In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:176 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY to be accounted for in some way. Goldsmith takes no cognizance of these categorical statements. Secondly, there is no support for Goldsmith's conclusion to be found in Hobbes's comment at the end of De Corpore. A cursory reading of the passage makes it clear that the comments concerning other hypotheses refer only to Part IV of De Corpore and not to the whole system as (...) Goldsmith suggests. Indeed the earlier parts are said to comprise the "theorems" of the systems, and the only way Hobbes suggests they might be found corrigible is if a mistake in deduction has occurred. Finally, Goldsmith pays insufficient attention to Hobbes's account of the process of analysis and sometimes seems to confuse it with the imaginary annihilation of the world which Hobbes uses as an expository device in expounding his concept of space. As Hobbes describes the process it begins with a phenomenal whole which is subjected to continued conceptual analysis until unanalyzable elements are reached. These logically primitive notions are referred to by Hobbes as "the most universal things" and as "first principles" which are "manifest of themselves" or "known to nature" (E. W. I, 69), all of which strongly suggests that they are coguized and not simply posited. Goldsmith mentions these descriptions of Hobbes's first principles in Chapter I, but presents no arguments to justify his abandoning them in favor of "suppositions or assumptions." When Goldsmith moves to Hobbes's political theory, he is on much firmer ground. The sections concerning human nature and natural law are generally excellent, particularly the account in Chapter IV of the relations between the various laws of nature. The treatment throughout this part of the book is exhaustive, although the point of some extended discussions is not very clear. There is a long discursive section in Chapter v on contraetarian thought which seems quite unrelated to anything it follows or precedes. And there are some curious allotments of emphasis. While Hobbes's "economic policy," which is a peripheral matter, is given a section to itself, the concept of obligation, which has been the focus of so much dispute in recent years and which is a central concern, is dealt with only by implication and in passing. In general Goldsmith accepts the traditional interpretation which sees the laws of nature as primarily prudential precepts found out by reason. These precepts are said to be like the "laws" of physics with respect to man's behavior in that they indicate regularities about the world which are ignored at one's own risk. Goldsmith suggests that the possible knowledge of God as a first cause serves only to reinforce man's awareness of the total causal nexus. The laws of nature are, properly speaking, laws only when they become civil regulations under the authority of a sovereign. The final chapter of the book attempts to assess the success of Hobbes's endeavor to create a science of politics by the "test" of its ability to explain the political phenomena of law, religion, and history. This is followed by eight appendices in which various disputes with other interpreters are briefly argued. The book contains an adequate index and a selected bibliography. There is a mistake on page 16, where the reference to De Corpore, Part I, should read Part II. PAUL J. JOHNSON California State College at San Bernardino Jean Chapelain, soixante-dix-sept lettres inddites ~ Nicolas Heinsius. Publi~es...avec une introduction et des notes par Bernard Bray. (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. wii -t- 467. --~ Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Id~s, 13.) A reviewer must admit at once that Jean Chapelain was no philosopher, that his letters have few general ideas, that a collection of them possesses no a priori right to be reviewed in a journal devoted to the history of philosophy. However, the present volume, edited and annotated by a member of the staff of the University of Utrecht, doctor of letters of BOOK REVIEWS 177 Amsterdam, appears in the series of the International Archives of the History of Ideas, published under the direction of P. Dibon of Nijmegen and R. Popkin of the University of California... (shrink)

Recent history makes clear that the quantum leaps being made in technology are the leading edge of a groundswell of paradigm shifts taking place in science, politics, economics, social institutions, and the expression of cultural values. Indeed it is the simultaneity and interdependence of these changes occurring in every dimension of human experience and endeavor that makes the present so historically distinctive. The essays gathered here give voice to perspectives on the always improvised relationship between technology and cultural values from (...) Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Pacific. Contributors: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, Roger T. Ames,Yoko Arisaka, Carl Becker, Francesca Bray, James Buchanan, Arindam Chakrabarti, Frank W. Derringh, Rolf Elberfeld, Charles Ess, Andrew Feenberg, Susantha Goonatilake, H. Jiuan Heng, Peter Hershock, Thomas P. Kasulis, George Khushf, David Farrell Krell, Joel J. Kupperman, William R. LaFleur, Lois Ann Lorentzen, David Loy, Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Möller, Robert Cummings Neville, Peimin Ni, Monica Atieno Opole, Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ, Helen Petrovsky, Ramon Sentmartí, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Vasanthi Srinivasan, Marietta Stepaniants, Vyacheslav S. Stiopin, Henk ten Have, Paul B.Thompson, Mary Tiles, David B.Wong. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the (...) specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank Yates (...) and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems. It requires that we find a way of maintaining the following claim, which I call Negative Orientation: although you claim (...) to value X, you are more accurately described as disvaluing Y. I argue that we cannot make sense of Negative Orientation at the level of evaluative judgments, for nothing about the etiology, content, or justification of evaluative judgments will support the Negative Orientation claim. But we can make sense of it by attending to the psychology of valuing. Using spiteful hatred as a paradigm case, I explain how certain outlooks and ideologies induce and sustain spiteful hatred in their adherents and thereby render the Negative Orientation claim true. (shrink)

