This book develops a philosophical structure for historical explanation that resolves disputes about the scientific status of history that have persisted since the nineteenth century. It does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative and by making their logic explicit. The books formulates a unique positive account of the logic of narrative explanations. This logic reveals how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology (...) of history--that is, it argues that there exists no one fixed past but many pasts. It includes a novel reading of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, displaying how Kuhn offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. The book situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework. Naturalism regards all canons of rational inquiry as evolving and contingent. The book also argues for the general philosophical significance of historical explanation. The first four chapters defuse methodological and the metaphysical objections to narrative explanations. The final three chapters explore how narrative explanations relate to other sciences. It will be of interest to researchers in historiography, theory of history, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hobbits as Buddhists and an Eye for an "I"Paul Andrew PowellWhen a medieval scholar friend of mine1 (knowing that I am a longstanding student of Zen), asked me if I would read J. R. R. Tolkien's famous fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings to see what Buddhism, if any, could be culled from it, I was not enthusiastic, especially after watching the movie (yes, I watched (...) the movie before I embarked on the text), so full of heroes, their passionate violence, monster-like foes, and fantastic scenarios.2 Hardly the compassion of the Buddha, I thought. The trilogy is as well replete with Christian references and Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and much has been written on these and that, but I decided that that literature would not b e germane to this short and singular investigation. At any rate, I was not encouraged about the project, and yet, a certain character did happen to exhibit one intriguing feature that caught my Buddhist attention from the beginning. And as I began to read deeper into the text, a larger—implausible, some would say—thesis began to form in my mind around this character's one particular attribute. And I thought that at least I might cultivate one's imagination and jar one's thinking in productive ways. So I confess that the inferences I make and conclusions I draw here may be a bit fantastic (perhaps to match the material). But, to answer the question: Is there any Buddhism in The Lord of the Rings? Please keep an open mind, and in the spirit of fantasy, indulge my commentary on this quest.Sauron's EyeSauron's Eye can be associated with at least two considered forms of consciousness: will and omnipresence. It is "The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable."3 Also, we find that "The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him [Frodo], the Eye piercing all shadows... Its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom... [I]ts thought was now bent with all its overwhelming force upon the Mountain."4 But will (we will return [End Page 31] to "omnipresence" some other time) is a neutral force. And clearly, Sauron's will is not neutral; it is a profoundly malevolent will. For we can also read that Sauron is a "dreadful menace of power... brooding in deep thought and dreadful malice."5 He is full of "policies and webs of fear and treachery... stratagems and wars."6An Eye For An I?Buddhism is a practice which reveals the true nature of things: self, reality, suffering. So let's more deeply consider the nature of Sauron's corruption. It seems unlikely, from a Buddhist view, that the Oxford scholar's central villain is a simple stand-in for brute evil (as might appear upon a first reading), for if evil is ontological then the only reasonable response to it is to strategize how best to cope with its encounter. This, in fact, is the Christian response to evil. Evil is: it exists a priori as a supernatural force outside of human intervention and its temptations may be successfully resisted through self-discipline and moral strength, and possibly an appeal to the supernatural, but never defeated absolutely by a stratagem of human will. It is true that Frodo struggles to resist the Ring's power, but mere coping is not the Fellowship's strategy. The fact that Tolkien's Fellowship actually undertakes to destroy the Ring through stratagem admits that Sauron's corruption is an emergent property of an underlying and vulnerable source rather than a supernatural, a priori property outside of human intervention.Instructively, and like the Fellowship, Buddhists as well understand that human suffering possesses an underlying and vulnerable source that can be overcome in human terms, and this vulnerable source of suffering is the human I. The Buddha... (shrink)

