In this book, Nuttall traces the development of "solipsistic fear... the fear that the external world... may not exist at all," in philosophy and literature, mainly English, from the late seventeenth century to the present. His method is first to trace some aspect of the philosophical discussion about the reality of the external world, and then to examine works of literature from the same period in which the same or similar views on the problem are expressed. In philosophy, Nuttall’s attention (...) centers on Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Bradley, and Wittgenstein, while in literature he focuses primarily on Sterne, Wordsworth, Sartre, and Eliot. Nuttall argues that Wittgenstein’s private language argument in the philosophical realm, and Eliot’s poetry in the literary, decisively counteract the solipsistic fear which the empiricist and idealist philosophers and their literary counterparts had developed. (shrink)

Among the most striking aspects of modern literature—expecially of modern German literature—are its frequent references to a notion called ‘reality’. The philosophical question this raises, ‘What is reality?’, is to one side of this enquiry, and so is the question whether or not this is a sensible question: this essay is intended as a contribution not to philosophy but to its connections with literary history and criticism. My present purpose, which determines my procedure, is to outline the various closely related (...) meanings of the word ‘Wirklichkeit’ throughout its very long history; to describe the polarization of meanings which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche's part in making the new polarity available to his literary heirs; to illustrate the way German literature became involved in this process in the first decade of our century; and, finally, to point to some of its political implications. My argument is part of a much larger topic, one that is not confined either to the German-speaking countries or indeed to literature. The topic, the ideologizing of ‘ reality ’, is relevant to all modern cultures. The present paper offers no more than a sketch of this development in one cultural area of our world. (shrink)

This paper details a “metadisciplinary” applied ethics course jointly taught and pioneered by a biologist, psychologist, and ethicist on the subject of Assisted Reproduction. Contrasted with a transdisciplinary approach (whose content involves themes or issues that span traditional disciplinary lines) and a multidisciplinary approach (which involves experts from several disciplines working side by side), a metadisciplinary approach involves both of these former characteristics while incorporating a continuous, critical appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of the contrasting methods and scopes of (...) each discipline’s methods of inquiry. This paper details the kinds of subjects that lend themselves to metadisciplinary approaches (e.g. applied ethics subjects which are real-world, complex, and studied by various disciplines), staffing guidelines for a smoothly functioning core team, how to plan and prepare the day-to-day of such a course to prevent a diffuse lesson structure, assignment and evaluation guidelines, and an appraisal of the value of such a class. The authors argue that while fundamental research may be conducted along traditional disciplinary lines, solutions to the complex problems of contemporary society require people who are equipped with problem-solving skills whose relevance spans disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Non-suicidal self-injury has consistently been associated with self-reported difficulties in emotion reactivity and the regulation of negative emotions; however, less is known about the accuracy of these self-reports or the reactivity and regulation of positive emotions. The present study sought to investigate differences between women with and without a history of NSSI on: self-reported general tendencies of negative and positive emotion reactivity, self-reported general tendencies of negative and positive emotion regulation, and emotion regulation reported in response to a positive and (...) negative mood induction. The sample consisted of 36 women with a recent history of NSSI within the last 2 years and a comparison group with no history of NSSI. Participants completed self-report measures of negative and positive emotion reactivity and regulation. In a separate session, participants underwent both a negative and positive mood induction using a counterbalanced design and reported their experienced emotions. Results from two-way MANOVAs and ANOVAs revealed those with a history of NSSI reported significantly greater difficulties in negative emotion reactivity and regulation than the no-NSSI comparison group; however, no group differences emerged in self-reported reactivity or regulation of positive emotions. In contrast, repeated measures ANOVAs on data from the mood induction task found no group differences in reactivity or regulation for either negative or positive emotions. These findings highlight the possibility that although individuals with a history of NSSI evaluate their ability to manage negative emotions as significantly worse than individuals with no history of self-injury, this may not reflect their actual emotion regulatory processes. (shrink)

The first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest book, The Birth of Tragedy, this important volume by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern examines the work in detail: its place in Nietzsche's philosophical career; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture; its place in the history of German ideas, and its value as a theory of tragedy and music. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Lesley Chamberlain, illuminating its enduring (...) importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this accessible study has been revived for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

