It may be seen, then, that if one was prepared to accept the existence of insulating sheaths on the nerves, all the arguments raised against the proposed identification of the nervous and electrical fluids, except one, could be answered satisfactorily. The single exception involved the question of how an electrical disturbance in the brain could be confined to a single nerve, and, as was indicated earlier, it was scarcely fair to hold this sort of objection against the electrical theory alone. (...) In that case, there remained no convincing argument to show why one should not accept the identification of the two fluids. On the other hand, of course, it remained an open question as to whether there was any convincing argument to show why one should accept the identification either. Galvani thought that his experiments provided just such an argument. (shrink)

Drawing on Iris Marion Young's essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Weir argues for an alternative ideal of home that involves: the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; relational identities, constituted through both relations of power and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; and connection to past and future, through reinterpretive preservation (...) and transformative identification. (shrink)

There has been much debate recently as to whether the notion of truth, as applied to one's home language, is metaphysically neutral, the interesting metaphysical questions arising elsewhere (in relation to such notions as mind-independence or objectivity or existence). ' On one side, the minimalists, as they have come to be known, favour deflationary accounts of truth such as the redundancy or disquotational theories and conclude that the notion of truth is applicable to declarative sentences in general - at (...) least where there are fairly definite standards of appropriateness for the assertion or denial of such sentences - irrespective of the metaphysical commitments of the propositions the sentences express. Opponents have criticized the minimalist account of truth or denied that it follows from this account that truth is metaphysically neutral. My sympathies in this debate lie with the minimalist but I wish to focus on a serious problem for the minimalist - that posed by the Liar paradox. This problem has featured very little in the recent debate but seems to me to yield the strongest objection to minimalism. I develop the objection in the next section, in §2 sketching what I feel to be the minimalist's best response, namely developing the position not in terms of Tarskian classical biconditionals but rather in terms of the naive rules for truth. It emerges, then, that the minimalist will be forced to repudiate classical logic. The last section, §3, deals with objections to the strategy of §2. (shrink)

The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential architecture. But the domestic spaces can also extend out, metaphorically, into familiar public spaces in which one may feel at home, and also extend inwards into self-perception, insofar as you may say that you dwell within yourself. This article begins by recalling Vitruvius’ fundamental notion of architectural utilitas concerns accommodating not a building’s owners but foreigners and strange outsiders. Vitruvius’ view on utility heavily favoured architecture’s socio-political function, (...) and the guests he believed that architecture ought to accommodate were not merely a home’s owners or their visiting friends, but those people who are more distant from a home’s owners: those who are stranger and less well understood, known as xenos and who ought to be respected under the Ancient Greek religious and ethical principle of xenia. It is on these grounds that Vitruvius makes an ethical critique of residential architecture in favour of the virtue of public architecture. Next the reach of xenia is proposed to extend towards those who are different not merely because of ethnic differences but cognitive and sensory differences. Such accommodations are today accounted for as part of accessibility design and salutogenic design. Similar conceptions are noted in Nietzsche’s notion of an “architecture for the perceptive” and the surrealist’s interpretation of the minotaur as a hybrid not only of animal and human but a hybrid of civilised citizen and barbarian outsider. Together these sketch out an expanded sense of the domestic that includes public spaces designed to accommodate strange outsiders and the hybrid forms used to signify them. (shrink)

