This is an extensively re-written second edition of a well regarded and much cited text on the issue of animal protection. It remains the only text to combine an examination of the philosophy and politics of the issue. Its central argument is that the philosophical debate is central to an understanding and evaluation of the substantive issues involving animals and the nature of the movement for change. The book has been thoroughly revised to include major theoretical and empirical developments. Specifically, (...) the "second generation" of animal ethics literature is examined in detail, and attention is paid to the campaigns and public controversy over the export of live animals and the use of animals in research, the impact of genetic engineering on the welfare of animals and the latest developments in the controversy over hunting. (shrink)

This book clarifies the relation between religion and ethics, articulates principles governing religion in politics, and outlines a theory of civic virtue. It frames institutional principles to guide governmental policies toward religion and counterpart standards to guide individual citizens; and it defends an account of toleration that leavens the ethical framework both in individual nations and internationally.

In this book, Robert Talisse critically examines the moral and political implications of pluralism, the view that our best moral thinking is indeterminate and that moral conflict is an inescapable feature of the human condition. Through a careful engagement with the work of William James, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and their contemporary followers, Talisse distinguishes two broad types of moral pluralism: metaphysical and epistemic. After arguing that metaphysical pluralism does not offer a compelling account of value and thus cannot (...) ground a viable conception of liberal politics, Talisse proposes and defends a distinctive variety of epistemic pluralism. According to this view, certain value conflicts are at present undecidable rather than intrinsic. Consequently, epistemic pluralism countenances the possibility that further argumentation, enhanced reflection, or the acquisition of more information could yield rational resolutions to the kinds of value conflicts that metaphysical pluralists deem irresolvable as such. Talisse’s epistemic pluralism hence prescribes a politics in which deep value conflicts are to be addressed by ongoing argumentation and free engagement among citizens; the epistemic pluralist thus sees liberal democracy is the proper political response to ongoing moral disagreement. (shrink)

Based on the "Guide to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990", this volume reviews the regulation of assisted conception including complex moral issues such as abortion, embryo research and cloning.

The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics involves two assumptions: one about locality and the other about when it is legitimate to infer the existence of an element-of-reality. Using one simple thought experiment, we argue that quantum predictions and the relativity of simultaneity require that both these assumptions fail, whether or not quantum mechanics is complete.

Explores the human condition in a range of world religions and discusses the issue and philosophical implications of comparison itself.

Anthropology, History, and Education, first published in 2007, contains all of Kant's major writings on human nature. Some of these works, which were published over a thirty-nine year period between 1764 and 1803, had never before been translated into English. Kant's question 'What is the human being?' is approached indirectly in his famous works on metaphysics, epistemology, moral and legal philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, but it is approached directly in his extensive but less well-known writings on physical (...) and cultural anthropology, the philosophy of history, and education which are gathered in the present volume. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question 'What is the human being?' should be philosophy's most fundamental concern, and Anthropology, History, and Education can be seen as effectively presenting his philosophy as a whole in a popular guise. (shrink)

Uno de los principales filosofos de nuestro tiempo, Robert Nozick, continua en este libro la tradicion socratica de investigacion. Este volumen ilustra la originalidad, fuerza y alcance de su obra, a la vez que demuestra su sello personal al combinar un extraordinario rigor analitico con un inteligente juego intelectual. A traves de ensayos y ficciones filosoficas, el libro abarca desde Socrates hasta Quine. Algunos ensayos ofrecen metodos clasicos para apoyar nuevas preguntas en torno a la eleccion. Otros, nuevas aproximaciones (...) a conocidos puzzles intelectuales. Estos escritos dan testimonio tanto de la oportunidad como de la inoportunidad del pensamiento del autor; pero sobre todo demuestran como la filosofia puede ser una forma de vida. (shrink)

Robert S. Summers is a distinguished legal theorist whose work has had significant influence in Europe as well as the United States. The study of form and substance in law, the theme of this collection, marks many of his most distinctive contributions to law and legal philosophy over four decades.

