Although the principle of respect for personal autonomy has been the subject of debate for almost 40 years, the conversation has often suffered from lack of clarity regarding the philosophical traditions underlying this principle. In this article, I trace a genealogy of autonomy, first contrasting Kant’s autonomy as moral obligation and Mill’s teleological political liberty. I then show development from Mill’s concept to Beauchamp and Childress’ principle and to Julian Savulescu’s non-teleological autonomy sketch. I argue that, although the reach for (...) a new principle to guide choices in physician–patient relationships can rightfully be seen as important, the notion that is now called autonomy within bioethics has corollaries that undermine critical aspects of medical care. As such, there is need for a richer account of the interplay between the free choice of patients and the informed recommendations of doctors. (shrink)

[E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:] . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which has invaded our art schools (...) and resulted in the doctrine that art could not possibly be taught because only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is creativity it is not possible to teach it. Q.E.D.—I recently asked my history finalists what "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . . [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:] . . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist? Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school children. With me there was a much better teacher . One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror. "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self expression" was as precious as virginity. E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Notes and Exchanges" ,"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" , and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" . Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

In British Columbia, Canada, many physicians providing care to individuals with high-risk opioid use disorder adopted safer supply (SS) opioid prescribing in the spring of 2020 with the goal of facilitating public health measures for COVID-19. This prescribing practice continued after measures were lifted. This study aimed to explore prescribers’ perspectives following several years of local experience in prescribing SS opioids, primarily in the form of hydromorphone tablets, and to apply ethical concepts to explore current challenges and ongoing sources of (...) provider distress. Addiction medicine SS prescribers participated in individual or small group semi-structured interviews. Each interview was transcribed and analysed for recurrent themes. Themes were then integrated into a narrative ethics discussion. Eleven addiction medicine physicians practicing in various settings within Vancouver participated in this study. Six themes were identified: clinical assessment, clinician distress, gaps in care, models of safer supply, research, and special populations. Ethical dilemmas in prescribing SS are identified and explored through a discussion of biomedical ethics principles and the physician role. (shrink)

I am not so insular and I hope not so presumptuous as to suppose that there is no contemporary philosophy apart from that empiricism which dominates very much of Great Britain, North America and Scandinavia. So let us notice that contemporary philosophy embraces broadly three points of view, though it will be part of my argument that they largely combine in the lessons they have to teach us, and in many of their implications for theology.

you use it. These two assumptions, which I believe to be false, are based on a more fundamental assumption, that the rule governing the reference of an indexical remains constant from use to use. Contemporary theories hold that the reference of an indexical varies from use to (relevantly different) use, but that the reference-fixing rule of use is You can search..

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes to solve the measurement problem and reconcile completeness and locality of quantum mechanics by postulating relativity to the observer for events and facts, instead of an absolute “view from nowhere”. The aim of this paper is to clarify this interpretation, and in particular, one of its central claims concerning the possibility for an observer to have knowledge about other observer’s events. I consider three possible readings of this claim, and develop the most promising (...) one, relativism, to show how it fares when confronted with the traditional interpretative problems of quantum mechanics. Although it provides answers to some problems, I claim that there is currently no adapted locality criterion to evaluate whether the resulting interpretation is local or not. (shrink)

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly (...) employed. I present Grice’s account of linguistic meaning and transpose his actual strategy and method to epistemic representation. This results in a reduction of epistemic representation to mental states that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality. (shrink)

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However, it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are too strongly qualified, then it is no longer SR. A way to overcome this difficulty is to talk (...) about modal, or nomological relations instead of purely extensional relations. I argue that this is insufficient, for then, SR collapses into modal empiricism. I suggest, however, that ME could be the best position in the debate on scientific realism. 1Introduction2Objections to Structural Realism3How to Escape Newman’s Objection4Which Modal Relations Are Retained in Theory Change?5Are Modal Relations Real?6Relativity and Fundamentality7Is Modal Empiricism Really Empiricism?8Could Modal Empiricism Be the Best of Both Worlds? (shrink)

