Johnston presents an argument for a form of immortality that divests the notion of any supernatural elements. The book is packed with illuminating philosophical reflection on the question of what we are, and what it is for us to persist over time.

Addiction is standardly characterized as a neurobiological disease of compulsion. Against this characterization, I argue that many cases of addiction cannot be explained without recognizing the value of drugs to those who are addicted; and I explore in detail an insufficiently recognized source of value, namely, a sense of self and social identity as an addict. For people who lack a genuine alternative sense of self and social identity, recovery represents an existential threat. Given that an addict identification carries expectations (...) of continued consumption despite negative consequences, there is therefore a parsimonious explanation of why people who identify as addicts continue to use drugs despite these consequences: they self‐identify as addicts and that is what addicts are supposed to do. I conclude by considering how it is nonetheless possible to overcome addiction despite this identity, in part by imagining and enacting a new one. Importantly, this possibility requires the availability of social support and material resources that are all too frequently absent in the lives of those who struggle with addiction. (shrink)

Suppose that John asks, ‘Is the window open?’ and Mary replies, ‘The window is open.’ Then John and Mary have produced two distinct utterances, and in doing so, they have performed two different kinds of speech act. But clearly there is something that these utterances have in common. According to the standard theory of speech acts, in these utterances different illocutionary forces have been applied to the same propositional content. Similarly, if John and Mary both believe that roses are red, (...) the same propositional content is attributed to their individual mental states.The propositional contents of utterances and beliefs have traditionally been identified with propositions. In turn, propositions have been characterized as language-independent particulars that can be re-identified in different contexts. In this article, I will argue that various phenomena that have hitherto been explained by propositions are better understood in terms of propositional acts. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works, Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of (...) the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one”. The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through. (shrink)

In the 1970s, Peter Hacker and Bernard Williams argued that Wittgenstein was a Kantian transcendental idealist. In the 1980s, Hacker officially rescinded this interpretation and Williams in any case regarded Wittgenstein's transcendental idealism as a philosophical mistake. And ever since, there has been a lively debate about Wittgenstein's Kantianism, anti‐Kantianism, or non‐Kantianism. No one doubts that throughout his philosophical writings, Wittgenstein saw a fundamental connection between language and human life. Jonathan Lear's critical judgment on the later Wittgenstein's transcendental anthropology is (...) that it is ultimately a failure, due to an incoherence between the prima‐facie‐opposed 'transcendental' and 'anthropological' levels of reflection. According to Kant, a mental representation is transcendental when it is either part of, or derived from, our nonempirical innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities. Then Kant's transcendental idealism (TI) can be formulated as a two‐part philosophical equation: representational transcendentalism, cognitive idealism. (shrink)

Liberalism, the founding philosophy of many constitutional democracies, has been criticized in recent years from both the left and the right for placing too much faith in individual rights and distributive justice. In this book, David Johnston argues for a reinterpretation of liberal principles he contends will restore liberalism to a position of intellectual leadership from which it can guide political and social reforms. He begins by surveying the three major contemporary schools of liberal political thought--rights-based, perfectionist, and political (...) liberalism--and, by weeding out their weaknesses, sketches a new approach he calls humanist liberalism. The core of Johnston's humanist liberalism is the claim that the purpose of political and social arrangements should be to empower individuals to be effective agents. Drawing on and modifying the theories of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, and others, Johnston explains how this purpose can be realized in a world in which human beings hold fundamentally different conceptions of the ends of life. His humanist liberalism responds constructively to feminist, neo-Marxist, and other criticisms while remaining faithful to the core values of the liberal tradition. (shrink)

We propose that corporations should be subject to a legal obligation to identify and internalise their social costs or negative externalities. Our proposal reframes corporate social responsibility as obligated internalisation of social costs, and relies on reflexive governance through mandated hybrid fora. We argue that our approach advances theory, as well as practice and policy, by building on and going beyond prior attempts to address social costs, such as prescriptive government regulation, Coasian bargaining and political CSR.