At the heart of Levinas’s work is the apparently simple idea that through the encounter with another person, we are forced to give up our self-concern and take heed of the ethical relation between us. But, while simple on the surface, when one tries to characterize it in more detail, it can be hard to fit together the various ways in which Levinas talks about this relation and to identify precisely what he took its normative structure to be, as this (...) is described in a number of apparently different ways, that are not obviously compatible or equivalent, such as “command,” “call,” “summons,” “demand,” and so on. In this chapter, we intend to focus on these different characterizations and show what makes them different while also endeavoring to find a way in which Levinas’s conception may nonetheless be fitted together into a coherent account of the face-to-face encounter that is at the heart of his ethics. We will begin by considering the different normative terms used to characterize the encounter in that text and show how they are conceptually distinct from one another; we will then offer a way to read Levinas’s position to nonetheless show how these different normative relations can be fitted together into a stable position. (shrink)

A Text Worthy of Plotinus makes available for the first time information on the collaborative work that went into the completion of the first reliable edition of Plotinus’ Enneads: Plotini Opera, editio maior, three volumes (Brussels, Paris, and Leiden, 1951-1973), followed by the editio minor, three volumes (Oxford, 1964-1983). Pride of place is given to the correspondence of the editors, Paul Henry S.J. and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, with other prominent scholars of late antiquity, amongst whom are E.R. Dodds, B.S. Page, A.H. (...) Armstrong, and J. Igal S.J. Also included in the volume are related documents consisting in personal memoirs, course handouts and extensive biographical notices of the two editors as well as of those other scholars who contributed to fostering the revival of Plotinus in the latter half of the 20th century. Taken together, letters and documents let the reader into the problems – codicological, exegetical, and philosophical – that are involved in the interpretation of medieval manuscripts and their transcription for modern readers. Additional insights are provided into the nature of collaborative work involving scholars from different countries and traditions. A Text Worthy of Plotinus will prove a crucial archive for generations of scholars. Those interested in the philosophy of Plotinus will find it a fount of information on his style, manner of exposition, and handling of sources. The volume will also appeal to readers interested in broader trends in 20th century scholarship in the fields of Classics, History of Ideas, Theology, and Religion. (shrink)

Erratum to: Synthese 191:1925–1930 DOI:10.1007/s11229-013-0380-3 The authors were unaware that points in their article appeared in “Caveats for Causal Reasoning with Equilibrium Models,” by Denver Dash and Marek Druzdzel, published in S. Benferhat and P. Besnard : European Conferences on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty 2001, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2143, pp. 192–203. The authors were unaware of this essay and would like to apologize to the authors for failing to cite their excellent work.

This article explores some open questions related to the problem of verification of theories in the context of empirical sciences by contrasting three epistemological frameworks. Each of these epistemological frameworks is based on a corresponding central metaphor, namely: (a) Neo-empiricism and the gambling metaphor; (b) Popperian falsificationism and the scientific tribunal metaphor; (c) Cognitive constructivism and the object as eigen-solution metaphor. Each of one of these epistemological frameworks has also historically co-evolved with a certain statistical theory and method for testing (...) scientific hypotheses, respectively: (a) Decision theoretic Bayesian statistics and Bayes factors; (b) Frequentist statistics and p-values; (c) Constructive Bayesian statistics and e-values. This article examines with special care the Zero Probability Paradox (ZPP), related to the verification of sharp or precise hypotheses. Finally, this article makes some remarks on Lakatos’ view of mathematics as a quasi-empirical science. (shrink)

It is a consequence of the theory of imprecise credences that there exist situations in which rational agents inevitably become less opinionated toward some propositions as they gather more evidence. The fact that an agent's imprecise credal state can dilate in this way is often treated as a strike against the imprecise approach to inductive inference. Here, we show that dilation is not a mere artifact of this approach by demonstrating that opinion loss is countenanced as rational by a substantially (...) broader class of normative theories than has been previously recognised. Specifically, we show that dilation-like phenomena arise even when one abandons the basic assumption that agents have (precise or imprecise) credences of any kind, and follows directly from bedrock norms for rational comparative confidence judgements of the form `I am at least as confident in p as I am in q'. We then use the comparative confidence framework to develop a novel understanding of what exactly gives rise to dilation-like phenomena. By considering opinion loss in this more general setting, we are able to provide a novel assessment of the prospects for an account of inductive inference that is not saddled with the inevitability of rational opinion loss. (shrink)