Axiomatic and problematic approaches to ontology are discussed, at first in relation to the work of Badiou and Deleuze in mathematics. This discussion is then broadened focussing on problematics in Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis which results in an analysis of the implications of this discussion for education. From this, education as being already there, which is an assumption in some strands of philosophy of education, following Deleuze’s critique of axiomatic presentations of ontological identities, is described as (...) a repressive, stabilizing operation, which produces objectives which are characterized as peculiar things. By contrast, those aspects of practice, knowledge, behaviours and populations which cannot be accommodated and resolved by axiomatic formulae and fall from axiomatic systems are characterized as queer things that constitute counter cultures. (shrink)

Scrutiny (1932-1953) was one of the most important critical reviews of the last century. Its editors and contributors included F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, Denys Thompson, L. C. Knights, D. W. Harding, W. H. Mellers, H. A. Mason, among others. In recasting Scrutiny’s critique of mass culture by way of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), I hope to show that the Scrutiny project not only dramatizes the conflicts internal to what MacIntyre calls emotivist culture, but provides a new way (...) of looking at the group’s relation to the culture industry, its purported elitism, and its deep ties with a communitarian rather than socialist politics. (shrink)

_The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences _collects newly commissioned essays that examine fundamental issues in the social sciences.

Page 116 According to Robert Sleigh Jr., “The opening remarks of DM.18 make it clear that Leibniz took the results of DM.17 as either establishing, or at least going a long way toward establishing, that force is not identifiable with any mode characterizable terms of size, shape, and motion.”†2 Sleigh finds this puzzling and suggests that other commentators have generally been insufficiently perplexed by the bearing that the DM.17 has on the metaphysical issue. He notes that §17 of the Discourse (...) is a presentation of “the argument of the Brevis demonstratio to the effect that Descartes erred in measuring force in terms of mass and velocity, rather than in terms of mass and the square of velocity,”†3 and observes that, given this, it is initially plausible to think that Leibniz ought to have concluded the very opposite, for “if force were measurable in terms of mass and the square of velocity†4—then force would be characterizable in terms of size (mass) and motion.”†5.. (shrink)

This volume presents introductory chapters from internationally-renowned experts on eleven of Leibniz's key philosophical writings. Offering accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of his work, along with information on their composition and context, this book is an invaluable companion to the study of Leibniz.

Section 17 of Leibniz’s Monadology contains a famous argument in which considerations of what it would be like to enter a machine that was as large as a mill are offered as reasons to reject materialism about the mental. In this paper, I provide a critical discussion of Leibniz’s mill argument, but, unlike most treatments, my discussion will focus on texts other than the Monadology in which considerations of the mill also appear. I provide a survey of three previous interpretations (...) of the argument and a partial defence of one of them, namely the one that Marc Bobro and I offered in Stepping Back Insider Leibniz's Mill (The Monist, 1998). However, I also argue that a fourth interpretation is necessary to account for the appearances of Leibniz’s mill in at least some of his writings. (shrink)

Unlike most of the other great philosophers Leibniz never wrote a magnum opus, so his philosophical correspondence is essential for an understanding of his views. This collection of essays by pre-eminent figures in the field of Leibniz scholarship is a most thorough account of Leibniz's philosophical correspondencee. It both illuminates Leibniz's philosophical views and pays due attention to the dialectical context in which the relevant passages from the letters occur. The result is a book of enormous value to all serious (...) students of early-modern philosophy and the history of ideas. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between pension fund ownership of companies and corporate social performance using a unique database of more than 500 publicly listed U.K. companies. The empirical analysis emphasizes the heterogeneous character of pension fund holdings and the multidimensional nature of corporate social performance. The results highlight that the characteristics of pension fund management are significant drivers of preferences for social performance and that employee-related aspects of social performance are preferred by pension funds.

This volume is a critical edition of the eight-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Burcher de Volder, professor of philosophy and mathematics at Leiden University. Containing the surviving correspondence between Leibniz and De Volder, the volume also presents a generous selection from the letters between Leibniz and his friend Johann Bernoulli, through whose intercession the correspondence began. Bernoulli acted as intermediary throughout, and the often candid discussions between Leibniz and Bernoulli provide illuminating background to the correspondence proper. Each of (...) the selections appears both in the original Latin and in English translation. (shrink)

Leibniz’s reasons for rejecting materialism are complex and often rely on assumptions that are deeply puzzling to contemporary philosophers. However, the discussion of these issues in § 17 of the Monadology has received a lot of attention over the past couple of decades. For it is here that Leibniz presents the most well known version of his “mill argument.”.