Accounts of scientific representation typically assume that there is a single sense of “represent”, and they attempt to develop a theory that can account for all its features. The aim of this article is to draw the consequences of a distinction between two senses of “represent” that has been proposed recently. Taking inspiration from the distinction between speaker-meaning and expression-meaning in philosophy of language, a first sense is analysed in terms of the mental states of the user of a vehicle (...) in context, and a second sense in terms of communal norms constraining contextual uses. I argue that making this distinction, and thus understanding the representation relation as essentially indexical and normative, can help us move beyond the controversies between various accounts of scientific representation, notably what have been dubbed informational and functional accounts, as well as debates regarding the ontology of scientific models. (shrink)

It seems intuitively obvious that what I am doing right now is more real than what I did just one second ago, and it seems intuitively obvious that what I did just one second ago is more real than what I did forty years ago. And yet, remarkably, every philosopher of time today, except for the author, denies this obvious fact about reality. What went wrong? How could philosophers get so far away from what is the most experientially evident fact (...) about reality? (shrink)

One of the central debates in current analytic philosophy of time is whether time consists only of relations of simultaneity, earlier and later (B-relations), or whether it also consists of properties of futurity, presentness and pastness (A-properties). If time consists only of B-relations, then all temporal determinations are permanent; if at anyone time it is the case that birth is later than Homer's birth, then it is ever after the case that Dante's birth is later than Homer's. The temporal position (...) of Dante's birth vis a vis Homer's is permanently fixed. Moreover, if B-relations are the only temporal determinations possessed by events, then each event, regardless of when it occurs, is equally as real as each other event. Each event sustains B-relations to other events, and thus in respect of its temporal determinations is ontologically undistinguished from each other event. Why should Dante's birth be "more real" than Homer's just because it is later than it? But if time also consists of A-properties, then some events are ontologically distinguished by virtue of their temporal determinations; the events that are or exist in the tensed sense, the events that possess the A-property of present- ness, have a reality not possessed by other events. All other events are no longer (are past) or are not yet (are future), and in this respect are deprived of the being, the presentness, possessed by the events that are. The A-properties possessed by events are impermanent temporal determinations; if an event possesses a certain A-property at one time, then there is another time at which the event will not have that A-property but some other A-property instead. First an event is future, then it is present, and finally it is past. This shows that the issue between the defenders of the B-theory and the defenders of the A-theory is of fundamental ontological importance. But analytic philosophers discuss this issue ,almost exclusively in terms of the language we use to describe the temporal determinations of events. They engage in what Quine calls "semantic ascent", i.e., redirecting their concern from the "things themselves" to the words we use to describe things. Defenders of the A-theory argue that tensed sentences and their tokens, sentences containing tensed copulas like "is", "was" and "will be" and adverbs like "now" and "at present", are untranslatable or unanalyzable into tenseless sentences about B- related events, and therefore that the tensed copulas and ad- verbs refer to A-properties of events. Defenders of the B-theory argue that tensed sentences or their tokens are translatable or analyzable into tenseless sentences about B-related events, and hence that the tensed sentences or tokens refer only to B-related events. While this semantic ascent is not without its advantages, it seems to me that additional light can be thrown on this subject if it is approached from a nonlinguistic phenomenological perspective. This approach is all the more needed since this particular issue in the philosophy of time has not been explicitly addressed by any of the practitioners of "phenomenology" (in the wide sense), such as Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty .Indeed, phenomenologists have generally seemed to be unaware of the debate between the A-theorists and B-theorists. This issue has been a concern exclusively of analytic philosophers (with the exception perhaps of the early 20th century British Idealist John McTaggart.) In this paper, I will point to a number of phenomenological facts that are pertinent to the debate. These facts all favor the A-theory. I shall make the case that the basic phenomenological truths about time simply cannot be accounted for by the B-theory . (shrink)

