This paper attempts to locate, within an actualist ontology, truthmakers for modal truths: truths of the form or . In Sect. 1 I motivate the demand for substantial truthmakers for modal truths. In Sect. 21 criticise Armstrong's account of truthmakers for modal truths. In Sect. 31 examine essentialism and defend an account of what makes essentialist attributions true, but I argue that this does not solve the problem of modal truth in general. In Sect. 41 discuss, and dismiss, a theistic (...) account of the source of modal truth proposed by Alexander Pruss. In Sect. 5 I offer a means of (dis)solving the problem. (shrink)

Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant (...) responses to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

We assess Meyer’s formalization of arithmetic in his [21], based on the strong relevant logic R and compare this with arithmetic based on a suitable logic of meaning containment, which was developed in Brady [7]. We argue in favour of the latter as it better captures the key logical concepts of meaning and truth in arithmetic. We also contrast the two approaches to classical recapture, again favouring our approach in [7]. We then consider our previous development of Peano arithmetic including (...) primitive recursive functions, finally extending this work to that of general recursion. (shrink)

Carey's book on conceptual change and the accompanying argument that children's biology initially is organized in terms of naïve psychology has sparked a great detail of research and debate. This body of research on children's biology has, however, been almost exclusively been based on urban, majority culture children in the US or in other industrialized nations. The development of folkbiological knowledge may depend on cultural and experiential background. If this is the case, then urban majority culture children may prove to (...) be the exception rather than the rule, because plants and animals do not play a significant role in their everyday life. Urban majority culture children, rural majority culture children, and rural Native American children were given a property projection task based on Carey's original paradigm. Each group produced a unique profile of development. Only urban children showed evidence for early anthropocentrism, suggesting that the co-mingling of psychology and biology may be a product of an impoverished experience with nature. In comparison to urban majority culture children even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity. In addition, all ages of Native American children and the older rural majority culture children gave clear evidence of ecological reasoning. These results show that both culture and expertise play a role in the development of folkbiological thought. (shrink)

Following a suggestion of Feys, we use “rigorous implication” as a translation of Ackermann's strenge Implikation ([1]). Interest in Ackermann's system stems in part from the fact that it formalizes the properties of a strong, natural sort of implication which provably avoids standard implicational paradoxes, and which is consequently a good candidate for a formalization of entailment (considered as a narrower relation than that of strict implication). Our present purpose will not be to defend this suggestion, but rather to present (...) some information about rigorous implication. In particular, we show first that the structure of modalities (in the sense of Parry [4]) in Ackermann's system is identical with the structure of modalities in Lewis's S4, and secondly that (Ackermann's apparent conjecture to the contrary notwithstanding) it is possible to define modalities with the help of rigorous implication. (shrink)

Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger's most perceptive critics, Paul Hühnerfeld, has said: "These books, whose meaning (...) was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Hödlerlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted."... What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time... And Heidegger's life -- his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city -- seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism. (shrink)

This thesis concerns the source of modal truth. I aim to answer the question: what is it in virtue of which there are truths concerning what must have been the case as a matter of necessity, or could have been the case but isn't. I begin by looking at a dilemma put forward by Simon Blackburn which attempts to show that any realist answer to this question must fail, and I conclude that either horn of his dilemma can be resisted. (...) I then move on to clarify the nature of the propositions whose truth I am aiming to find the source of. I distinguish necessity de re from necessity de dicto, and argue for a counterpart theoretic treatment of necessity de re. As a result, I argue that there is no special problem concerning the source of de re modal facts. The problem is simply to account for what it is in virtue of which there are qualitative ways the world could have been, and qualitative ways it couldn't have been. I look at two ways to answer this question: by appealing to truthmakers in the actual world, or by appealing to non-actual ontology. I develop a theory of truthmakers, but argue that it is unlikely that there are truthmakers for modal truths among the ontology of the actual. I look at the main possibilist ontology, David Lewis' modal realism, but argue that warrant for that ontology is unobtainable, and that we shouldn't admit non-actual possibilia into our ontology. I end by sketching a quasi-conventionalist approach to modality which denies that there are modal facts, but nevertheless allows that we can speak truly when we use modal language. (shrink)

The founder of early German Romantic philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel, is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy because of the way that he establishes many of the themes by which nineteenth-century continental thought separates itself from Kant. Yet our view of his depth and originality as a thinker has often been distorted by his proximity to Hegel, who propounded a highly polemical and reductive reading of Schlegel. One of the ways in which our view of Schlegel is distorted by (...) Hegel's reading is our association of Schlegel with the stance of irony. While Schlegel considered irony as merely one of several fruitful ways to rethink the relation of the subject to the absolute, Hegel used a reductive reading of... (shrink)

Motivation and emotion are not clearly defined and differentiated in Rolls's The brain and emotion, reflecting a widespread problem in conceptualizing these phenomena. An adequate theory of emotion cannot be based upon reward and punishment alone. Basic mechanisms of arousal, agonistic, and prosocial motives-emotions exist in addition to reward-punishment systems.

Revonsuo's evolution-based theory places the nightmare as a prototype dream, which fully realizes its biological function. However, individuals who experience both repetitive (PTSD) nightmares and/or lifelong nontraumatic nightmares demonstrate impaired psychological functioning and attenuated information-processing. The importance of reconciling these discrepancies are addressed and ideas for providing stronger empirical tests of the model are presented. [Revonsuo].