In 1985 Daniel Garber published his highly intluential paper “Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years”. In two recent articles, Garber returns to these issues with a new position - that we should perhaps conclude that Leibniz did not have a view concerning the ultimate ontology of substance during his middle years. I discuss the viability of this position and consider some more general methodological issues that arise from this discussion.

In recent years, there has been increased awareness of unethical consumer practices in Asian countries. Asian consumers have gained a bad reputation for buying counterfeit products, such as computer software, fashion clothing and watches. In 1993, the estimated losses to US software companies due to Chinese counterfeiting stood at US $322 million (Kohut, 1994). The present study uses a consumer ethics scale developed by Muncy and Vitell (1992) to investigate consumers' ethical judgments from a Chinese perspective. The result shows that (...) consumers in different cultures utilize similar rules to assess the ethicality of a given situation. However, findings also show certain cultural elements that are unique in influencing Chinese consumers' ethical judgments. The results also indicate the need for the continued development of and investment in consumer education in Asia. (shrink)

This paper explores the issue of Leibniz's commitment to the doctrines of eternal punishment and universal salvation. I argue against the dominant view that Leibniz was committed to eternal punishment, but rather than defending the minority position that Leibniz believed in universal salvation, I suggest that the evidence for his adherence to each is indicative of the way in which he regards religious doctrine as instrumentally valuable. My hypothesis is that Leibniz thought that the appropriateness of advocating eternal damnation, universal (...) salvation or any other eschatological position was a function of the role that it would play in engendering the virtue of true piety in a given audience. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to shed light on Leibniz’s justification of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It approaches this issue through a close textual analysis of the correspondence with Samuel Clarke and a more abstruse and lesser-known writing, ‘Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream’.

This paper is a new translation and interpretation of the essay by Leibniz which has come to be known as “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream.” Leibniz used many different literary styles throughout his career, but “Leibniz’s Philosophical Dream” is unique insofar as it combines apparent autobiography with a dreamscape. The content is also somewhat surprising. The essay is reminiscent of Plato, insofar as Leibniz describes a transition from existence in a cave to a more enlightened mode of being outside of it. But, (...) in contrast with the usual identification of Leibniz as a “rationalist,” the mode of being that is valorised involves cognition that is intuitive and supra-rational. The paper begins with the translation followed by an interpretation of the essay. I conclude by considering the ramifications of my interpretation for our conception of Leibniz’s philosophy. (shrink)

The question of Leibniz’s relationship to mysticism has been a topic of some debate since the early part of the 20th Century. An initial wave of scholarship led by Jean Baruzi presented Leibniz mystic. However, later in the 20th Century the mood turned against this view and this negative appraisal holds sway today. In this paper I aim to do two things: First I provide a detailed account of the ways in which Leibniz is critical of mysticism; second, I argue (...) that there is, nonetheless, an important sense in which Leibniz should be regarded as an advocate of mysticism. However, the approach that I take does not focus on an effort to overturn the kinds of considerations that led people to reject the views of Baruzi. Instead, I try to reframe the discussion and explore more complex and interesting relationships that exist between mysticism and Leibniz’s philosophical theology than have been articulated previously. Here I draw on some recent discussions of mysticism in the philosophical literature to illuminate Leibniz’s own distinction between “false mysticism” and “true mystical theology.”. (shrink)

