglect are obvious: the Timoleon is a simple Life, contains few citations, and is universally and justifiably believed to be founded, together with the Timoleon of Cornelius Nepos, upon the tradition established by Timaeus. Scholars of the nineteenth century agreed in further concluding that both authors (...) derived their material directly and almost exclusively from Timaeus. This conclusion does not appear to have been challenged in spite of the well-known contention of Eduard Meyer, which has won considerable approval, that neither biographer was accustomed to use primary historical authorities, each relying mainly upon biographies of the Hellenistic period which have not survived. The validity of Meyer's theory as a general principle of source-criticism will not be expressly discussed in this paper. My purpose is rather to examine the Timoleon only, especially in relation to the Timoleon of Nepos, and to suggest a method of composition here adopted by Plutarch, who, I believe, based his Life upon a secondary biography and supplemented this from a primary historical authority. (shrink)

This book is unique in presenting an interdisciplinary conversation between jurists and logicians. It brings together scholars from both law and philosophy and looks at the application of 'the new logics' to law and legal ordering, in a number of legal systems. The first Part explores the ways in which the new logics shed light on the functioning of legal orders, including the structure of legal argumentation and the rules of evidence. The second addresses how non-classical logics can help us (...) to understand the interactions between multiple legal orders, in a range of contexts including domestic and international law. The final Part examines particular issues in the applicability of non-classical logics to legal reasoning. This book will be of interest to jurisprudence and logic scholars and students who want to deepen their understanding of relationships between law and legal reasoning, and learn about recent developments in formal logic. (shrink)

As Anthony Tol explains in his general introduction to (his translation of) Vollenhoven's 1926 inaugural address, the Reformed epistemology that Vollenhoven espouses here is essentially three-layered. Most basic is the intuition - the starting point of all knowing. It starts with discerning. Then there is knowledge. At this point language, communication, and judgments are relevant. The third layer is thought. Thought may disclose and renew or criticize and correct against the background of what we know. Thought is also central to (...) concept formation. The factor that runs through these three layers is truth, taken realistically. It has its seat in the intuition of discerning. It is central to knowledge, for the essence of knowledge is said to be "possessing truth." And in connection with thought, or more particularly in concept formation, the latter is described as "truth grasped in a form." Apart from advocating his own understanding of epistemology in this inaugural address, Vollenhoven takes issue with how epistemology is generally understood. The critique is cast in a historical overview. (shrink)

Most of the commentaries on Greek authors which circulated in the towns of Egypt during the late Ptolemaic and early Imperial periods ignored the critical and colometrical problems which had engaged the attention of the great Alexandrian grammarians. A few, however, based themselves on texts equipped with signs, included the signs in their lemmata and offered explanations. Such commentaries must be the source of the scattered references to signs in the older marginal scholia in Byzantine manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar (...) and the Attic dramatists. The only Byzantine manuscript to transmit a pagan text still equipped with a large number and a variety of signs, namely cod. Venice, Bibl. Marc. gr. 454, is also the only one to transmit scholia with lemmata retaining prefixed signs. Just as texts and scholium-lemmata lost their signs in the course of transmission, so too did references to signs within scholia either disappear or become garbled. At best, a statement about the reasons for affixing a sign would turn into one about the content or style of the verse in question. The few mentions made of the great Alexandrians give no cause for thinking that we ever have a verbatim quotation of an πόμνημα written by one of them in order to explain his own signs. Time and again it is demonstrable that an explanation of a sign's presence against a particular verse goes back to some writer like Aristonicus. What survives of the ancient discussion of Latin literature is exiguous in comparison with the Greek material. (shrink)

The problem which I propose to consider is not whether the distinctions past, present, future, characterize the form of time in such a way that whatever may be true concerning the reality of one of these characteristics must be equally true of the others, but the more particular question of the kind of existence which belongs to the content of the past, or its constituents as events.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 135-149 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope H. D. Harootunian While the formation of area studies in the universities and colleges of the United States was initially inaugurated as a response to the Cold War "necessity" to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned, many of whom were new refugees of decolonization, one of its unintended consequences was to foster the development of (...) comparative perspectives of study across disciplines and different cultural regions. But this secondary goal was often diverted by the principal purpose of area studies programs to supply authoritative information on regions outside of Euro-America (the second and third worlds) considered crucial to the national security and to private businesses thrown increasingly into an expanding global market seeking new regions capable of providing buyers, workers, and materials. In time, the vocation of comparison became part of the unconscious of area studies, as the unit of the nation-state took precedence over all other considerations. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas that were able to integrate different disciplines, area studies have too often settled for simple multidisciplinarism, substituting coverage for comparison, language acquisition for method, the nation-state for the totality of the cultural region. Benedict Anderson's recent Spectre of Comparisons reminds us of the role played by area studies programs in the American academic profession during the nervous days of the Cold War and the wartime exigencies that led to their postwar organization and installation in a number of universities. But it also recalls for us the comparative promise associated with area studies and how it was either redirected to a multidisciplinary approach poorly disguised as interdisciplinarism or simply incorporated into large developmental narratives like modernization theory. It is instructive to see how Anderson's own work, rather than Southeast Asian area studies, has been able to achieve the remote goal of integration and comparison in a number of stunning examples that have eluded the collective efforts of many institutional programs. This singular success magisterially discloses how he was trained to envisage the region as a "unified" area studies program, even though little more than a geographical term named this unity, and what he needed to do to actually realize the dim prospect of achieving some sort of larger, integrated understanding, which was eventually inscribed in his seminal book, Imagined Communities. At the most basic level, Anderson was able to secure this effect first by roaming around the area (turning his banishment from Indonesia in 1972 to good use by shifting his attention to Thailand and then the Philippines). Yet, as his essays show, there were other, more intellectually and epistemologically compelling reasons which, if amplified, might provide such diversity with a sense of commonality that only geography and the putatively integrative approach of an area studies program seemed willing to promise even as they failed to deliver.Anderson situates his own intellectual trajectory within the institutional circumstances of the region as an area studies which he and his contemporary fellow students "helped give a certain reality" [Spectre 19]. In fact, "Southeast Asia" has always been [End Page 135] the common frame that structured the particular relationship between Europe of the colonizers and its Asian colonized and thus became the location that best exemplified for him the peculiar nature of the "haunting," as he puts it, as both the place of comparison and the necessity of comparability. In other words, Southeast Asia was the locus that best afforded a sighting of the spectacle of specters that recalled authorizing sister images in Europe and provided a perspective that was necessarily comparative. In Anderson's reckoning, comparison first referred to the circulation of images between metropole and colony and secondly between the various colonial sites that constituted Southeast Asia. As a result, Southeast Asia, and by extension all colonies, became the overdetermined place of haunting.Beyond the agency of the war, of course, was the experience of colonialism and those first modern interpreters of Asia who, as administrators, spent long years in the field serving imperial bureaucracies and who were in the incomparable position of examining such sites... (shrink)