This paper concentrates on three connected features of Taylor's argument. I begin by considering his historical sections on the formation of the modern identity, raising some doubts about the focus of his discussion and offering some specific criticisms in the case of Locke and Rousseau. Next I examine Taylor's list of the moral imperatives allegedly felt with particular force in the contemporary world. I question the extent to which the values listed by Taylor are genuinely shared, and point to a (...) range of criticisms put forward by conservatives, Marxists, feminists, and other opponents of liberalism, all of whose doubts Taylor appears to underestimate. Finally, I address Taylor's underlying claim that a religious dimension is indispensable if our highest human potentialities are to be realized, and conclude with a critique of his theistic arguments. (shrink)

infinite, and offer several arguments in sup port of this thesis. I believe their arguments are unsuccessful and aim to refute six of them in the six sections of the paper. One of my main criticisms concerns their supposition that an infinite series of past events must contain some events separated from the present event by an infinite number of intermediate events, and consequently that from one of these infinitely distant past events the present could never have been reached. I (...) introduce.. (shrink)

Many activities towards plants are directly related to environmental crisis issues. However, our actions towards plants are little theorized in philosophy and ethics. After a brief presentation of the history, state of the art, and current issues of plant ethics, I critically illustrate how the theoretical threads of current ethics should be clarified, and, more importantly, contextualised, to promote the application of concrete measures. Particular attention is paid to the ethics of plant flourishing as applied to different fields and types (...) of plants. The treatment of wild and ornamental plants is, thus, explicitly distinguished from that of improved agricultural varieties, themselves distinguishable according to modes of cultivation. I thus propose and discuss several recommendations and concrete courses of action to promote an ethics of plants, while pointing out its limitations. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that relations of necessity cannot be known by induction on experience. In this paper, I propose a notion of situated possibilities, weaker than nomic possibilities, that is compatible with an inductivist epistemology for modalities. I show that assuming this notion, not only can relations of necessity be known by induction on our experience, but such relations cannot be any more underdetermined by experience than universal regularities. This means that any one believing in a universal regularity is (...) as well warranted to believe in the corresponding relation of necessity. (shrink)

A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self evident that the natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient evidence that God did not exist. If I held a certain epistemological theory about "basic beliefs", I might conclude from this experience that my intuition that (...) there is no God co existing with th is horror was a "basic belief" and thus that I am epistemically entitled to be an atheist without needing to justify this intuition, But I do not hold such an epistemological theory and believe that intuitive atheological beliefs, such as the one I experienced (and the corresponding intuitive theological beliefs, such as that God is providentially watching over this gruesome event) require justification if they are to be epistemically warranted. The following sections of this article present a justification for the atheological intuition I experienced that dark night. My justification will consist mostly in providing reasons to believe premise (3) in the following probabilistic argument.. (shrink)

Après avoir rappelé les catégories qui dans la Science de la logique et la Philosophie de la nature aident à penser de façon hégélienne la notion de matière , nous indiquons ici à quel point Hegel peut sembler un précurseur de la science du XXe siècle. Est alors analysé en quoi ce genre d’affirmation peut être soutenu mais aussi relativisé. Il apparaît en tout cas que la position de Hegel par rapport à la matière n’est, à bien des égards, pas (...) plus « idéaliste » que la position des physiciens d’aujourd’hui. La matière est pensée par le philosophe allemand comme la trace passagère du processus infini de la réalité – processus qui ne saura s’épuiser dans les diverses constructions des sciences positives.Having considered the categories which, in Science of Logic and Philosophy of Nature, enable us to adopt a Hegelian approach to considering the notion of matter , we here indicate the extent to which Hegel can be considered a forerunner of 20th century science. We then analyse how this type of assertion can be defended but also relativised. It would in any case seem that Hegel’s approach to « matter » is in many respects no more « idealistic » than that adopted by physicists today. Matter is considered by the German philosopher to be a fleeting trace of the infinite process of reality – a process which can never be exhausted in the various constructions of the positive sciences. (shrink)

Islamic ethics, sufism in the teachings of Ḥasan Ḥasanʹzādah Āmulī; a renowned Iranian scholar.