Medical practitioners of the sixteenth century had their own body of special terms, just like the doctors of this century. McConchie examines medical terminology used in a selection of thirteen medical works published between 1547 and 1612, and compares it with treatment of these words in the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries of today, showing how well - or ill - the specialist terminology of sixteenth-century medical practitioners has been recorded. He compiles a corpus of new data from a (...) selection of medical texts ranging from scholarly tomes to homely handbooks. The study of this corpus reveals errors, omissions, and biases which raise questions for lexicographical tools in general. Are existing dictionaries adequate in their investigation of Renaissance English? Has current understanding been more biased and more deficient than we thought? If so, how are we to redress the problem? This book uses a specialist semantic domain to raise important issues for lexicographers, and historians of early modern English and medicine. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so (...) much to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:160 BOOK REVIEWS ary. The latter dispose toward {mediate) and help in the expression of (pertain to the use of) the grace of the Spirit. In professing the priority of the Spirit, The Reshaping of Catholicism could hardly be in greater agreement with the Summa theologiae. This theme in Dulles suggests how Aquinas can be linked to ecclesial renewal: Aquinas's thought on the New Law can assist the Church (...) in continually re-acquiring its own divinely given internal order. FR. THOMAS HUGHSON, S.J. Pontificial Biblical Institute,!erusalem; Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action. By ALAN DoNAGAN. Studies in Philosophical Psychology, R. F. Holland, ed. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Pp. x + 197. $29.95 (cloth). Readers of Donagan expecting a book in the style of The Theory of Morality will be surprised; Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action is far more compact and demanding. In setting out to support his thesis that the "propositional attitudes" (the term is taken from Russell) of beliefs and wishes explain choices which, in turn, explain human actions, the author considers a plethora of views and objections of both contemporary and traditional philosophers: Gilbert Ryle-whose Concept of Mind Donagan considers a classic of analytic Aristotelianism -Roderick Chisholm, Donald Davidson, Anthony Kenny, John Searle, Alvin Goldman, Elizabeth Anscombe, Bertrand Russell, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Frege. At times the reader may wish that fewer theorists were appealed to, or perhaps that his or her familiarity with the views referred to were more extensive, or at least that (although not in the case of Frege) they were explicated in more detail. Further explication, however, could obscure hopelessly the line of reasoning of the author. While he appears to wish to give credit every place it is due, he also wishes to clarify the genesis of significant objections to be met by a defensible action theory. Happily, Donagan himself provides an overview of his project, which he calls a " Plan for an Investigation of Human Action on Socratic Lines." This is proffered in chapter one after the author has discussed the " Socratic tradition in the theory of human action " and the question "Should the Socratic tmdition be jettisoned as folk psychology?" BOOK REVIEWS 161 As these sections provide the foundation for Donagan's thesis, they are briefly summarized here. Considering both Aristotle and the " mediaeval Aristotelian " Aquinas to be in the Socratic tradition, Donagan emphasizes Aristotle's role in distinguishing human from animal action. Possibilities for acting are represented in the human intellect in propositions, toward which one can take various attitudes. Those philosophers who hold that such propositional attitudes cannot explain human action are challenged. Donagan then takes on those cognitive scientists who reject as " stagnant " and rooted in folk beliefs the Socratic theory of action. He rather impressively presents the problems involved in admitting, as do the " scientific psychologists," the practicality of employing the notion of propositional attitudes in history and natural sciences (which seem to exist in a context of history), while at the same time actually :rejecting the existence of such attitudes and hence their theoretical validity. Indeed, Donagan brings home the point that it is simply incon· sistent to hold both that there are no beliefs and that the belief that there are beliefs underlies a stagnant research program. Having thus sustained his position :regarding propositional attitudes in general, Donagan summarizes, chapter by chapter, his "contem· po:rary Socratic " plan for examining the actions of rational animals. It will be helpful to sketch this program, filling in crucial portions. In chapter two the author contends that bodily or mental actions are events that are individuals insofar as they are " changes or persistences in states of continuing individual objects" (p. 38). Propositional attitudes are states, but their arising and persistence in being as energeiai are events that explain,actions. Building on Aristotle's teaching and that of his mediaeval successors, in chapter three Donagan argues that beliefs and wishes, or the cognitive and appetitive propositional at· titudes, explain choices which in turn explain actions. In chapter four Donagan elucidates Durnmett's :revision of the Fregeau semantical theory, which he opts... (shrink)