By “essentially embodied Kantian selves,” I mean necessarily and completely embodied rational conscious, self-conscious, sensible (i.e., sense-perceiving, imagining, and emoting), volitional or willing, discursive (i.e., conceptualizing, judging, and inferring) animals, or persons, innately possessing dignity, and fully capable not only of free agency, but also of a priori knowledge of analytic and synthetic a priori truths alike, with egocentric centering in manifestly real orientable space and time. The basic theory of essentially embodied Kantian selves was spelled out by Kant over (...) the course of slightly less than two decades, between 1768 and 1787, but above all, it flows from an empirical realist and metaphysical reading of the “Refutation of Idealism” that Kant inserted into the Postulates of Empirical Thought section in the 1787 edition of the first Critique. In my opinion, all rational but also “human, all-too-human” creatures like us are, synthetic a priori necessarily, essentially embodied Kantian selves. Let’s call that the essentially embodied Kantian selves thesis, or for short, EEKST. If EEKST is true, then it’s synthetic a priori impossible for the selves of creatures like us to exist independently of our own living organismic animal bodies or beyond the deaths of those bodies, whether temporarily or permanently, by any means whatsoever. Indeed, the very ideas of disembodied selves, their survival after death, and of human immortality, while minimally logically consistent, are in fact conceptually empty and incoherent, even over and above the synthetic a priori impossibility of such things, since the term “myself” indexically picks out an essentially embodied Kantian self, all of whose core features require grounding in a particular living organismic animal body. According to the recent and contemporary movement of transhumanism, the selves of creatures like us can not only exist independently of our bodies, as functional systems of representational content that are inherently able to be implemented or realized in digital-mechanical technology and uploadable to servers, but also to survive accidental or natural human death in server-limbo, then be downloaded into technologically enhanced partially mechanical humanoid bodies or even into wholly artificially-created completely mechanical non-humanoid bodies, survive in these new implementations or realizations for an indefinitely long time, repeat that process, and possibly even become immortal. Transhumanism is in fact metaphysically equivalent to Swedenborgianism, which Kant so effectively criticizes and wittily derides in his 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Moreover, and more importantly, if EEKST is true, then, just like Swedenborgianism, transhumanism is not only conceptually empty and incoherent, but also synthetic a priori impossible. And what’s more, it’s also existentially and morally reprehensible. In short, then, the belief in transhuman selves is nothing but a reprehensible noumenal fantasy or Hirngespinst. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a controversy ongoingwithin current Deweyan philosophy of educationscholarship regarding the proper role and scopeof science in Dewey's concept of inquiry. Theside I take is nuanced. It is one that issensitive to the importance that Dewey attachesto science as the best method of solvingproblems, while also sensitive to thosestatements in Dewey that counter a wholesalereductivism of inquiry to scientific method. Iutilize Dewey's statements regarding the placeaccorded to inquiry in aesthetic experiences ascharacteristic of his method, as bestconceived.

This paper argues that the passage of time cannot be understood in a certain ‘objective’ manner: it is not something comprehensible as from no one and nowhen by means of generalizations over times, properties, subjects, events etc. This does not mean, however, that its reality should be denied, that we should lower our sights to explaining instead ‘the experience of time as passing’. Rather, time’s passage is to be elaborated within a metaphysics of time of a rather different kind, one (...) which might be presented as an articulation of being in time. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a historical exposition of John Buridan's theory of divided modal propositions. We then develop a semantic interpretation of Buridan's theory which pays particular attention to Buridan's ampliation of modal terms. We show that these semantics correctly capture his syllogistic reasoning.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III.

The historical techniques of theodor gomperz, Friedrich jodl, Wilhelm jerusalem, And rudolf eisler are described. All four excelled at expositing and comparing widely divergent doctrines. Gomperz and jerusalem discussed how social practices influenced doctrines. Eisler was perhaps the most encyclopedic historian of philosophy ever. Johnston's book "the austrian mind" (berkeley, 1971) relates the four philosophers to seventy other austrian thinkers.

The first nuclear engineers emerged from the Manhattan Project in the USA, UK and Canada, but remained hidden behind security for a further decade. Cosseted and cloistered by their governments, they worked to explore applications of atomic energy at a handful of national labs. This unique bottom-up history traces how the identities of these unusually voiceless experts - forming a uniquely state-managed discipline - were shaped in the context of pre-war nuclear physics, wartime industrial management, post-war politics and utopian energy (...) programmes. Even after their eventual emergence at universities and companies, nuclear workers carried the enduring legacy of their origins. Their shared experiences shaped not only their identities, but our collective memories of the late twentieth century. And as illustrated by the Fukushima accident seven decades after the Manhattan project began, this book explains why they are still seen conflictingly as selfless heroes or as mistrusted guardians of a malevolent genie. (shrink)

Born of a terrible insomnia—"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"—this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self-described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." _On the Heights of Despair_ shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician (...) of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity.... His writing... is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Bill Marx, _Boston Phoenix _"The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming.... Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—_Publishers Weekly,_ starred review "This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."—Judith Shulevitz, _New York Times Book __Review_. (shrink)

This article considers the provisions of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 in respect of advance decisions. It considers the new statutory regulation of advance directives (termed 'advance decisions' in the Act) and the formalities necessary to effect an advance decision purporting to refuse life-sustaining treatment. The validity and applicability of advance decisions is discussed with analogy to case law and the clinician's reasonable belief in following an advance decision is considered. The article assesses the new personal welfare Lasting Powers of (...) Attorney, the situation where an attorney purports to refuse life-sustaining treatment on behalf of the donor, and the contrast between best interests and substituted judgment. (shrink)

In his 1987 book _Conditionals, Frank Jackson presents an argument to the effect that the indicative conditionals of natural language have the same truth conditions as the material conditional of truth-functional logic. This Jackson refers to as the "paradox of indicative conditionals." I offer a solution to this paradox by arguing that some conditionals that appear to be in the indicative mood are actually subjunctives, to which the paradox does not apply. I support this proposed solution with some historical observations (...) on the evolution of the English verb phrase. (edited). (shrink)

The thesis presents a development of J. L. Austin's analysis of truth and its accompanying analysis of sentence structure. This involves a discussion and refinement of Austin's notions of the demonstrative and descriptive conventions of language and of the demonstrative and descriptive devices of sentences. The main point of the thesis is that ordinary language must be treated as an historical phenomenon: one that has evolved its more complex features through a long series of variations upon a small number of (...) rudimentary conventions and locutions. The utility of Austin's analysis is shown to lie in the description that it provides of the functions of these rudimentary conventions and locutions. The analysis is used to illuminate a number of problematic sentences and expressions of ordinary language, including identity sentences, definite descriptions, existential sentences, and conditionals. (shrink)