I critically examine the assumption that the theoretical structure that varies under theoretical symmetries is redundant and should be eliminated from a metaphysical picture of the universe, following a ‘symmetry to reality’ inference. I do so by analysing the status of coordinate change symmetries taking a pragmatic approach. I argue that coordinate systems function as indexical devices, and play an important pragmatic role for representing concrete physical systems. I examine the implications of considering this pragmatic role seriously, taking what I (...) call a perspectivist stance. My conclusion is that under a perspectivist stance, all symmetries (including local gauge symmetries) potentially have a direct empirical status: they point to dynamical aspects that are invariant under changes of operationalisation, and they constitute a guide not to reality, but to nomology and kinship. (shrink)

This inquiry is motivated by the question: if atheism is true, is it nevertheless the case that holiness or sacredness is exemplified? I believe the answer to this question is affirmative, and that the path to its affirmation lies in the rejection of the traditional assumption that holiness is a single and simple property of a divinity that eludes analysis. The opposite view, that there are several complex properties comprising holiness, makes it manifest that there are holy beings, even a (...) holy ‘supreme being’, even if there is no God and no gods. (shrink)

As I see it, the historic role of literary Bloomsbury was to act as a sort of check or antibody continually attacking the proponents of the vulgar passions in the body politic whenever these menaced the traditional values of liberal England. In a democracy and perhaps in any modern state there is always a danger that men seeking power will rely upon the feelings rather than the intelligence of the masses. Such appeals to the vulgar passions represent a continual danger; (...) fight on till the Huns are smashed, squeeze Germany until the pips squeak, woman's place is in the home, stamp out dirty unnatural vice, keep the black man in his place—exhortations of this kind can be terribly effective. Against them, or most of them, one may oppose the arguments of the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies, all men are brothers. This Bloomsbury did not do; it had no use either for the hero or for the saint. In its polemics it appeals to good sense and good feeling and relies upon the belief that ultimately the reasoned argument will prevail. Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and the Elite" and exchanges with E. H. Gombrich and James Ackerman. (shrink)

I think that virtually all contemporary theists, agnostics and atheists believe this is logically possible. Indeed, the main philosophical tradition from Plato to the present has assumed that the sentence, "God is the originating cause of the universe", does not express a logical contradiction, even though many philosophers have argued that this sentence either is synthetic and meaningless (e.g., the logical positivists) or states a synthetic and a priori falsehood (e.g., Kant and Moore), or states a synthetic and a posteriori (...) falsehood (e.g., contemporary defenders of the probabilistic argument from evil). (shrink)

I endeavor to explain husserl's theory of hyletic data, And to show that there is no phenomenological evidence for the existence of such data. I explain husserl's theory that hyletic data include the perceptual sensations that are immanent to consciousness, And that correspond to the objective sense properties that belong to the perceived object. The hyletic sensations do not appear, But are endowed with a meaning by the perceptual consciousness, And by means of this meaning-Endowment, The perceptual consciousness achieves an (...) awareness of the objective sense properties. I argue that the hyletic sensations can never be intuited. According to husserl's definition, 1) these sensations are meaningless, And 2) it is possible to intuit only what has a meaning. Therefore the hyletic data cannot be intuited, And therefore there is no phenomenological (intuitive) evidence for their existence. (shrink)

I begin by defending condition (i) against five objections (section 2). Following this, I show that the theory that laws obtain contingently encounters three problems that are solved by the theory that laws are metaphysically necessary (section 3). In section 3, I criticize the regularity theory of natural laws and the universals theory of Armstrong, Dretske and Tooley, and also show how the metaphysical theory solves the “inference problem” that Van Fraassen (1989) posed for any theory of natural laws.

Tense, and Time , and William Lane Craig’s in The Tensed Theory of Time . Their ontologies differ greatly, however, and (before I discuss their particular ontologies) I shall concentrate at the outset on some general themes of presentism. You can search..