I consider David Efird and Tom Stoneham's recent version of the subtraction argument for metaphysical nihilism, the view that there could have been no concrete objects at all. I argue that the two premises of their argument are only jointly acceptable if the quantifiers in one range over a different set of objects from those which the quantifiers in the other range over, in which case the argument is invalid. So either the argument is invalid or we should not accept (...) both its premises. (shrink)

The references to "Chicago" (meaning, of course, the University of Chicago) Schools of economics and history of religion, and the quotation of Allan Bloom, who may be considered to belong to a Chicago school of philosophy, may suggest a general endorsement of "Chicago" ideas. This is not the case.

This article explores the contrasting arguments for the place of the arts in education made by the two distinguished arts educators—the American Elliot Eisner and British dance and physical education theorist Graham McFee. Both scholars begin with the premise that the arts should be central to a liberal education and then diverge. McFee argues, from his success in seeing dance as part of the National Curriculum in the UK, that a conceptually precise and closely focused philosophical rationale is critical, whereas (...) Eisner takes the opposite path—arguing for the inclusion of the arts because they embody the most profoundly central task of all education—the nuanced development of mind. (shrink)

Byrne & Hilbert (2003; henceforth B&H) do not adequately explain how it is that phenomenal colors are physical, as their physicalism claims. This explanation requires more characterization of the relationship between the epistemology and nature of color than B&H provide. With this characterization, we can see that a physicalist need not accept unknowable color facts, as B&H do.

Small corpora remain an important resource for addressing questions requiring specialized data not found in large general purpose corpora. But do these small corpora have sufficient data to analyze low-frequency phenomena? This article presents a case study of the try-and-V pseudocoordination construction in English, which has an unusual morphosyntactic restriction: neither verb can be inflected. Diachronic corpora elucidate its origin as reanalysis from ambiguous usage of non-finite verbs in the late 1500s. Dialectal corpora reveal variation in frequency but not grammatical (...) properties. And child language corpora reveal productive usage even by young children. These results are considered successful and the outlook is optimistic for addressing low-frequency phenomena beyond contemporary, standard English, especially as more, and more diverse, corpora become available. (shrink)

Originally published in 1970. This work evaluates the appeal to the sensually given which played an important role in epistemological discussions during the early 20 th Century. While many contemporary philosophers regarded this appeal as a mistake, there were still some who defended the notion of the given and even made it the foundation of their views regarding perception. The author here points to several different views concerning the nature of the sensually given and argues that the issue between them (...) is not empirical, as is naturally suggested by what he calls ‘the Naïve View’ of the dispute, but rather metaphysical, involving different theories regarding the relationship between Thought and Reality. This leads on to a discussion of the different views presently held regarding the task of the epistemologist, and to a new suggestion with regard to the relationship between common sense and the rival ontologies suggested by scientists and philosophers. In the course of the argument a variety of different topics are discussed such as the correspondence and coherence theories of truth, the differences between scientific and philosophical theories, and the relevance of scientific treatments of the subject of perception to the treatment of this topic by philosophers. (shrink)

In this detailed study giving more depth and breadth to Moravia’s work than has hitherto been done in English, the authors explore his background and assess his accomplishment as a twentieth-century artist. Students of the modern novel will be interested in the explication given here of the influences of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Martin Buber on Moravia’s work.

'Excellent, extremely entertaining, utterly compelling, wonderfully unique' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH There isn't a person left in the valley who hasn't turned against Sam Marsdyke. Under the brooding eye of his father he spends his days alone on the moors tending sheep, watching wide-eyed ramblers march past and 'towns' move in, turning farms into second homes. Then a new family arrives, eager for 'welly weekends and a postcard view out the bedroom window', and Marsdyke catches sight of their young daughter. What begins (...) as an unlikely friendship turns into something altogether more unnerving. Brilliantly comic and deeply unsettling. God's Own Country traces a journey across the Yorkshire landscape and into the mind of one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction. 'Remarkable, compelling, very funny and very distrubing . . . like no other character in contemporay fiction' SUNDAY TIMES. (shrink)

This book develops a philosophy of aesthetic experience through two socially significant philosophical movements: early German Romanticism and early critical theory. In examining the relationship between these two closely intertwined movements, we see that aesthetic experience is not merely a passive response to art-it is the capacity to cultivate true personal autonomy, and to critique the social and political context of our lives. Art is political for these thinkers, not only when it paints a picture of society, but even more (...) when it makes us aware of our deeply ingrained forms of experience in a transformative way. Ultimately, the book argues that we have to think of art as a form of truth that is not reducible to communicative rationality or scientific knowledge, and from which philosophy and politics can learn valuable lessons. (shrink)

biological theories of emotion are often used to explain and predict human desires, particularly the desire to reproduce. I propose that these desires are largely socially constructed, but that the naturalization of desires and the normalization of biological theories sustain the pursuit of biological childbearing as a biological need. Foundational metaphysical and epistemological theories have lent both authority and urgency to the idea of a biological need to bear children, which has resulted in a diminished focus on alternative modes of (...) having children.I suggest that a form of biological determinism rests on what philosopher John Dewey calls a misplaced "quest for certainty." This search is a process whereby a... (shrink)

In terms of physics, mass is the fixed attribute of an object while weight varies with the accelerative force. Neither weight nor mass are simple sensory stimuli as both involve the integration of sensory and motor information with higher cognitive processes. Studies of apparent heaviness yield only vague information about sensorimotor mechanisms.

If one player’s gain is exactly equivalent to another’s loss, the game is said to be zero-sum. For example, football: every improvement of position for one team is an exactly corresponding deterioration for the other team. On the other hand, a buyer and a supplier haggling over a price is not a zero-sum game, since the parties hope to mutually gain.

2. Spinoza, as is well known, held both and explicitly and concluded that God does not act from free will. In Note II to Prop. 33 of the Ethics Spinoza says, "Although it be granted that will appertains to the essence of God, it nevertheless follows from His perfection that things could not have been by Him created other than they are or in a different order.".