The Full Bayesian Significance Test (FBST) for precise hypotheses is presented, with some applications relevant to reliability theory. The FBST is an alternative to significance tests or, equivalently, to p-ualue.s. In the FBST we compute the evidence of the precise hypothesis. This evidence is the probability of the complement of a credible set "tangent" to the sub-manifold (of the para,rreter space) that defines the null hypothesis. We use the FBST in an application requiring a quality control of used components, based (...) on remaining life statistics. (shrink)

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i.

A Bayesian measure of evidence for precise hypotheses is presented. The intention is to give a Bayesian alternative to significance tests or, equivalently, to p-values. In fact, a set is defined in the parameter space and the posterior probability, its credibility, is evaluated. This set is the “Highest Posterior Density Region” that is “tangent” to the set that defines the null hypothesis. Our measure of evidence is the complement of the credibility of the “tangent” region.

Conditional independence tests have received special attention lately in machine learning and computational intelligence related literature as an important indicator of the relationship among the variables used by their models. In the field of probabilistic graphical models, which includes Bayesian network models, conditional independence tests are especially important for the task of learning the probabilistic graphical model structure from data. In this paper, we propose the full Bayesian significance test for tests of conditional independence for discrete datasets. The full Bayesian (...) significance test is a powerful Bayesian test for precise hypothesis, as an alternative to the frequentist’s significance tests (characterized by the calculation of the p-value). (shrink)

In the longstanding foundational debate whether to require that probability is countably additive, in addition to being finitely additive, those who resist the added condition raise two concerns that we take up in this paper. (1) _Existence_: Settings where no countably additive probability exists though finitely additive probabilities do. (2) _Complete Additivity_: Where reasons for countable additivity don’t stop there. Those reasons entail complete additivity—the (measurable) union of probability 0 sets has probability 0, regardless the cardinality of that union. Then (...) probability distributions are discrete, not continuous. We use Easwaran’s (Easwaran, Thought 2:53–61, 2013) advocacy of the _Comparative_ principle to illustrate these two concerns. Easwaran supports countable additivity, both for numerical probabilities and for finer, qualitative probabilities, by defending a condition he calls the _Comparative_ principle [ \({\mathcal{C}}\) ]. For numerical probabilities, principle \({\mathcal{C}}\) contrasts pairs, P 1 and P 2, defined over a common partition \(\prod\) = {a _i_ : _i_ ∈ I} of measurable events. \({\mathcal{C}}\) requires that no P 1 may be pointwise dominated, i.e., no (finitely additive) probability P 2 exists such that for each _i_ ∈ I, P 2 (a _i_ ) > P 1 (a _i_ ). By design, the cardinality of \(\prod\) is not limited in \({\mathcal{C}}\), which Easwaran asserts is important when arguing that the principle does not require more, or less, than that probability is countably additive. We agree that a numerical probability P satisfies principle \({\mathcal{C}}\) in all partitions just in case P is countably additive. However, we show that for numerical probabilities, by considering the size of the algebra of events to which probability is applied, principle \({\mathcal{C}}\) is subject to each of the above concerns, (1) and (2). Also, Easwaran considers principle \({\mathcal{C}}\) with non-numerical, qualitative probabilities, where a qualitative probability may be finer than an almost agreeing numerical probability P. A qualitative probability is regular if possible events are strictly more likely than impossible events. Easwaran motivates and illustrates regular qualitative probabilities using a continuous, almost agreeing quantitative probability that is uniform on the unit interval. We make explicit the conditions for applying principle \({\mathcal{C}}\) with qualitative probabilities and show that \({\mathcal{C}}\) restricts regular qualitative probabilities to those whose almost agreeing quantitative probabilities are completely additive. For instance, Easwaran’s motivating example of a regular qualitative probability is precluded by principle \({\mathcal{C}}\). (shrink)

