While there is a considerable body of research on law student identity construction based on interviews and transcripts of classroom talk, there is very little work based on student written texts. In this article two letters of advice written by beginning law students are analysed, using Ivanic and Camps’s framework, as an example of identity formation. Legal identity is argued to be formed by students’ attempts to accommodate a dynamic, partial, practitioner role of provider of advice to the traditional analytic (...) focus of the law student. The process of accommodation is evident in the language of the letters, which show disfluencies resulting from attempts to combine different roles into a coherent legal identity. Comparison with a professionally written letter suggests that, rather than seeking to shape a coherent position, lawyers are able simultaneously to hold incompatible perspectives, concealing the tensions by foregrounding some perspectives and backgrounding others. (shrink)

The usual treatment of a dinner table utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is that it involves an indirect request to pass the salt as well as a direct question about the hearer’s ability to do so: an indirect speech act. These are held to involve two illocutionary forces and two illocutionary acts. Rod Bertolet has raised doubts about whether consideration of such examples warrants the postulation of indirect speech acts and illocutionary forces other than the literal ones. In (...) a recent article, Mary Kate McGowan, Shan Shan Tam, and Margaret Hall claim to show that these doubts are unfounded. The purpose of this paper is to show that they have not established this. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the role of sceptical thinking in the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, in the context of the seminal but contestable History of Scepticism by Richard Popkin. It investigates the anti-sceptical essay by Galen De optimo modo docendi, which was retranslated in the sixteenth century by Erasmus and later published as an adjunct to the works of Sextus Empiricus, in order to highlight the currency of ideas about hyperbolic doubt, and links this to the (...) long tradition of free enquiry in which doubting authority is seen as a profitable exercise closely associated with the independence of philosophy from theological domination; and it argues that this long tradition played an important role in the emergence of the new science. (shrink)

Climate change is a unique ethical problem. The individual actions of virtually everyone in the world contribute to climate change, which risk causing great harm, especially in the future. We are all complicit in causing this harm. In most cases, complicity implies accountability: one deserves blame or punishment, he becomes a legitimate subject of reactive attitudes, or he owes compensation. I argue that individuals are not accountable in these ways for their complicity in causing climate change. Rather, our moral accountability (...) flows directly to our political and collective responsibility. A morally decent person living in a developed, carbon-based society has no moral obligation to change the way she lives, but we all have strong moral duties to pressure our governments to enact effective policies to limit carbon emissions. (shrink)

The first edition, published by Acumen in 2000, became a prescribed textbook on modal logic courses. The second edition has been fully revised in response to readers' suggestions, including two new chapters on conditional logic, which was not covered in the first edition. "Modal Logics and Philosophy" is a fully comprehensive introduction to modal logics and their application suitable for course use. Unlike most modal logic textbooks, which are both forbidding mathematically and short on philosophical discussion, "Modal Logics and Philosophy" (...) places its emphasis firmly on showing how useful modal logic can be as a tool for formal philosophical analysis. In part 1 of the book, the reader is introduced to some standard systems of modal logic and encouraged through a series of exercises to become proficient in manipulating these logics. The emphasis is on possible world semantics for modal logics and the semantic emphasis is carried into the formal method, Jeffrey-style truth-trees. Standard truth-trees are extended in a simple and transparent way to take possible worlds into account. Part 2 systematically explores the applications of modal logic to philosophical issues such as truth, time, processes, knowledge and belief, obligation and permission. (shrink)

This book investigates theories of interpretation and meaning in Renaissance jurisprudence.

Robert I. Soare, Automorphisms of the Lattice of Recursively Enumerable Sets. Part I: Maximal Sets.Manuel Lerman, Robert I. Soare, $d$-Simple Sets, Small Sets, and Degree Classes.Peter Cholak, Automorphisms of the Lattice of Recursively Enumerable Sets.Leo Harrington, Robert I. Soare, The $\Delta^0_3$-Automorphism Method and Noninvariant Classes of Degrees.

I shall in this paper defend a universalizability thesis against certain objections. It will shortly be clear that the thesis defended is not the universalizability thesis as generally understood but something which differs crucially from it in that it claims no role whatsoever in ‘the definition of morality’. My title may therefore be misleading in this respect.