[Alan Weir] This paper addresses the problem of how to account for objective content-for the distinction between how we actually apply terms and the conditions in which we ought to apply them-from within a naturalistic framework. Though behaviourist or dispositionalist approaches are generally held to be unsuccessful in naturalising objective content or 'normativity', I attempt to restore the credibility of such approaches by sketching a behaviouristic programme for explicating objective content. /// [Alexander Miller] Paul Boghossian (1989, 1990) has argued, (...) on grounds concerning the holistic nature of belief fixation, that there are principled reasons for thinking that 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism about content cannot hope to satisfy a condition of extensional accuracy. I discern three separable strands of argument in Boghossian's work-the circularity objection, the open-endedness objection, and the certification objection-and argue that each of these objections fails. My conclusion is that for all that Boghossian has shown, 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist (...) feminists like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)

This book evaluates the widespread preference in philosophy of mind for varieties of property dualism over other alternatives to physicalism. It takes the standard motivations for property dualism as a starting point and argues that these lead directly to nonphysical substances resembling the soul of traditional metaphysics. In the first half of the book, the author clarifies what is at issue in the choice between theories that posit nonphysical properties only and those that posit nonphysical substances. The crucial question, he (...) argues, is whether one posits nonphysical things that satisfy an Aristotelian-Cartesian independence definition of substance: nonphysical things that could exist in the absence of anything else. In the second half, the author argues that standard and Russellian monist forms of property dualism are far less plausible than we usually suppose. Most significantly, the presuppositions of one of the leading arguments for property dualism, the conceivability argument, lead by parity of reasoning to the view that conscious subjects are nonphysical substances. He concludes that if you posit nonphysical properties in response to the mind-body problem then you should be prepared to posit nonphysical substances as well. Mainstream philosophy of mind must take nonphysical substances far more seriously than it has done for the best part of a century. The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Responsibility is often thought of as primarily a legal concept. Even when it is moral responsibility that is at issue, it is assumed that it is above all in moralities based on law-centered patterns and models that responsibility takes center stage, so that responsibility is a legal concept at its core, and is applicable to the realm of private morality only by extension and analogy.

How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of individual and collective identities in relation to freedom.

Neo-Fregeans argue that substantial mathematics can be derived from a priori abstraction principles, Hume's Principle connecting numerical identities with one:one correspondences being a prominent example. The embarrassment of riches objection is that there is a plurality of consistent but pairwise inconsistent abstraction principles, thus not all consistent abstractions can be true. This paper considers and criticizes various further criteria on acceptable abstractions proposed by Wright settling on another one—stability—as the best bet for neo-Fregeans. However, an analogue of the embarrassment of (...) riches objection resurfaces in the metatheory and I conclude by arguing that the neo-Fregean program, at least insofar as it includes a platonistic ontology, is fatally wounded by it. (shrink)

Truth Through Proof defends an anti-platonist philosophy of mathematics derived from game formalism. Alan Weir aims to develop a more satisfactory successor to game formalism utilising a widely accepted, broadly neo-Fregean framework, in which the proposition expressed by an utterance is a function of both sense and background circumstance.

In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.

Logicians interested in naive theories of truth or set have proposed logical frameworks in which classical operational rules are retained but structural rules are restricted. One increasingly popular way to do this is by restricting transitivity of entailment. This paper discusses a series of logics in this tradition, in which the transitivity restrictions are effected by a determinacy constraint on assumptions occurring in both the major and minor premises of certain rules. Semantics and proof theory for 3-valued, continuum-valued and surreal-valued (...) semantics are given and the proof theory for the systems outlined. The framework is robust in the sense that no conditional, defined or primitive, which sustains the contraction principles underlying Curry paradoxes can be expressed. Classical recapture is smoothly achievable in the system which however is expressively limited and not semantically closed. The conclusion considers the issue of how to extend the system to capture full naive set theory. (shrink)

Libertarianism needs a theory of class. This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: “The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?” A greater number will say: “We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one.”.