Schon in seinen frühen Jahren war Leibniz ein Gegner der Cartesischen Naturphilosophie, ca. 1697 zeigt sich in seinen Texten dann ein Argument gegen Descartes, das ich im folgenden behandle und als ,heterogeneity argument‘ bezeichnen möchte - eingangs wird hier dargestellt, wie Leibniz es im Paragraphen 13 seiner Schrift De ipsa natura expliziert, anschließend diskutiere ich zwei frühere Ansätze, die sich um das Thema drehen und die darin einig sind, daß Leibniz Descartes' Auffassung von der materiellen Welt aus a priori - (...) Gründen kritisiert, da sie intern inkonsistent bleibt: Ich versuche nachzuweisen, daß diese Interpretationen Leibniz nicht gerecht werden und plädiere für eine a posteriori - basierte Auslegung - Leibniz zieht Descartes' Ansatz in Zweifel, indem er sich auf ,contingentia‘ hinsichtlich der Art beruft, in der unsere Sinneswahrnehmung die materielle Welt repräsentiert. Zum Abschluß erörtere ich einige allgemeinere hermeneutische Probleme, die sich aus den Unterschieden zwischen früheren Interpretationen und meiner eigenen Deutung nun ergeben. (shrink)

contemporaries, Bayle and Locke. Unlike Bayle, but like Locke, Leibniz argues that reason and faith are in conformity. Nevertheless, in contrast to the account that he finds in Locke’s Essay, Leibniz does not reduce faith to a species of reasonable belief. Instead, he insists that, while faith must be grounded in reason, true or divine faith also requires a supernatural infusion of grace.

Seine Kritik an Descartes' Auffassung vom Körper gründet Leibniz bekanntlich auf Erörterungen zur Teilbarkeit und Ausdehnung. Obgleich jene Argumentation im Fokus einer Auseinandersetzung mit Leibniz' Metaphysik angesiedelt werden muss, ist sie bisher nicht recht verstanden worden. Mein Anliegen hier ist im Kern, Leibniz' Gedankengang zu explizieren und dessen Stichhaltigkeit auszuleuchten. Das Argument, um das es geht, ist wohl am ehesten aus der Darlegung in Leibniz' Korrespondenz mit Antoine Arnauld bekannt, findet sich jedoch zudem im späteren Briefwechsel mit De Volder. Neben (...) Parallelen gibt es zwischen den Verfahrensweisen, die Leibniz in den zwei Korrespondenzen jeweils favorisiert, gleichwohl derart signifikante Differenzen, dass es nicht unbegründet scheint, ihm auch zwei Argumentationslinien zuzuschreiben -die Unterschiede dieser Linien werde ich im Folgenden auch hinsichtlich ihres Entstehungszusammenhangs beleuchten und einen Ausblick auf weitere Forschungserfordernisse wagen. (shrink)

Like _Beyond All Appearances_,_ _which it supplements, Paul Weiss’s new book is a fundamental work which faces all the hard issues which are not only at the heart of philosophy but at the core of our entire culture. Readers of Mr. Weiss’s phenomenology of religion will need no introduction to this new work which expands and clari­fies many of the issues raised in _Beyond All Appearances. _However, no knowl­edge of Paul Weiss’s previous books is required to understand and (...) appreciate this brilliant new exposition. Weiss’s plain style makes his ideas accessible to all intelligent readers, whether or not they have been trained as professional philosophers. Here in _First Considerations _Mr. Weiss addresses himself to such topics as actuality, internalization, evidence, names, substance, being, natures and possibilities, existence, unity and the cosmos—issues which have engrossed him as a moral philosopher and meta­physician throughout his distinguished career. In his progress through the ideas and issues expounded in this new book Mr. Weiss is concerned with the human condition distinctive of this species of ours. Rigorously applied, his moral philosophy is as complete and thorough as that of any of the major thinkers, and provides as complete a guide as, for example, that of Buddhism. A highly original work, no doubt well in advance of current trends in philosophy, _First Considerations _will provoke further thought and discussion and will be regarded as a seminal work in modern philosophical approaches. (shrink)