Philosophical descriptions of democratic music education frequently rely on “inclusion” and “participation” as the defining features of democratically oriented music programs. Democratic epistemic considerations, such as regulatory ideals of musical quality and excellence, however, are less commonly cited, if not actively avoided. This paper addresses several primary reasons for the paucity of epistemic considerations in democratic music education and problematizes current concerns about epistemic judgements from a democratic perspective. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice, this paper argues (...) that democratic dialogue that respects values of diversity and inclusion cannot legitimately ignore epistemic dimensions because doing so occludes the epistemic dimensions of cultural, racial, and gender diversity in music education classrooms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian CounterblastIan MacleanThere seem to me to be two good reasons for looking at Foucault’s Renaissance episteme again, even though specialists of the Renaissance have given it short shrift and Foucault himself does not seem to have set great store by it in his later writings. 1 The first is that in general books on Foucault accounts of it are still given in a (...) neutral or even approving way, as though neither the concept of episteme (which suggests both that mind-sets or paradigms or epistemes are all-constraining) nor the account of the Renaissance episteme in particular (which is given a predominantly Platonic and hermetic character) require modification, if not refutation. 2 I shall suggest that although in some sense we are all prisoners of our mind-sets, there are ways in which we can escape from this prison 3 ; and with respect to the Renaissance in particular, I shall claim that Aristotelianism, not Platonism, is the appropriate context in which to see the dominant universe of discourse of the day and that this philosophy can be shown to possess the resources for escaping its limitations. To do this I shall [End Page 149] give a brief resume of Foucault’s episteme in general and the Renaissance episteme in particular. Then I shall show first, that the Platonist features which he cites as typical are actively refuted at that time and cannot be described as dominant without severe qualification; second, that the versions of Aris-totelianism widely taught in universities and schools give quite different accounts of these features; and third, that this form of thinking can be shown to have the freedom of self-critique in the very areas in which Foucault chooses to see Renaissance philosophy as both constraining and constrained.In 1969 Foucault produced his “theoretical work” L’Archéologie du savoir as the methodological systematization of his earlier historical writings, L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (l961), La Naissance de la clinique (l963), and Les Mots et les choses (1966). In this work man is described as a modern self-invention, fashioned from a particular configuration of knowledge and destined soon to disappear. Foucault’s history of man is a story about the way he constituted himself as a subject and then made his body, his behavior, his reason, and his consciousness the object of his study and a field to be controlled, regulated, trained, and coerced. In this analysis man’s “rationality” becomes not a faculty but an authoritarian straitjacket. What Foucault sets out to investigate is a very fundamental form of ontology but not one associated with profound knowledge; it is a superficial and finite, if largely invisible, field, which is discontinuous, not defined by the agenda of the modern state of any associated discipline, and peopled by “utterances” (énoncés) which are only graspable in their differences and their dispersion. If coagulations of these “utterances” (formations discursives) occur at all, they appear only in the form of consistent relations: the objects to which they “refer” are no more than objectifications whose scientific status cannot be established and whose meaning cannot be recovered by semantic or rhetorical analysis. In calling his previous book Les Mots et les choses, he was being explicitly ironic, for neither the words nor the things of the title have any substance to them: they are not presences but absences. The description made by the historian is remote from his object, indirect, incomplete; it describes a “preconceptual field” in which the “preconcepts” are no more than organizing operators or functions revealing relationships of dependence, processes of validation, contingent theories of truth. The “utterances” which these “preconcepts” inform come together in “discourses” which are neither systems nor mere aggregations of knowledge; archaeological history as practiced by Foucault uncovers not a “mentality” but an “episteme,” which he defines as follows:By episteme we mean... the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, possibly formalized systems.... The episteme is not a form of knowledge or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries [End Page 150] of the most... (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We’ve all seen them, those slightly blurred pictures of elongated and otherwise misshapen athletes and horses crossing the finish line illustrating a news story about a tight finish in a sprint, at...

Abstract.In evolving to its great size the human brain has retained the distinctive features and chemistry of three kinds of brains that reflect an ancestral relationship to reptiles, early mammals, and late mammals. It constitutes, so to speak, a psychencephalon comprised of three‐brains‐in‐one, a triune brain. In the evolution from reptiles to mammals two key changes were the development of nursing and maternal care. Through the agency of “newer” parts of the brain a parental concern for family eventually generalizes not (...) only to other members of the species but to the entire biosphere, a psychological development that amounts to the evolution of responsibility and what we call conscience. Given our freedom to decide “yes” or “no” on various issues, we need not look beyond the evolving family to find a reason for being, an ethic to live by. (shrink)

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political involvement? And how (...) should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical, sometimes dramatic, choices about their role in the political arena. (shrink)

This chapter will argue that due to a lack of genuine consent, some of Russell’s practices in his romantic/sexual relationships are morally objectionable according to his own normative theory (utilitarianism) and these practices are intellectually objectionable according to his post-1913 meta-ethics (expressivism) and his understanding of rationality. On utilitarian grounds, Russell’s actions would maximize pleasure and minimize pain for all the parties affected by the relationship if the authenticity of his partners’ consent were maintained either by a more or less (...) equal social and political standing of the partners or, failing that, by the powerful partner’s exercise of the virtue of restraint; neither of these conditions was satisfied in Russell’s relationships with Vivien Eliot or Helen Dudley. On expressivist grounds, the expressions of desires upon which Russell’s romantic/sexual practices were based, such as the disregard for the humanity of women, conflict with his calls for world peace based on a concern for the well-being of humanity. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued against “speciesism”—an attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species. In reply, Douglas MacLean defends a speciesist or humanist outlook on morality, exploring the ways in which ethics is inextricably tied to practices that define what it is to live a distinctively human life.