To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...) appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted. (shrink)

Sainsbury argued that exact extensions for predicates entails the unacceptable infinite tower of higher order vagueness so that exact extensions must be rejected. I offer a second argument: The exact extensions arise when semantic values are assumed to be (exact) properties. But no assignment of unique properties to predicates could arise from any real-world finite basis. How, then, is talk of properties as semantic values to be understood? We distinguish the precise compositional rules of semantics from the operation of messy, (...) imprecise rules at the word/world interface for applicability of minimal predicates. When such application is sufficiently clear it is idealized as property instantiation and semantic composition proceeds in familiar ways. These imprecise rules for application of minimal predicates provide the proper locus for study of vagueness. The conclusions thus far apply to show that higher order vagueness is not forced and that classical logic can generally be retained. I discuss implications for the sorites paradox. Abandoning properties entails abandoning simple correspondence truth understood as Pa is true just in case a has the property signified by P. As an alternative I outline a pragmatist approach to truth, the spirit of which is conveyed by the slogan, “To be true enough is to work well enough.”. (shrink)

Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are (...) not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children's understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life. Key Words: cognitive development; concepts; meaning; semantics; social cognition; syntax; theory of mind; word learning. (shrink)

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

One of the great challenges for students of any discipline is to be able to put into practice the knowledge learned in theory. Public health does not escape this challenge. Research Methods for Public Health is a book that seeks to help students understand in a simple way how to enter into the practice of public health research. This book stands out for its easy reading, but especially because it emphasizes the existence of quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as (...) the combination of both methods. On the other hand, the authors show between the lines, and sometimes more clearly, the importance of teamwork in research groups, a key element to avoid errors, validate procedures or instruments and increase the reliability of the results, as well as the importance of criteria of validity, reliability, precision, relevance, transparency and credibility, among others. -/- Uno de los grandes retos para los estudiantes de cualquier disciplina es poder poner en práctica los conocimientos aprendidos en la teoría. La salud pública no se escapa de este desafío. Research Methods for Public Health es un libro que busca ayudar a comprender de manera sencilla cómo introducirse en la práctica de la investigación en salud pública. Este libro se destaca por su fácil lectura, pero especialmente porque pone el énfasis en la existencia de los métodos cuantitativos y cualitativos, así como en la combinación de ambos métodos. Por otro lado, los autores dejan ver entrelíneas, y a veces más claramente, la importancia del trabajo en equipo en los grupos de investigación, elemento clave para evitar errores, validar procedimientos o instrumentos y aumentar la confiabilidad de los resultados, así como la importancia de criterios de validez, confiabilidad, precisión, relevancia, transparencia y credibilidad, entre otros. -/- Reseña del libro: Stuart McClean, Isabelle Bray, Nick de Viggiani, Emma Bird and Paul Pilkington. Research Methods for Public Health. London: SAGE, 2020. 273 p. (shrink)

Taking the semantic values of predicates to be precise properties leaves no room for predicate vagueness. I suggest instead understanding talk of properties as used in semantics as idealized placeholders for the imprecise results of navigating the word/world interface. Basic predications result by applying imprecise informal rules of word use, and it is in the imprecision of these rules that vagueness arises. The idealized property-placeholders then function to separate the messy process of navigating the word/world interface from the exact rules (...) of semantic composition. This scheme applies a methodology of problem separation that is well known in the physical sciences. (shrink)

In ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ (Miller, 2017), Alistair Miller presents a searing indictment of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and a dismissal of claims for its importance for education. He provides a summary account of Levinas's philosophy and, in relation to this, refers briefly to a number of authors who have related Levinas's work to education. This account is at fault, however, in fundamental ways, and this leads to errors in the conclusions that he draws. The present short paper does (...) not attempt to address these problems in the round but rather focuses on a particular aspect of his phrasing in constructing the account, taking this as a significant pointer to the nature of the misinterpretation as a whole. (shrink)

(2008). Neither Dogma nor Common sense: Moore's confidence in his ‘proof of an external world’1. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 163-195.