While many with schizophrenia experience deficits in metacognition it is unclear whether those deficits are related to other features of illness. To explore this issue, the current study classified participants with schizophrenia as possessing a deficit in both awareness of their own emotions and those of others , aware of their own emotions but unaware of the emotions of others and aware of their own emotions and of other’s emotions . Groups were compared on assessments of neurocognitive function, symptoms, and (...) history of sexual trauma. ANCOVA controlling for education found that the group unaware of their own emotions and those of others demonstrated poorer verbal memory, processing speed, executive function, less emotional discomfort and higher levels of disorganization symptoms relative to the other groups. The group aware of their own emotions but not those of others had a significantly higher report of childhood sexual abuse. (shrink)

1 Adaptationism is a research strategy that seeks to identify adaptations and the specific selective forces that drove their evolution in past environments. Since the mid-1970s, paleontologist Stephen J. Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin have been critical of adaptationism, especially as applied toward understanding human behavior and cognition. Perhaps the most prominent criticism they made was that adaptationist explanations were analogous to Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Since storytelling is an inherent part of science, the criticism refers to the acceptance (...) of stories without sufficient empirical evidence. In particular, Gould, Lewontin, and their colleagues argue that adaptationists often use inappropriate evidentiary standards for identifying adaptations and their functions, and that they often fail to consider alternative hypotheses to adaptation. Playing prominently in both of these criticisms are the concepts of constraint, spandrel, and exaptation. In this article we discuss the standards of evidence that could be used to identify adaptations and when and how they may be appropriately used. Moreover, building an empirical case that certain features of a trait are best explained by exaptation, spandrel, or constraint requires demonstrating that the trait's features cannot be better accounted for by adaptationist hypotheses. Thus, we argue that the testing of alternatives requires the consideration, testing, and systematic rejection of adaptationist hypotheses. Where possible, we illustrate our points with examples taken from human behavior and cognition. Key Words: adaptation; ADHD; brain allometry; constraint; epistemology; evolutionary psychology; exaptation; female orgasm ; optimization; special design; waist-hip ratio. Footnotes1 The authors contributed equally to this paper. Order of authorship was determined alphabetically. Correspondence may be addressed to any of the authors. (shrink)

This paper illuminates Leibniz’s conception of faith and its relationship to reason. Given Leibniz’s commitment to natural religion, we might expect his view of faith to be deflationary. We show, however, that Leibniz’s conception of faith involves a significant non-rational element. We approach the issue by considering the way in which Leibniz positions himself between the views of two of his contemporaries, Bayle and Locke. Unlike Bayle, but like Locke, Leibniz argues that reason and faith are in conformity. Nevertheless, in (...) contrast to the account that he finds in Locke’s Essay, Leibniz does not reduce faith to a species of reasonable belief. Instead, he insists that, while faith must be grounded in reason, true or divine faith also requires a supernatural infusion of grace. (shrink)

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against...

This comprehensive and diverse anthology, the only one of its kind, illuminates the complex evolution of moral thought regarding animals and includes writings from ancient Greece to the present. _Animal Rights_ reveals the ways in which a variety of thinkers have addressed such issues as our ethical responsibilities for the welfare of animals, whether animals have rights, and what it means to be human.

This paper is a discussion of the treatment of Leibniz's conception of substance in Heidegger's The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. I explain Heidegger's account, consider its relation to recent interpretations of Leibniz in the Anglophone secondary literature, and reflect on the ways in which Heidegger's methodology may illuminate what it is to read Leibniz and other figures in the history of philosophy.

In a recent paper, Dennis Plaisted examines an important argument that Leibniz gives for the existence of primitive concepts. After sketching a natural reading of this argument, Plaisted observes that the argument appears to imply something clearly inconsistent with Leibniz’s other views. To save Leibniz from contradiction, Plaisted offers a revision. However, his account faces a number of serious difficulties and therefore does not successfully eliminate the inconsistency. We explain these difficulties and defend a more plausible alternative. In the process, (...) we call attention to the neglected topic of Leibniz’s views on the nature of conceiving, and reveal his commitment to the somewhat surprising thesis that one can conceive something through a concept even if one has no conscious grasp of that concept. (shrink)