The new edition of this widely used and respected textbook includes three new chapters on conditional logic. Other chapters have been revised and updated, making the second edition a fully comprehensive introduction to modal logics and their application. Unlike most modal logic textbooks, which are both forbidding mathematically and short on philosophical discussion, Modal Logics and Philosophy focuses on showing how useful modal logic can be as a tool for formal philosophical analysis. In Part 1, the reader is introduced to (...) some standard systems of modal logic and provided with a series of exercises that encourage proficiency in manipulating these logics. Girle emphasizes possible world semantics for modal logics and its formal method, Jeffrey-style truth-trees, in which standard truth-trees are extended in a simple and transparent way to take possible worlds into account. Part 2 explores the applications of modal logic to philosophical issues such as truth, time, processes, knowledge and belief, and obligation and permission. (shrink)

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

Traces the development of recursive functions from their origins in the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, with particular emphasis on the work and influence of Kurt Gödel.

The reputation of the Christian tradition has fared poorly in the literature on the history of attitudes to nonhuman animals. This is more a consequence of secularist prejudice than objective scholarship. The idea of "dominion" and the understanding of animal souls are almost universally misrepresented. There has been no firmer conclusion than that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution had a profoundly beneficial impact on the recognition of our similarities to, kinship with, and consequent moral obligations to, other species. In reality, (...) Darwinism had no such effect. That there was an essential kinship with, and homologies between, humans and other species had been attested to for centuries. In the first major ethical issue that arose after the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man -- legislation to restrict vivisection -- Darwin and Huxley stood on the side of more or less unrestricted vivisection while many major explicitly Christian voices -- from Cardinal Manning to Lord Chief Justice Coleridge to the Earl of Shaftesbury -- demanded the most severe restrictions, in many cases abolition. The customary tale of how Christianity hindered the development of sensibilities to animals and how Darwinism occasioned a revolution in animal ethics needs to be rethought and retold. (shrink)

In their book, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Depew and Weber argued for the need to address the relationship between self-organization and natural selection in evolutionary theory, and focused on seven “visions” for doing so. Recently, Batten et al. in a paper in this journal, entitled “Visions of evolution: self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes,” picked up the issue with the work of Depew and Weber as a starting point. While the efforts of both sets (...) of authors are to be commended, there are substantive errors in both the presentations of my work and of my work with colleagues that undermine theirs. My purpose here is to correct the errors in question, thereby removing the undermining effects and in so doing reassert the position my colleagues and I first advanced more than two decades ago, and that I still stand by and argue for today. The central points are as follows: Self-organization or spontaneous ordering is a process of selection; this selection process is governed by a “physical selection principle”; this principle is the law of maximum entropy production; and natural selection is a special case where the components are replicating. (shrink)

Consent transforms an otherwise illegitimate act into a legitimate one. To be valid, however, it must be adequately informed. The legal requirement is vague and provides little assistance in predicting when it will be satisfied. This is particularly so when a patient consents to a procedure and the physician subsequently varies one of the components of that procedure. Using three legal judgments and one General Medical Council decision as a springboard, I have explored the concept of a medical procedure within (...) the context of consent and developed a theoretical model to elucidate a more predictable and consistent informational requirement. (shrink)

In The Analysis of Matter (1927) Bertrand Russell constructs point-instants from events. During the writing of the manuscript, he encountered a problem with the initial definition of a point-instant and revised the definition accordingly in the published version. My principal aim is to show that the problem was brought to his attention by F.P. Ramsey. Secondly, I explain the reason why Russell investigates, and consequently endorses, a different method of construction of point-instants in Human Knowledge (1948), even though he was (...) able to overcome the difficulties involving the construction of point-instants in The Analysis of Matter.. (shrink)

This article is an examination of the Augsburg physician Ieremias Martius’s Catalogus bibliothecae of 1572, which may well by the first printed sales catalogue of a library. The author claims it to be the product of careful selection, covering the whole field of medicine and containing both rare and recent medical books. The catalogue is placed here in the context of Martius’s career, and his contacts in the European medical world. An account is given of the bibliographical resources available to (...) him, before the contents themselves are anatomised. His interest in various fields is revealed here: medieval practical medicine, medical humanism, anatomy, Hippocratism, medical observationes and letter collections, gynecology, astrological medicine, balneology, botany, and the literature of medical secrets. Martius’s eclecticism and open-mindedness is revealed further through a comparison of his library with five other contemporary book collections of doctors. (shrink)