One metaphysical problem about laws is how to find appropriate truthmakers for fully general functional laws. What makes it true, for instance, that an uninstantiated mass would interact with others as prescribed by laws concerning mass? This is the missing value problem. D. M. Armstrong attempted to solve it by appeal to determinable universals. I will offer a trope‐theoretic solution that, while in some ways more metaphysically adventurous than Armstrong's view, avoids commitment to universals and determinables (as different from their (...) determinates). The solution makes use of a special conception of tropes as capable of intrinsic change. It also makes use of a distinction between two ways of having a causal power (a distinction we should make in any case). Existing powers‐based approaches to the problem struggle to avoid the idea that powers mysteriously point beyond themselves. But if tropes are capable of intrinsic change in the way I propose, they can account for the full generality of laws with minimal pointing beyond, and can do so while retaining natures that are credibly intrinsic. (shrink)

Recent books by Paul Johnston, D. Z. Phillips, Philip Shields, and B. R. Tilghman all depict Wittgenstein as centrally concerned with ethics, but they range from representing his main works as expressing and advocating a particular religious-ethical outlook to arguing that his work has no ethical content but aims primarily to clarify such logical distinctions as that between ethical and empirical judgments. All four books raise the question about the moral philosopher's proper role, and each suggests a rather different (...) answer. Via the discussion of these books, I argue that Wittgenstein's stress on diversity in the ways of human life, his notion of conceptual grammar, the idea of a perspicuous representation, his lifelong involvement with art and his suggestions about its connection with morality, and his preoccupation with aspect-seeing-all suggest new possibilities of rehabilitating the historically recurrent idea that the philosopher may be a moral sage. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of self-directed duties concern not merely those duties one has regarding oneself, but those one owes specifically to oneself. In this paper, I take up the question of what it even means to owe something to oneself in the first place. A proper appreciation of what it means, I argue, will help answer skeptics who doubt the coherence of duties to self.

We present a variety of (ω 1 ,∞)-distributive forcings which when applied to models of Martin's Maximum separate certain well known reflection principles. In particular, we do this for the reflection principles SR, SR α (α ≤ ω 1 ), and SRP.

After decades of attempts, comparisons between classical Chinese and Greco-Roman philosophy have had limited success. While there have been some productive lines of inquiry (for example, comparing early Confucian ethics to virtue ethics as represented by Aristotle), the overall record is disappointing because concepts such as Plato’s theory of forms or Aristotle’s emphasis on syllogism have proved incommensurable with most classical Chinese ways of thinking. But much of the problem can be attributed to the habit of comparing Chinese thinkers to (...) Plato and Aristotle without asking whether they are the most suitable philosophers for this purpose. For most of the twentieth century, Hellenistic philosophy was scarcely considered. Yet very recently, provocative similarities have been identified between Chinese philosophy and Stoicism, especially Epictetus. I shall argue that these parallels are even more significant than previous scholarship has recognized (I hope to convince the reader that some of them are indeed staggering), and conclude by asking why we find such parallels in the first place. My claim will not be direct or even indirect transmission; this is a case, to borrow a distinction from evolutionary biology, of analogous rather than homologous development. -/- . (shrink)

I argue for a kind of sub-category generalism about conspiracy theories. I identify four features that negatively contribute to the evaluation of any conspiracy theory that has them. I argue that particularism about conspiracy theories is in conflict even with this moderate position. I explain the implications of sub-category generalism for questions about the epistemic environment in which epistemic agents operate. I argue that even if there are pragmatic reasons for being vigilant about the possibility of malign conspiracies, this does (...) not support rejecting the claim that it is a prima facie epistemically wrong to believe a conspiracy with any of the four features I identify. I discuss how the favoured sub-category generalism may help to refine discussion about the relationship between the psychology of those who believe conspiracy theories and subjects who have delusions. There are grounds for thinking that believers in conspiracy theories display irrationality at least as bad as those suffering from delusions. This is not to pathologise believers in conspiracy theories but recognise the continuities between those who have delusions and believers who are not the subject of clinical attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is a case study in public health ethics. It considers whether there is a basis in ethics for political action by health professionals and their associations in response to inhumane treatment. The issue arises from Australia's treatment of asylum seekers and the charge that this treatment has been both immoral and inhumane. This judgement raises several questions of broader significance in bioethics and of significance to the emerging field of public health ethics. These questions relate to the (...) role of health professionals in response to inhumane treatment of people in their charge; to the discipline of public health in light of a growing recognition of its ethical basis; and the role of public health and bioethical associations in response to ethical issues arising in a political context. It is argued that, in serious cases of humanitarian and human rights abuses affecting health and well‐being, there is a case for political action by health professionals, academic and professional institutions, and associations of public health and ethics. (shrink)

