Conspicuous consumption was first identified and discussed by Thorstein Veblen in his classic text on The Theory of the Leisure Class published in 1899. Since that time, business organisations have encouraged and exploited the demand for status goods and today the supply of products which serve as social symbols is highly organised and profitable. This paper looks at the ways in which manufacturers, advertisers and retailers have combined to promote status-seeking as an acceptable form of consumer behaviour and at how (...) the market for status goods has been expanded by corporate strategies geared to securing rapid rates of social obsolescence in the conspicuous goods and services on offer. The ethical arguments for and against such business activity are then examined in detail. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 2, July - August 2020, Page 165-167.

Professor Sir Roger Penrose's work, spanning fifty years of science, with over five thousand pages and more than three hundred papers, has been collected together for the first time and arranged chronologically over six volumes, each with an introduction from the author. Where relevant, individual papers also come with specific introductions or notes. The first volume covers the beginnings of a career that is ground-breaking from the outset. Inspired by courses given by Dirac and Bondi, much of the early (...) published work involves linking general relativity with tensor systems. Among his early works is the seminal 1955 paper, 'A Generalized Inverse for Matrices', his previously unpublished PhD and St John's College Fellowship theses, and from 1967, his Adam's Prize-winning essay on the structure of space-time. Add to this his 1965 paper, 'Gravitational collapse and space-time singularities', and the 1967 paper that introduced a remarkable new theory, 'Twistor algebra', and this becomes a truly stellar procession of works on mathematics and cosmology. (shrink)

In a historical moment when cross-cultural communication proves both necessary and difficult, the work of comparative philosophy is timely. Philosophical resources for building a shared future marked by vitality and collaborative meaning-making are in high demand. Taking note of the present global philosophical situation, this collection of essays critically engages the scholarship of Roger T. Ames, who for decades has had a central role in the evolution of comparative and nonwestern philosophy. With a reflective methodology that has produced creative (...) translations of key Chinese philosophical texts, Ames-in conjunction with notable collaborators such as D.C. Lau, David Hall, and Henry Rosemont Jr.-has brought China's philosophical traditions into constructive cross-cultural dialogue on numerous ethical and social issues that we face today. The volume opens with two parts that share overlapping concerns about interpretation and translation of nonwestern texts and traditions. Parts III and IV-"Process Cosmology" and "Epistemological Considerations"-mark the shift in comparative projects from the metaphilosophical and translational stage to the more traditionally philosophical stage. Parts V and VI-"Confucian Role Ethics" and "Classical Daoism"-might best be read as Chinese contributions to philosophical inquiry into living well or "ethics" broadly construed. Lastly, Part VII takes Amesian comparative philosophy in "Critical Social and Political Directions," explicitly drawing out the broader dimensions of social constitution and the ideal of harmony. The contributors-scholars working in philosophy, religious studies, and Asian studies-pursue lines of inquiry opened up by the work of Roger Ames, and their chapters both clarify his ideas and push them in new directions. They survey the field of Chinese philosophy as it is taking shape in the wake of Ames's contributions and as it carries forward a global conversation on the future of humanity. (shrink)

This book traces the career development and influence on American intellectual life of the first twenty women to earn a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Rogers explores the factors that led these women to pursue careers in academic philosophy, examines the ideas they developed, and evaluates the impact they had on the academic and social worlds they inhabited. This volume investigates not only the success stories of such women as Eliza Ritchie, Julia Gulliver, and Christine Ladd-Franklin, to name (...) a few, but also the policies and practices that made it difficult or impossible for others to succeed. (shrink)

Advertising and Consumption: Advertising and Social Change by Ronald Berman, Beverley Hills and London: Sage, , 1981, pp 159, £11.95 and £5.50 The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 pp 248, £1.75 Conspicuous Consumption by Roger S Mason, Farnbrough: Gower, 1981, pp x + 156, £9.50 Channels of Desire by Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1982, pp viii + 312, $7.95.

Scholars who mention the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in the Mid-Twentieth Century tend to cite G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous ‘complaint’, and sometimes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is less usual to write of Roger Scruton. Placed in the context of Bernard Williams and John Casey’s works – at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions – Scruton’s theory of the imagination is shown to concern the rationality of moral attitudes. In short, it concerns (...) virtue ethics. Of broader interest, following Scruton’s arguments, his aesthetics may be conceived as concerning stores of moral knowledge; this is by virtue of the sensuous conditioning of the thought-content of moral judgement. The centrality of imitation to Aristotelian ethics, in other words, finds its concomitant in the object of imitation as the artwork. It is my view that Scruton’s work, Art and Imagination (his PhD thesis of 1973), is an attempt to provide a framework for the judgement involved in virtue ethics, concerning both intentionality and object. (shrink)

the symmetry of our evidential situation. If our confidence is best modeled by a standard probability function this means that we are to distribute our subjective probability or credence sharply and evenly over possibilities among which our evidence does not discriminate. Once thought to be the central principle of probabilistic reasoning by great..