Jianjun Mei: Cultural Interaction between China and Central Asia during the Bronze Age Charles Higham: The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Ralph Hanna: Yorkshire Writers Christopher Ricks: Shakespeare and the Anagram Tony Wrigley: The Quest for the Industrial Revolution Linda Colley: 'This Small Island': Britain, Size and Empire Murray Pittock: Robert Burns and British Poetry Peter Pulzer: Special Paths or Main Roads? Making Sense of German History Wolf Lepenies: Overestimating Culture: A German Problem. Exile and Emigration, The Survival of (...) German Culture Angela Leighton: Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson Nicholas Stern: Development as a Process of Change: Toward a Dynamic Public Economics Lord Woolf: Human Rights: Have the Public Benefitted? (shrink)

At first glance, Mark Richard's recent book When Truth Gives Out appears, in the most commendable sense of the word, ‘old-fashioned’. Its central thesis is that truth is sometimes the wrong standard to use when assessing the judgements we make about the world. Not all correct judgements are true, and not all incorrect ones are false. They can all be measured, but they cannot all be measured in the same way. -/- Many of the heroes of old, ensconced in philosophical (...) Valhalla, are no doubt blowing their trumpets in approval. The heroes did not see truth as easy to come by. Far from it. Truth, like wealth, was to be earned, the product of hard epistemological work and stern semantic discipline. Much of what we say and think did not live up to their exacting standards for truth. Morality, literature, poetry, politics, philosophy, psychology and much else besides were often judged lacking. Consequently either we were to believe that all opinions in these matters were equally mistaken, or we were to look for explanations of why we say and think what we do about such things other than the desire to know the truth. We were expressing our sentiments, or prescribing, or commending, or manipulating. But in making such judgements, we were not judging what was true or false. Such were our choices. Grim, surely, but heroic choices often are. -/- So, like the heroes of old, Richard thinks that truth does not live everywhere. In this respect, he is aligned with such worthies as Hume, Russell, Ayer, and one or other of the Wittgensteins. But it is there that the resemblance stops. For in point of fact, Richard's way of approaching these matters is importantly new. This is an outstanding and original work of analytic philosophy, one that manages to be both deep and sensible; it rewards careful study, and defies easy categorization. -/- In what follows, I shall illustrate the distinctiveness of Richard's approach, and the problems it consequently faces, by asking two questions about some of its key elements. The first question concerns what his picture tells us about what remains when (absolute) truth gives way. The second concerns what it tells us about truth. These are hardly the only important aspects of his view – I shall be ignoring, for example, his discussion of emotivism, and a stellar discussion of the semantics of epithet – but they are some of the most fundamental. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnalytic philosophy is often associated with a physicalistic naturalism that privileges natural-scientific modes of explanation. Nevertheless there has since the 1980s been a heterodox, somewhat subterranean trend within analytic philosophy that seeks to articulate a more expansive, ‘non-reductive‘ conception of nature. This trend can be traced back to P.F. Strawson’s 1985 book Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. However, Strawson has long been ignored in the literature around ‘soft naturalism’ – especially in comparison to John McDowell. One of the reasons for (...) this is that Strawson’s account of soft naturalism is not often viewed as particularly plausible – it has come in for heavy criticism from the likes of Sebastian Gardner and Robert Stern. In this paper, I argue that Strawson’s soft naturalism ought to be re-assessed: that his critics can be refuted, and that his naturalism remains a compelling alternative to the likes of McDowell’s. I attempt this through a ‘radicalisation’ of the modest Strawson’s position, demonstrating that his naturalism has implicit in it something like Marx’s conception of human ‘species-being’. (shrink)

This article gives an account of the belgian party system in 1974. It concludes at the existence of a «multipartist» system. It also examines the ideological character of the party system. For this purpose, it studies the electoral platforms of all the parties. From a semiotics viewpoint, it isolates a number of semantic axes. After a binary coding, it factor-analyses the results. Two main factors are extracted «ideological mixing» and conservative - progressist position.