In this introductory paper, we assess the current status of blindsight -- the phenomenon in which patients with damage to their primary visual cortex retain the ability to detect, discriminate and localize visual stimuli presented in areas of their visual field in which they report that they are subjectively blind. Blindsight has garnered a great deal of interest and critical research, in part because of its important implications for the philosophy of mind. We briefly consider why this is so, and (...) then go on to examine three empirical questions which have fuelled challenges to the validity of blindsight as a distinct neuropsychological phenomenon. First, is blindsight simply degraded normal vision? Second, does blindsight depend on undamaged areas of primary visual cortex? Third, does evidence that blindsight patients are aware of moving stimuli undermine the apparent dissociation between access to visual information and visual experience in blindsight? In the course of the review we introduce the four other papers on blindsight in this issue. We conclude that, although patients with primary visual cortex damage may indeed perceive moving stimuli, there is still good evidence for a dissociation between access to information and phenomenal experience which cannot be accounted for in terms of degraded normal vision or undamaged primary visual cortex. (shrink)

Throughout his writings, Hayek has emphasized that a "scientistic prejudice" is working as a bad steering factor in the research for sound theories in the general field of social sciences, and especially in economics. Notwithstanding Hayek's criticism, most contemporary economists still think that they must imitate methods of physical and biological sciences in order to do good and valid science. While Hayek was first vehemently reproving this methodological choice in his early writings (for example, Hayek 1952), he was afterwards convinced (...) by Popper, as he himself acknowledges (see Hayek 1967) that the scientific method social scientists sought to transpose into their own research field was mere illusion. Consequently, Hayek rejected the confirmationist approach to economic theories and adopted a strict falsificationist one (this is very clear in the Nobel Memorial Lecture: see Hayek 1974). (shrink)

Ecrit vraisemblablement vers 386/385, le Menexene s'attache a l'eloquence politique lors d'oraison funebre en l'honneur de citoyens morts au combat. Dans ce dialogue, Socrate indique au jeune Menexene qui entre en politique, comment se moquer des orateurs en lui recitant une oraison funebre provenant de sa maitresse Aspasie, epouse de Pericles. L'ouvrage decortique l'un des premiers dialogues de Platon.

The various cosmological proposals by Einsteinian relativists seek to show the structure of the world as a consequence of the basic notions of relativity. In particular, the irrelevance of the state of motion of an observer to his description of the fundamental laws of nature is to be maintained. Furthermore, gravity is understood as being a description of the fact that particles move along certain minimal paths in non-Euclidean space. In this theory, the effect of one material particle on another (...) particle in the old-fashioned sense of gravitational attraction becomes indirect; that is, a particle moves on a minimal path in a space having a degree of curvature dependent on the material entities which exist in it, rather than having its path bent by the attraction between it and other material bodies, all of them existing in an absolute or receptacle-like space. (shrink)

This book explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Robert S. Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.

In an important 2006 paper, Nishi Shah defends ‘evidentialism’, the position that only evidence for a proposition’s truth constitutes a reason to believe this proposition. In opposition to Shah, Anthony Robert Booth, Andrew Reisner and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen argue that things other than evidence of truth, so-called non-evidential or ‘pragmatic’ reasons, constitute reasons to believe a proposition. I argue that we can effectively respond to Shah’s pragmatist critics if, following Shah, we are careful to distinguish the evaluation of the reasons (...) for a belief from the process of actually forming a belief and allowing it to influence action. Drawing this distinction is assisted if we utilize Rudolf Carnap’s probabilistic interpretation of what it means to be disposed to believe a claim. (shrink)

In the Scholium to the Definitions at the beginning of the {\em Principia\/} Newton distinguishes absolute time, space, place and motion from their relative counterparts and attempts to justify they are indeed ontologically distinct in that the absolute quantity cannot be reduced to some particular category of the relative, as Descartes had attempted by defining absolute motion to be relative motion with respect to immediately ambient bodies. Newton's bucket experiment, rather than attempting to show that absolute motion exists, is one (...) of five arguments from the properties, causes and effects of motion that attempts to show that no such program can succeed, and thus that true motion can be adequately analyzed only by invoking immovable places, i.e., the parts of absolute space. (shrink)