H. D. Lewis; I—Mind and Body—Some Observations on Mr. Strawson's Views: The Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1.

Criminal jurisdiction; international criminal courts.

The relation between quantum measurement and thermodynamically irreversible processes is investigated. The reduction of the state vector is fundamentally asymmetric in time and shows an observer-relatedness which may explain the double interpretation of the state vector as a representation of physical states as well as ofinformation about physical states. The concept of relevance being used in all statistical theories of irreversible thermodynamics is demonstrated to be based on the same observer-relatedness. Quantum theories of irreversible processes implicitly use an objectivized process (...) of state vector reduction. The conditions for the reduction are discussed, and it is concluded that the final (subjective) observer system may be carried by a space point. (shrink)

The following remarks on the aviary simile have been prompted by Professor Hackforth's article in C.Q. January 1938, pp. 27 ff., in which he in turn comments on certain points in Professor Cornford's treatment in his Plato's Theory of Knowledge. Commenting on 199c–d C. suggests that P.'s criticism in that passage might be met by the inclusion in the aviary of ‘complex objects such as the “sum of 7 and 5”.… It is this object that I identify with 11 when (...) I make my false judgement.… False judgement can be explained as the wrong putting together of two pieces of knowledge’—i.e. 11 and ‘the sum of 7 and 5’. C. further suggests that P. has overlooked this possibility because he persists in speaking as if we judged not ‘that the sum of 7 and 5 is 11’ but that ‘12 is 11 ’. H. replies that this criticism of C.'s is not valid because P. understands the knowledge of 11 and 12 to include a knowledge of the various sums that make up these numbers. There could, therefore, be no ‘question of “putting together” such a piece of knowledge as 7 + 5 = 12 with a different piece of knowledge, viz. the knowledge of 12. They are not different pieces; they are the same piece.’. (shrink)

Not so long ago I attended a conference of philosophers and politicians. I was introduced to one rather opinionated politician as one of the philosophers. He promptly asked me, “What sort of philosopher?” I turned the edge of this by replying rather tartly in turn, “Quite a good one, it is generally thought.” This may seem a little naughty, but there are some uses for prevarication, and few of us care to attach a too explicit label to ourselves. When we (...) do so we often find ourselves keeping the wrong company. There are still some isms around, but we have weeded out most of them from our syllabuses. There is more important and rewarding work to do than fighting pitched philosophical battles between closely regimented troops. (shrink)

The excursus of Thucydides on the last years of Pausanias and Themistocles is remarkable for its simple, rapid-flowing style, its storytelling tone, its wealth of personal ancedote, its marked deviation from his normally strict criteria of relevance. These characteristics, which give the excursus a Herodotean flavour, have often been noted by modern scholars, but until recently acceptance of its general credibility has been widespread, and indeed, with one important exception, which seems to have created very little impression almost unchallenged.

Belief in the ultimacy and distinctiveness of ethical principles has been challenged in many ways to-day. The advance of science, especially in the fields of psychology and anthropology, has provided the relativist and the sceptic with many new weapons to put in their armoury; and the positivist has launched a very subtle attack. The present state of society, both in the internal affairs of the peoples of the world and in their inter-relations, has brought many moral principles into contempt. But (...) there have also been notable advances, especially where more self-effacing virtue is concerned. Philosophers have also rebutted the attacks of the sceptic with peculiar incisiveness and vigour; indeed we know better to-day than at any other time just what we must hold if the objectivity of ethics is to be maintained. How the battle is going is by no means easy to determine. But there is one corner of the field, and that the one from which the most powerful attack of all may be delivered, which the upholder of the ultimacy of moral truths has left almost wholly undefended, so lightly does he estimate the danger from that quarter. That is the religious one. Account has been taken of the arguments of the sociologist and the Freudian psychologist, but it has been assumed, with astonishing naïveté, that religion is an ally to be wholly relied upon. But morality and religion have often been in conflict, and they seem to be so as much as ever to-day. For some of the most powerful forces in our religious life, and those which are in some ways most attuned to our needs, seem to be wholly inimical to the moral life. It is with this aspect of the vast problem of morality and religion that we can best concern ourselves in a course with the general title of “Moral and Political Conflicts of Our Time.”. (shrink)

Autobiographical essay covering the first twenty five years of the author's life.