We have two aims in this paper. The first is to provide the reader with a critical guide to recent work on relativity and persistence by Balashov, Gilmore and others. Much of this work investigates whether endurantism can be sustained in the context of relativity. Several arguments have been advanced that aim to show that it cannot. We find these unpersuasive, and will add our own criticisms to those we review. Our second aim, which complements the first, is to demarcate (...) the most defensible form of relativistic endurantism. A recurring theme of this paper is that even those philosophers who do worry about relativity have not taken it seriously enough. (shrink)

Scientism has none of the virtues of science or philosophy, so let's do away with it.

Both papers – to different degrees – underplay the interactive dimensions of music, and both would have benefited from integrating the concept of attachment into their treatments of social bonding. I further suggest that their treatment of music as a discrete domain of human experience and behaviour weakens their arguments concerning its functions in human evolution.

Abstract Havi Carel has recently argued that one can be ill and happy. An ill person can ?positively respond? to illness by cultivating ?adaptability? and ?creativity?. I propose that Carel's claim can be augmented by connecting it with virtue ethics. The positive responses which Carel describes are best understood as the cultivation of virtues, and this adds a significant moral aspect to coping with illness. I then defend this claim against two sets of objections and conclude that interpreting Carel's phenomenology (...) of illness within a virtue-ethical framework enriches our understanding of how illness can be edifying. (shrink)

Ian Normile begins this study from the premise that critical thinking is often conceptualized and practiced in problematically narrow and instrumentalized ways. Following Ronald Barnett, he suggests that the idea of critical being can help expand the theory and practice of critical thinking to better meet the needs of education and society. Essential to this effort is greater consideration of how critical thinking articulates with other aspects of being. Normile uses two examples of “non-critical” experiences that he argues can help (...) critical thinking expand into critical being. First, he explores the emotive power of wonder as a source of inspiration and emotional education, and as an essential aspect of critical thinking. He then argues that curiosity, wonder, contemplation, and critical thinking are complementary aspects of critical being. The second example is the Chinese concept of wu-wei, a form of efficacious non-critical action. Normile argues that inevitable breakdowns in wu-wei provide opportunities for critical reflection while the unlearning common to both wonder and wu-wei facilitates receptivity to new perspectives and possibilities beyond the boundaries of the familiar; in this state, one is capable of facilitating the metacritique that is essential to truly transformative critical thinking. Normile concludes with some brief thoughts on implications for practice as a starting point for further inquiry. (shrink)

All three authors range themselves against John Norton's deductive analysis of thought experiments. Brown's insight, Nersessian's mental modelling, and Gooding's embodiment, arise, in each case, from a major all-purpose philosophical theory. None reaches down to the specific level of thought experiments, which are small, rare, and precious. I urge attention to Wittgenstein's remark that "the experimental character disappears when one looks at the process as a memorable picture." Thought experiments are not experiments. They are static. They become fixed, more like (...) jokes or optical illusions. Unlike real experiments, they have no life of their own. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi, which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the (...) long tradition of free enquiry in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition played an important role in the emergence of the new science. (shrink)

This paper will argue for the need to attend to the impact of cognitive and other psychological limitations on the ways in which we theorize about fairness and unfairness. In particular it will consider the implications of the fact that people seem better able to describe situations as unfair than to articulate coherent conceptions of fairness, and that theories that make demands on people that they perceive as inordinate will be ignored regardless of the strength of the arguments in their (...) favor. (shrink)

Experience is inescapably temporal. But how do we experience time? Temporal experience is a fundamental subject in philosophy – according to Husserl, the most important and difficult of all. Its puzzles and paradoxes were of critical interest from the Early Moderns through to the Post-Kantians. After a period of relative neglect, temporal experience is again at the forefront of debates across a wealth of areas, from philosophy of mind and psychology, to metaphysics and aesthetics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of (...) Temporal Experience is an outstanding reference source to the key debates in this exciting subject area and represents the first collection of its kind. Comprising nearly thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Handbook_ is organised into seven clear parts: Ancient and early modern perspectives Nineteenth and early twentieth-century perspectives The structure of temporal experience Temporal experience and the philosophy of mind Temporal experience and metaphysics Empirical perspectives Aesthetics Within each part key topics concerning temporal experience are examined, including canonical figures such as Locke, Kant and Husserl; extensionalism, retentionalism and the specious present; interrelations between temporal experience and time, agency, dreaming, and the self; empirical theories of perceiving and attending to time; and temporal awareness in the arts including dance, music and film. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of mind and psychology. It is also extremely useful for those in related fields such as metaphysics, phenomenology and aesthetics, as well as to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. (shrink)