Naive set theory, as found in Frege and Russell, is almost universally believed to have been shown to be false by the set-theoretic paradoxes. The standard response has been to rank sets into one or other hierarchy. However it is extremely difficult to characterise the nature of any such hierarchy without falling into antinomies as severe as the set-theoretic paradoxes themselves. Various attempts to surmount this problem are examined and criticised. It is argued that the rejection of naive set theory (...) inevitably leads one into a severe scepticism with regard to the feasibility of giving a systematic semantics for set theory. It is further argued that this is not just a problem for philosophers of mathematics. Semantic scepticism in set theory will almost inevitably spill over into total pessimism regarding the prospects for an explanatory theory of language and meaning in general. The conclusion is that those who wish to avoid such intellectual defeatism need to look seriously at the possibility that it is the logic used in the derivation of the paradoxes, and not the naive set theory itself, which is at fault. (shrink)

J. S. Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures is often thought to conflict with his commitment to psychological and ethical hedonism: if the superiority of higher pleasures is quantitative, then the higher/lower distinction is superfluous and Mill contradicts himself; if the superiority of higher pleasures is not quantitative, then Mill's hedonism is compromised.

The guiding idea behind formalism is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an abstract sector of reality but is much more akin to a game, bringing with it no more commitment to an ontology of objects or properties than ludo or chess. This idea has some intuitive plausibility: consider the tyro toiling at multiplication tables or the student using a standard algorithm for differentiating or integrating a function. It also corresponds to some aspects of the practice of (...) advanced mathematicians in some periods—for example, the treatment of imaginary numbers for some time after Bombelli's introduction of them, and perhaps the attitude of some contemporary mathematicians towards the higher flights of set theory. Finally, it is often the position to which philosophically naïve respondents will gesture towards, when pestered by questions as to the nature of mathematics. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to develop a terminological structure in which private perceptions can be discussed publicly without bringing into existence the usual unnecessary philosophical problems of confused usage of language. chisholm displays an appraisive, quasi-ethical use of language, whereby he claims that a thing has some particular sensible property is to have adequate evidence that it actually does have that property. (staff).

Starting with the distinction between epistemological and ontological naturalism, this chapter focuses most on Quine’s epistemological naturalism, not the ontological anti-naturalism he thought it leads to. It is argued that naturalised epistemology is not central to Quine’s epistemology. Quine’s key epistemological principle is:- follow the methods of science, and only those. Can Quine demarcate scientific methods from non-scientific ones? The problems which have been raised here, e.g. in the case of mathematics, are considered. A main theme is the relationship between (...) Quine’s naturalism and reductionist forms of ‘scientistic’ naturalism. Quine is generally taken to be an anti-reductionist, unsurprisingly given his explicit anti-reductionist pronouncements from ‘Two Dogmas’ onwards. It is argued that the situation is more complex than this and that key Quinean arguments are driven by a positivistic reductionism he never entirely broke free from. (shrink)

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the wide range of issues surrounding "passive euthanasia" and "allow-to-die" decisions. The author develops a comprehensive conceptual model that is highly useful for assessing and dealing with real-life situations. He presents an informative historical overview, an evaluation of the clinical settings in which treatment abatement takes place, and an insightful discussion of relevant legal aspects. The result is a clearly articulated ethical analysis that is medically realistic, philosophically sound, and legally viable.