This article offers a critical examination of Kroll’s (Natural Language Semantics 16: 359–372, 2008) arguments against Elbourne’s (Situations and individuals, 2005) treatment of bishop sentences.

Paul Stevens; On the Nuffield Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 99–111, https://doi.org/10.1111/.

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)

BackgroundThe use of genetic test results in risk-rated insurance is a significant concern internationally, with many countries banning or restricting the use of genetic test results in underwriting. In Australia, life insurers’ use of genetic test results is legal and self-regulated by the insurance industry (Financial Services Council (FSC)). In 2018, an Australian Parliamentary Inquiry recommended that insurers’ use of genetic test results in underwriting should be prohibited. In 2019, the FSC introduced an industry self-regulated moratorium on the use of (...) genetic test results. In the absence of government oversight, it is critical that the impact, effectiveness and appropriateness of the moratorium is monitored. Here we describe the protocol of our government-funded research project, which will serve that critical function between 2020 and 2023.MethodsA realist evaluation framework was developed for the project, using a context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) approach, to systematically assess the impact of the moratorium for a range of stakeholders. Outcomes which need to be achieved for the moratorium to accomplish its intended aims were identified, and specific data collection measures methods were developed to gather the evidence from relevant stakeholder groups (consumers, health professionals, financial industry and genetic research community) to determine if aims are achieved. Results from each arm of the study will be analysed and published in peer-reviewed journals as they become available.DiscussionThe A-GLIMMER project will provide essential monitoring of the impact and effectiveness of the self-regulated insurance moratorium. On completion of the study (3 years) a Stakeholder Report will be compiled. The Stakeholder Report will synthesise the evidence gathered in each arm of the study and use the CMO framework to evaluate the extent to which each of the outcomes have been achieved, and make evidence-based recommendations to the Australian federal government, life insurance industry and other stakeholders. (shrink)

Current reproductive technology challenges us to think seriously about social values surrounding childbearing. Thoughtful discussion must combine careful attention to the experience of pursuing parenthood by technological means with principled reflection on the morality of this pursuit.

The paper aims to clarify several key aspects of Alexandru Dragomir: his amazing “technique” of keeping his entire knowledge in perfect working condition, his exceptional precision of references and his continuous disregard concerning writing. The root of all these peculiarities is traced back to Plato’s cognitive and moral arguments against writing, as expressed in Phaedrus and Seventh Letter. Finally, the article brings to light what seems to be the lesson of Dragomir’s life as a thinker: to rely only on the (...) living thought, that which is written “inside the soul”. (shrink)

Economists now have the data to generate a high‐resolution picture of the economic inequalities within the very top fractions of income and wealth and between the top‐most fractions and others that have emerged since the early 1980s. I shall refer to these inequalities collectively as “the new inequality.” I argue that the moral value of solidarity can be used to raise pointed moral questions about the new inequality. In most cases, however, I shall raise such questions without answering them. For (...) I contend that solidarity functions more usefully as part of an articulate hermeneutic of suspicion—that is, as a central element in skepticism about economic inequalities and their justifications. Seeing that it functions in this way, we can see one contribution religious ethics makes to an inquiry into the new inequality. (shrink)

: This contribution offers a detailed presentation of an anonymous book on the soul ascribed to the fourteenth-century Franciscan philosopher and theologian Nicholas Bonet. The work is conserved in two manuscripts of the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. In both manuscripts the work is almost certainly incomplete. It has a strong focus on the vegetative and sensitive operations of the human soul and on phenomena such as light and colour. Keywords: Fourteenth-century philosophy, Nicholas Bonet, philosophical manuscripts, philosophical (...) psychology, the soul. (shrink)

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights (...) of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. (shrink)