Examining the role of dispositions (potentials and propensities) in both physics and psychology reveals that they are commonly derivative dispositions, so called because they derive from other dispositions. Furthermore, when they act, they produce further propensities. Together, therefore, they appear to form discrete degrees within a structure of multiple generative levels. It is then constructively hypothesized that minds and physical nature are themselves discrete degrees within some more universal structure. This gives rise to an effective dualism of mind and nature, (...) but one according to which they are still constantly related by causal connections. I suggest a few of the unified principles of operation of this more complicated but universal structure. (shrink)

Kripke's lectures, published as Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language , posed a sceptical problem about following a rule, which he cautiously attributed to Wittgenstein. He briefly noticed an analogy between his new kind of scepticism and Goodman's riddle of induction. ‘Grue’, he said, could be used to formulate a question not about induction but about meaning: the problem would not be Goodman's about induction—‘Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past, will be grue in the (...) future?’—but Wittgenstein's about meaning: ‘Who is to say that in the past I did not mean grue by “green”, so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, “green”?’. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 751-754.

John Henry Newman was a major figure in nineteenth-century religious history. He was one of the major protagonists of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement within the Church of England whose influence continues to be felt within Anglicanism. A high-profile convert to Catholicism, he was an important commentator on Vatican I and is often called 'the Father' of the Second Vatican Council. Newman's thinking highlights and anticipates the central themes of modern theology including hermeneutics, the importance of historical-critical research, the relationship (...) between theology and literature, and the reinterpretation of the nature of faith. His work is characterised by two elements that have come especially to the fore in post-modern theology, namely, the importance of the religious imagination and the fiduciary character of all knowledge. This Companion fills a need for an accessible, comprehensive and systematic presentation of the major themes in Newman's work. (shrink)

The story of liberal democracy over the last half century has been a triumphant one in many ways, with the number of democracies increasing from a minority of states to a significant majority. Yet substantial problems afflict democratic states, and while the number of democratic countries has expanded, democratic practice has contracted. This book introduces a novel framework for evaluating the rise and decline of democratic governance. Examining three mature democratic countries – Britain, Australia and New Zealand – the authors (...) discuss patterns of governance from the emergence of mass democracy at the outset of the twentieth century through to its present condition. The shared political cultures and institutional arrangements of the three countries allow the authors to investigate comparatively the dynamics of political evolution and the possibilities for systemic developments and institutional change. (shrink)

The best-known fact about the interaction of the Republican Roman poet Gaius Lucilius (c.180–103/102b.c.e.), the inventor of the genre of Roman verse satire, with the doctrine of Scepticism is probably a statement of Cicero: that Clitomachus the Academician dedicated a treatise to the poet (Cic.Luc. 102). Diogenes Laertius makes much of that writer's, Clitomachus’, industry (τὸ φιλόπονον, 4.67), with the comment: ‘to such lengths did his diligence (ἐπιμελείας) go that he composed more than four hundred treatises’. This phraseology surely reminds (...) those interested in Lucilius’ influence on later Latin poetry of Horace's disparaging comment,in hora saepe ducentos, | ut magnum, uersus dictabat(‘as a bravura display, he would often dictate two hundred verses in an hour’,Sat.1.4.9–10); moreover, Horace shortly afterwards calls his predecessorgarrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem(‘talkative and too lazy to bear the work of writing’, 1.4.12). Yet, a sceptical view of Horace's critique might have to think of Lucilius as hard-working, like his putative friend the Academic philosopher, Clitomachus. (shrink)