We began with three propositions: that people have a right not to be treated as mere means to the ends of others, that a woman who voluntarily becomes pregnant nevertheless has the right to an abortion, and that a woman who voluntarily gives birth does not have a right to abandon her child until she finds a substitute caretaker. These propositions initially seemed inconsistent, for the prohibition on treating others as mere means appeared to rule out the possibility of positive (...) rights, thus making it impossible to countenance the right to abort or the right not to be abandoned . But we have seen that the prohibition on treating people as mere means to the ends of others is best understood as ruling out basic positive rights while permitting derivative ones. Since a willing mother is responsible for bringing her child into the world in the first place, she cannot abandon it without violating its negative right not to be killed, and so such a child has a derivative positive right not to be abandoned. A pregnant woman, on the other hand, has a negative right not to have her body invaded, and from this negative right derives a positive right to abort her fetus, so long as doing so is not disproportionate to the seriousness of the threat . Therefore, far from being in conflict, propositions , , and have been shown to be in harmony with one another, the latter two being plausibly grounded in the first. Insofar as we have reason to accept , then, we have reason to accept and . Moreover, we have seen that a proper understanding of allows us to embed and in a larger moral perspective in which the limits of compulsory altruism are firmly drawn: enforceable rights to the use or assistance of others may be allowed into the moral domain only if they are “sponsored” by some negative right. Every putative positive right must find such a sponsor, or perish. (shrink)

Mathematics poses a difficult problem for methodological naturalists, those who embrace scientific method, and also for ontological naturalists who eschew non-physical entities such as Cartesian souls. Mathematics seems both essential to science but also committed to abstract non-physical entities while methodologically it seems to have no place for experiment or empirical confirmation. The chapter critically reviews a number of responses naturalists have made including logicism, Quinean radical empiricism, and Penelope Maddy’s variant thereof and suggests some further problems both for ontological (...) and for methodological naturalists. (shrink)

Graham Harman describes the allure of art as the tension and fusion of a real object to sensual qualities so that it makes it seem that the inwardness of reality is opened to us. Yet real objects are withdrawn; how are we aware of their fusion? Since Harman’s ontology mandates that contact between real objects occurs only through sensual objects, this essay explores the idea that art’s allure must be a tension between sensual objects that draw the experiencer to believe, (...) or alieve, they are in contact with the withdrawn real. By looking at the examples in representational painting and sleight of hand magic, we see that ontographic art objects use at least four, carefully separated sensual objects to produce their aesthetic effect. The conclusion summarises allure as a sensual object process, speculates on art’s dialetheic confusion of sensual and real objects giving an enduring allure to idealism, and notes potential motifs of an infra-realist resistance. (shrink)

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to (...) the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art. (shrink)

Franz Brentano developed an original theory of intrinsic value which he attempted to base on his philosophical psychology. Roderick Chisholm presents here a critical exposition of this theory and its place in Brentano's general philosophical system. He gives a detailed account of Brentano's ontology, showing how Brentano tried to secure objectivity for ethics not through a theory of practical reason, but through his theory of the intentional objects of emotions and desires. Professor Chisholm goes on to develop certain suggestions (...) about intrinsic value made by Brentano and his students, and discusses their relevance to theodicy and the problem of evil. Brentano, as the teacher of Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, and others, stands at the origin of the phenomenological tradition and of the Polish school of philosophy that developed after World War I. He has also had considerable influence on Anglo-American philosophy. This book will interest those concerned with the origins of phenomenological value theory and more generally with the connections between ethics and philosophical psychology. (shrink)

In her book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood analyzes the practices of the women in the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Mahmood argues that in order to recognize the participants as agents, we need to question the assumption that agency entails resistance to norms; moreover, we need to question the feminist allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of freedom. In this paper, I argue that rather than giving up the ideal of freedom, we can (...) explore the possibility that there are different conceptions of freedom, and that the agency of the women in the mosque movement can be understood through a conception of freedom as a practice of connection, or belonging. I develop this alternative paradigm through discussions of four conceptions of freedom: Foucault's theory of agency as self-creation, positive freedom, communitarian freedom, and freedom as resistance. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1964, given by Roderick M. Chisholm (1916-1999), an American philosopher.