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Schrecker and John W. Nason some half century ago, the University of Pennsylvania is home to microfilm reproductions of over one hundred thousand hand-written pages drawn from the collection of Leibniz’s papers presently housed in the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover. The microfilms are to be found on the mezzanine floor of the reference section in the Van Pelt Library and are readily accessible to visitors. Xerox copies may be made, although the Van Pelt Library (...) stresses that the microfilms remain the property of the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, and that permission to copy must be obtained from Hannover beforehand. (shrink)

Between 1698 and 1706 Leibniz was engaged in one of his most interesting correspondences, with the Dutch philosopher and physicist Burcher de Volder. The two men were concerned primarily with the question of how the motion of bodies can be explained without appeal to the direct intervention of God. Leibniz presented a naturalistic account of motion to De Volder, but failed to convince him of its adequacy. I shall examine one reason for this failure - the disagreement that arose over (...) the issue of whether there is a substance whose nature is constituted by extension. (shrink)

The main concern of this essay is to make a case for the thesis that Leibniz conceived of his philosophy as a way of life in something like the sense articulated in the works of Pierre Hadot. On this view, philosophy was a type of conduct, or a mode of existing‐in‐the‐world, which had to be practised at each instant, with the goal of transforming the whole of the individual’s life. The essay also serves as an introduction to some of the (...) main themes in Hadot’s work. While it includes a brief discussion of a number of the central components of Leibniz’s philosophy conceived as a way of life, the essay does not aim to do so in great detail. Rather, it offers a manifesto and initial road map. (shrink)

Data on birth order and parent-offspring relations for 1,601 adolescents participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were used to test hypotheses about the role of adolescent suicidal behavior in parent-offspring conflict. Among adolescents highly dissatisfied with their mothers, the odds that middleborns would make at least one suicide attempt was 23% that of first- and lastborns (p<.001), but their odds of receiving medical treatment for their attempts was 8.5 times greater than the odds for first- and lastborns (...) (p=.032). The results are tentatively interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that adolescents use suicide attempts to leverage investment from their parents. (shrink)

It is well known that Leibniz believes that the motion of bodies is caused by an internal force.1 Moreover, he distinguishes between two kinds of force that are associated with bodies, which he calls primitive and derivative forces respectively. My aim is to explain Leibniz’s account of the relation between these two kinds of force, and to address a puzzle that arises in connection with this relation. In fact Leibniz speaks of two different kinds of derivative force. The first, and (...) most fundamental, kind of derivative force is the momentary tendency to move from one perception to another within a simple substance, or monad. Sometimes these are called “appetitions”.2 The second kind are the forces of bodies that are found in the mechanical explanations of Leibnizian Dynamics.3 We shall be concerned primarily with the latter in what follows. However, the derivative forces of monads will also play an important role in the discussion. As one might expect, Leibniz holds that derivative forces are derived from the primitive ones. This idea is more usually expressed in terms of the notion of modification. Thus, derivative forces are said to be “nothing but the modifications and results of primitive forces”4 and to “arise as shapes arise from modification of extension”.5 Here it is natural to assume that Leibniz understands the relation between primitive and derivative force in something like the way in which Descartes understood the relation between modes of extended and thinking substances and the substances themselves, namely as particular ways of being an extended or thinking thing that inhere in their subjects.6 Although this account of derivative forces as modifications of primitive forces may seem plausible at first, difficulties arise when we try to understand how it could apply to the derivative forces in Leibnizian bodies. For it seems to be in conflict with two further aspects of Leibniz’s philosophy. Both can be found in the following passage from a letter to De Volder of 1705.. (shrink)

Locke and Leibniz on Substance gathers together papers by an international group of academic experts, examining the metaphysical concept of substance in the writings of these two towering philosophers of the early modern period. Each of these newly-commissioned essays considers important interpretative issues concerning the role that the notion of substance plays in the work of Locke and Leibniz, and its intersection with other key issues, such as personal identity. Contributors also consider the relationship between the two philosophers and contemporaries (...) such as Descartes and Hume. (shrink)