René Descartes was a French mathematician and philosopher and is considered the father of modern philosophy. Coinciding with a period of scientific exploration and discovery in Europe, modern philosophy emphasized the use of reason over a dependence on traditional ways of thinking about the world. Embodying this spirit, Descartes split with many of the medieval and scholastic philosophers that came before him and attempted to build a philosophical system from scratch. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes begins this project (...) by considering how much we can know about the world around us. In this piece, we will critically examine Descartes’ arguments that reality is not what it appears to be. Descartes makes the case that we can't rule out that our life is all a dream or that we might all be radically deceived. Is there any way that we can rule these things out? (shrink)

With a new preface, Robert Paul Wolff's classic analysis of the foundations of the authority of the state and the problems of political authority and moral autonomy in a democracy.

This essay describes possible futures that may result from accelerating technological advances and the challenges these futures present to psychotherapists. In the next 100 years, human beings will be likely to increasingly use computers and artificial intelligence and become extremely dependent on this relationship. Chip and stem cell implants may provide people with greater memory capacity, computational capacity, and skill sets. Genetic engineering, cryonics, and cloning may allow dramatic increases in the human life span these developments occur, they will challenge (...) what it means to be a human being and have a soul. Although psychotherapists will acquire new tools for assessment and intervention, they will face the daunting task of addressing these changes and challenges to personhood with their clients. (shrink)

Most of the time when historians study chemistry the subject dealt with is what might be called élite chemistry. This is chemistry at the cutting edge, chemistry which makes a difference to how we come to understand the properties of matter, molecules, reactions, and so on. Other associated matters which may be explored by historians of chemistry concern social, economic or political relationships with élite chemistry. In this Debus Lecture I want to consider what possibilities there were that the working-class (...) would be able to learn about chemistry in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and how and why this was achieved. (shrink)

That self-interest is a source of reasons for action has rarely if ever been controversial in philosophy. That the interest of others is such a source for normal persons has often seemed to philosophers to need argument. I refer to non-instrumental normative reasons, and I assume that when one has a reason of this kind to do something, doing it is prima facie rational. If the only source of basic reasons for action—those having non-instrumental normative force, and in a certain (...) sense non-derivative force—is self-interest, then the only way ethics can have a rational grip on us is through our viewing others as in some sense means to our own ends. This does not make ethics impossible, for it might be true and quite credible that in the long run our self-interest is adequately served only by leading a minimally moral life. I have long argued, however, that self-interest is not the only basic source of reasons for action and, more positively, that the basic grounds of practical rationality are in a special way impersonal. In “Audi on the Rationality of Altruism”, Charlott Becker and her colleagues explore my case for this view. (shrink)

Congenial information is often judged to be more valid than uncongenial information. The present research explores a related possibility concerning the process by which people label a claim as fundamentally factual or opinion. Rather than merely being more skeptical of uncongenial claims, uncongenial claims may be metacognitively categorized as more opinion than factual, while congenial claims may be more likely to be categorized as factual. The two studies reported here attempt to trace a preliminary outline of how claims are categorized (...) as fact, opinion, or some mix of the two in the context of mundane claims, contentious political issues, and conspiracy theories. The findings suggest that claims are more likely to be labeled factual to the extent that one subjectively agrees with the content of the claim. Conspiracy theories appear to occupy a middle-ground between fact and opinion. This metacognitive approach may help shed light on popular debate about conspiracy theories, as well as seemingly intractable political disagreements more generally, which may reflect fundamental differences in the perceived epistemic foundations of claims rather than simple disagreement over the facts of the matter. Given limitations of the stimuli and participant samples, however, it remains to be seen how generalizable these findings are. (shrink)

This article begins with an introduction to defeasible (nonmonotonic) reasoning and a brief description of a computer program, EVID, which can perform such reasoning. I then explain, and illustrate with examples, how this program can be applied in computational representations of ordinary dialogic argumentation. The program represents the beliefs and doubts of the dialoguers, and uses these propositional attitudes, which can include commonsense defeasible inference rules, to infer various changing conclusions as a dialogue progresses. It is proposed that computational representations (...) of this kind are a useful tool in the analysis of dialogic argumentation, and, in particular, demonstrate the important role of defeasible reasoning in everyday arguments using commonsense reasoning. (shrink)