_The Foundations of Knowing _ was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This collection of essays on the foundations of empirical knowledge brings together ten of Roderick M. Chisholm's most important papers in epistemology, three of them published for the first time, the others significantly revised and expanded for this edition. The essays in Part I constitute (...) a thoroughgoing defense of foundationalism—the doctrine that our justification for believing always rests upon a self-evident basis. In Part II, Chisholm applies foundationalist principles to various areas within the theory of knowledge, and in part III he presents a history of twentieth-century American epistemology. "Roderick M. Chisholm's work has been most influential both in the development of epistemology and in the widespread application of his analytic method. I am sure this publication featuring the unification of his views will be of great value to those working on the central issues of philosophy." Hector-Neri Castañeda, Indiana University Roderick Chisholm is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Among his books are _Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Theory of Knowledge, Person and Object_,and _The First Person _. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a theory of perception distinct both from classical sense-datum theories and from intentionalist theories, that is theories according to which one perceives external objects by dint of a relation with a propositional content. The alternative I propose completely rejects any representational element in perception. When one sees that an object has a property, the situation or state of affairs of its having that property is one's perception, so that the object and property are literally (...) part of one's mind. The most obvious objection to this view is that it embodies a rampant form of idealism. It is argued to the contrary, via consideration of the metaphysics of situations, that the theory is entirely consistent with a robustly realist view of the world. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Adolescents who are critically, chronically, and terminally ill traditionally have been given little voice in their health care treatment. But over the last three decades attitudes have begun to shift. The legal and medical professions as well as parents and children's advocates have started to recognize that cognitively normal adolescents have decisionmaking capacity and believe these patients ought to have the opportunity to participate in even the toughest of health treatment decisions. Advance directives, if used with sensitivity and care, could (...) prove a valuable means of giving these older pediatric patients a say in their care. (shrink)

It is widely held that for an action to be free it must be the case that the agent can do otherwise. Compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree over what this ability amounts to. Two recent articles offer novel perspectives on the debate by employing Angelika Kratzer’s semantics of ‘can’. Alex Grzankowski proposes that Kratzer’s semantics favour incompatibilism because they make valid a version of the Consequence Argument. Christian List argues that Kratzer’s semantics favour a novel form of compatibilism. I argue that (...) List’s compatibilist application of Kratzer’s semantics faces problems not faced by Grzankowski’s incompatibilist employment of them. On the other hand I argue that Kratzer’s semantics make Grzankowski’s version of the Consequence Argument valid only at the cost of rendering it dialectically useless. Contrary to both views Kratzer’s semantics do not appear to add substantial weight to either side of the compatibilism/incompatibilism dispute. (shrink)

Most of the time our quantifications generalise over a restricted domain. Thus in the last sentence, ‘most of the time’ is arguably not a generalisation over all times in the history of the universe but is restricted to a sub-group of times, those at which humans exist and utter quantified phrases and sentences, say. Indeed the example illustrates the point that quantificational phrases often carry an explicit restriction with them: ‘some people’, ‘all dogs’. Even then, context usually restricts to a (...) subdomain of the class specified by the count noun. Although teenagers like to have fun by being, they mistakenly think, overly literal— ‘Everyone is tired, let’s get to bed’: ‘everyone: you mean every person in the entire universe?’— competent language users have to be sensitive to context virtually all the time. But is it always the case that generalisation is over a restricted domain? On the face of it, to claim this is paradoxical. If we say. (shrink)

Foucault’s critique of early modern political theory aimed at displacing sovereignty as the principle of intelligibility of power. In the genealogical literature since Foucault, sovereignty has become a residual category lacking analytic specificity, largely displaced by governance, in turn equated with politics. We argue that Foucault and the Foucauldians have not understood that the flourishing of governance has presupposed a symbolic regime with a division of knowledge-power-law characteristic of the democratic sovereign. The conflation of governance with politics, together with the (...) sliding of sovereignty under governance, has left Foucauldians unable to diagnose the dangers present in varying possible sovereignty-governance configurations. (shrink)