University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism. About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students that I would not accept papers which included the words protagonist, basic , alienation, total , dichotomy, and a few others including elite and elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be used to discuss what is, after all, (...) an interesting idea.It is of course true that my students and I use the word incorrectly. An elite must surely be a chosen body. Congress, the police, the final heat of the Miss World contest, and the Bolshevik Party are elites, whereas an aristocracy or a plutocracy—unless one believes the rich and the nobility to be chosen by God—are not. Nevertheless, when we use the word elite in connection with the visual arts it is certainly related to, though not synonymous with, class. An elite is usually a group within a relatively prosperous class. The patrons of the Renaissance were, presumably, at the apex of the social system: on the other hand, the patrons of the Impressionists belonged to a comparatively humble section of the middle classes. But it will be found that an aesthetic elite does always enjoy certain advantages of wealth and leisure and education.Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and for the record’s sake to correct certain fashionable errors concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper, and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth had remained my only objet, I should have left these words unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my (...) sources, and there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded. I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting in itself but, just as Prince’s Hal’s “plain tale” is made livelier by being contrasted with Falstaff’s “eleven buckram men,” so too the simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of Virginia’s recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a quotation from one of them.Volume I [of Virginia Woolf’s Letters] has a rarely preserved portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into insignificance as an “influence” next to the radiance of Woolf’s relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the Cooperative Working Women’s Guild, Janet Case, her Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called “Nun.”1These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer. But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence of Virginia Woolf’s husband, her sister, and her closest friends “fades into insignificance” when compared with that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I have gone sadly astray. Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” and “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’ ”. (shrink)

It must be admitted that there are some of us who “teach” Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn from her. The secret of Virginia’s eminently readable prose style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that, she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my biography of Virginia Woolf. In (...) a sense, she does not need to; she can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I considered my aunt “a minor British novelist, ranked somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction” . Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf, seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention , and seeing that I have said absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of the imagination.Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she “replies” by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her “reply,” which must be about as long as the article by which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus tells us that she has written “two long essays in which I did at length and in detail exactly what he does here”; here, then, we come to her answer . The reader, who may be somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was primarily Leonard Woolf’s friend rather than Virginia’s, that her relationship with Virginia was at times very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia’s use of the term “the woman’s republic” . Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Ruskin , Bloomsbury , Virginia Woolf: A Biography , and On Human Finery . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” , “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’” , and “A ‘Radiant’ Friendship”. (shrink)

But while the literature of art is, in publishers' terms, booming, it has in one respect suffered a loss. During the past two hundred years there has usually been some important figure who acted as a censor and an apologist of the contemporary scene, a Diderot, a Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Frye. Who amongst our living authors plays this important role? What name springs to mind? I would suggest that no name actually springs; the last of our grandly (...) influential critics was Sir Herbert Read and since his death, whatever else modern art may or may not possess, it has no prophet. This is not to say that aesthetic prophets are necessarily desirable nor that there are not some very conscientious and extremely perceptive critics at work today; in view of the fact that I am within a fortnight exhibiting my work in a London dealer's gallery , it would be folly to deny it. But it is I believe true that for better or for worse we have no grand pundit of living art and I believe that this lack may be concerned with what I see as a certain diminution in the role of the art critic, a certain decay in this department of literature. It is a tendency which I regret and the causes of which I want to try to discuss. It arises I believe from a misunderstanding concerning the proper functions of the critic and this confusion of purpose will be my theme. First, however, I think that I should glance at two important circumstances which make the work of an art critic particularly difficult today. Quentin Bell, professor of the history and theory of art at Sussex University, has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists, and, Bloomsbury. His article, "Art and the Elite," appeared in the first issue of Critical Inquiry. "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" was originally delivered as the Leslie Stephen lecture at the University of Cambridge on November 26, 1973. Other contributions are "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

This paper is a reply to some of Scott Soames ' comments on my colloquium paper Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of the New Theory of Reference. Except for the indicated parts added in May, 1995, this paper was written on December 16th–25th, 1994 as my reply to Soames for the APA colloquium in Boston, December 28, 1994. In this paper, I argue that Soames ' contention that Marcus is not one of the primary founders of contemporary nondescriptivist theories of (...) reference is false. Soames presents numerous arguments for his thesis that Marcus did not originate ideas later elaborated upon by Kripke, but his arguments are unsound; they are based in part on a misunderstanding of Marcus' theory and in part on an inadequate grasp of some of the key notions of the New Theory of Reference, such as the notion of a posteriori necessities and the notion of reference-fixing descriptions. (shrink)

Some philosophers hold that the tenseless theory of time entails the "temporal parts" theory of personal identity, that a person is a succession of distinct particulars. Some philosophers also believe that the tensed theory of time entails the "substance" or "continuant" theory of personal identity, that a person is a single particular that endures through time. I argue that these philosophers are mistaken. Both the tensed and tenseless theories of time are compatible with both theories of personal identity.

This paper argues for a completely universal scepticism, according to which no beliefs at all are justified to the least degree. The argument starts with a version of the Agrippan trilemma, according to which, if we accept that a belief is justified, we must choose between foundationalism, coherentism of a particular sort, and an infinite regress of justified beliefs. Each of these theories is given a careful specification in terms of the relationship of “justifiedness in p depending on justifiedness in (...) q”. It is then argued that no beliefs – not even beliefs about phenomenal experiences – are foundational in the required way. Both coherentism and infinitism are untenable, since, since they face various objections, most significantly the objection that acceptance of either would commit one to allowing that all beliefs were justified. Because the three possible accounts of justificational structure all fail radically, it is concluded that no beliefs are justified. (shrink)

If big bang cosmology is true, then the universe began to exist about 15 billion years ago with a 'big bang', an explosion of matter, energy and space from a singular point. This singularity is spatially and temporally pointlike; that is, it has zero spatial dimensions and exists for an instant (at t=0) before exploding with a 'big bang'. The big bang singularity is also lawless; Stephen Hawking writes: A singularity is a place where the classical concepts of space and (...) time break down as do all the known laws of physics because they are all formulated on a classical space time background. ... [T]his breakdown is not merely a result of our ignorance of the correct theory but represents a fundamental limitation to our ability to predict the future [of the singularity], a limitation that is analogous but additional to the limitation imposed by the normal quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. [1] The lawlessness of the singularity entails that it 'would thus emit all [possible] configurations of particles with equal probability' [2]. Paul Davies describes this vividly: 'Anything can come out of a naked singularity -in the case of the big bang the universe came out.' [3]. (shrink)

Sceptics have been accused of achieving their sceptical conclusions by an arbitrary (though usually implicit) redefinition of terms like “justified”, so that, while it may be true that no belief is justified in the sceptic’s new sense of the word, all the beliefs we have taken as justified remain so in the ordinary, standard meaning of the term. This paper defends scepticism against this charge. It is pointed out that there are several sorts of case where someone’s belief may be (...) properly termed justified in one “sense”, or from one “point of view”, but from another, equally properly termed unjustified. It is argued that the point of view of the sceptic, or the sense in which he uses the term, is one of the perfectly standard ones, and not some arbitrarily introduced new sense. In addition, an explanation that is not damaging to scepticism is provided of a sceptic’s own continued ascriptions of justifiedness in everyday contexts. (shrink)

I shall argue in this paper that extant definitions of causality are incorrect since they do not cohere in the proper way with the concept of a cause of the universe. This lack of coherence is twofold. For some extant definitions of a cause, there are possible instances of the concept of a cause of the universe that do not satisfy the definitions. For these or other extant definitions, there are entities or occurrences that are not instances of the concept (...) of a cause of the universe but that count as causes of the universe according to the definitions. This failure of coherence between extant definitions of causality and the concept of a cause of the universe entails either that there is some other definition of a cause that is correct or that causality is indefinable. I shall suggest in the conclusion of this paper that it is more plausible to believe that causality is indefinable. (shrink)

Atheists have tacitly conceded the field to theists in the area of philosophical cosmology, specifically, in the enterprise of explaining why the universe exists. The theistic hypothesis is that the reason the universe exists lies in God’s creative choice, but atheists have not proposed any reason why the universe exists. I argue that quantum cosmology proposes such an atheistic reason, namely, that the universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of existing based on a functional law of nature. This (...) law of nature (“the wave function of the universe”) is inconsistent with theism and implies that God does not exist. I criticize the claims of Alston, Craig, Deltete and Guy, Oppy and Plantinga that theism is consistent with quantum cosmology. (shrink)

This article adopts a bottom-up approach to theory interpretation, following the slogan “meaning is use”, and applies it to quantum mechanics. I argue that it fits very well with the Consistent Histories formulation of quantum mechanics, interpreted in a particular way that is not the interpretation favoured by original proponents of the formulation. I examine the difficulties and advantages of this interpretation.

In his justifiedly famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74:4, 1996), David Lewis presents a contextualist account of knowledge, which, like other contextualist accounts, depicts sceptical claims as involving application of a higher standard of knowledge than is applied in everyday ascriptions of knowledge. On Lewis’ account, the sceptic’s denials and the everyday ascriptions are made in different contexts, which allows them both to be true. His account gives detailed specification of how contexts are to be determined. My (...) paper points out that this view is unattractive to the sceptic, since it makes scepticism, even if true, completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the rest of our cognitive discourse. After arguing that the sceptic’s own ascriptions of knowledge (made outside the philosophy seminar room) can be explained in non-contextualist ways, I expound and criticise Lewis’ analysis of knowledge, taking up in particular a central component of his account, the “Rule of Attention”. In the central part of the paper I argue that the reasons given for the inclusion of the rule are all inadequate, and also that there are positive reasons for rejecting it. The final section of the paper argues that the excision of the Rule of Attention removed would leave Lewis’ account subject to serious counter- examples. (shrink)

This edited collection explores the philosophy of Clarence Irving Lewis through two major concepts that are integral to his conceptual pragmatism: the a priori and the given. The relation between these two elements of knowledge form the core of Lewis’s masterpiece _Mind and the World-Order_. While Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism is directed against any conception of the _a priori_ as constraining the mind and experience, it also emphasizes the inalterability and the unavoidability of the given that remains the same through any (...) interpretation of it by the mind. The essays in this volume probe Lewis’s new account of the relation between the a priori and the given in dialogue with other notable figures in 20 th -century philosophy, including Carnap, Friedman, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Sellars, and Sheffer. _C.I. Lewis’s Conceptual Pragmatism_ __represents a focused treatment of a long-neglected figure in 20 th -century American philosophy. (shrink)

This edited collection explores the philosophy of Clarence Irving Lewis through two major concepts that are integral to his conceptual pragmatism: the a priori and the given. The relation between these two elements of knowledge form the core of Lewis's masterpiece Mind and the World-Order. While Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is directed against any conception of the a priori as constraining the mind and experience, it also emphasizes the inalterability and the unavoidability of the given that remains the same through any (...) interpretation of it by the mind. The essays in this volume probe Lewis's new account of the relation between the a priori and the given in dialogue with other notable figures in 20th-century philosophy, including Carnap, Friedman, Goodman, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Sellars, and Sheffer. C.I. Lewis: The A Priori and the Given represents a focused treatment of a long-neglected figure in 20th-century American philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to establish a connection between modelling practices and interpretive approaches in quantum mechanics, taking as a starting point the literature on scientific representation. Different types of modalities play different roles in scientific representation. I postulate that the way theoretical structures are interpreted in this respect affects the way models are constructed. In quantum mechanics, this would be the case in particular of initial conditions and observables. I examine two formulations of quantum mechanics, the standard (...) wave-function formulation and the consistent histories formulation, and show that they correspond to opposite stances, which confirms my approach. Finally, I examine possible strategies for deciding between these stances. (shrink)