This paper pursues two tasks: first, to criticize a number of prominent contemporary interpretations of the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, especially Jonathan Barnes’s; and second, to outline an alternative interpretation of Sextus that (a) reconciles the opposing sides of the long-standing dispute over the scope of Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment, and (b) suggests a sympathetic alternative to some of the most influential accounts of the Pyrrhonian way of life.

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Descartes’ distinction between infinite and indefinite is important for his philosophy, but poorly understood. Various commentators have offered conflicting interpretations of it; some have even questioned ist importance. In this paper I wish to investigate Descartes’ various discussions of the distinction and to use my investigation to shed light on the related question of the authority of the "Conversation with Burman". I believe that the distinction is treated differently in the "Conversation" than it is in the Cartesian corpus proper and (...) that the difference of treatment is paradigmatic of other differences between that work and the works which come from Descartes’ own hand. I divide my discussion into two parts: first, on the reliability of the "Conversation" and Ferdinand Alquié’s critique of it; and second, on the distinction between the infinite and indefinite. (shrink)

This disagreement extends to the fundamental details of physical and biochemical theories. On the other hand, (2) There is almostuniversal agreementthatlife did notfirstcome aboutmerely by chance. This is not to say that all scientists think that life’s existence was inevitable. The common view is that given a fuller understanding of the physical and biological conditions and processes involved, the emergence of life should be seen to be quite likely, or at least not very surprising. The view which is almost universally (...) rejected by researchers in the field is that the numerous and prima facie improbable physical and biological requirements for life all fell together just by a fluke, like so many dice tumbling out of a bag and landing all sixes. Most importantly, for the purposes of the following discussion, (3) The conviction that life did not arise largely by chance is treated as epistem- ically prior to the development of alternative theories. C 2007, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation C 2007, Blackwell Publishing, Inc. (shrink)

Synaesthesia is considered a rare perceptual capacity, and one that is not capable of cultivation. However, meditators report the experience quite commonly, and in questionnaire surveys, respondents claimed to experience synaesthesia in 35% of meditation retreatants, in 63% of a group of regular meditators, and in 86% of advanced teachers. These rates were significantly higher than in nonmeditator controls, and displayed significant correlations with measures of amount of meditation experience. A review of ancient texts found reports suggestive of synaesthesia in (...) advanced meditators from India and China. These findings suggest that synaesthesia may be cultivated by meditation, and that laboratory studies of meditators could be rewarding. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 114-116.

This paper shows that in late seventeenth-century Scotland there existed a sizeable virtuoso community whose leaders were abreast of European developments in philosophy, history and science. Moreover, by c. 1700, Sir Robert Sibbald was attempting to organize a learned society modelled upon those he knew in Europe and upon London's Royal Society. The interests of the virtuosi and their attempts to institutionalize their pursuits laid much of the ground work for the Scottish Enlightenment. The Royal Society of Scotland which Sir (...) Robert hoped to found never became a reality, but the academic ideals which he propounded came to fruition in the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh and later bodies such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The intellectual inquiries and achievements of Sir Robert and his friends, particularly those in medicine and natural history, continued to be of interest to later Scots. They, thanks in part to the influence of the Newtonian physician Archibald Pitcaire, improved upon Sibbald's naïve Baconianism, but to a surprising degree their concerns had also been his. (shrink)

Among other interesting proposals, Juan Comesaña’s _Being Rational and Being Right_ makes a challenging case that one’s evidence can include falsehoods. I explore some ways in which we might have to rethink the roles that evidence can play in inquiry if we accept this claim. It turns out that Comesaña’s position lends itself to the conclusion that while false evidence is possible and not even terribly uncommon, I can be rationally sure that I don’t currently have any and perhaps also (...) that I won’t get any, and (absent certain evidence to the contrary) you are not afflicted with any either. This conclusion might seem too good to be true. I finish by raising a puzzle about one of the main motivations for Comesaña’s view. (shrink)

Embryos, cells, genes, and organisms : reflections on the history of evolutionary developmental biology / Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein The organismic systems approach : streamlining the naturalistic agenda / Werner Callebaut, Gerd B. Müller, and Stuart A. Newman Complex traits : genetics, development, and evolution / H. Frederik Nijhout Functional and developmental constraints on life-cycle evolution : an attempt on the architecture of constraints / Gerhard Schlosser Legacies of adaptive development / Roger Sansom Evo-devo meets the mind (...) : toward a developmental evolutionary psychology / Paul E. Griffiths Reproducing entrenchments to scaffold culture : the central role of development in cultural evolution / William C. Wimsatt and James R. Griesemer. (shrink)

In this note, I point out a mathematically well-defined way of non-trivially comparing the sizes of uncountable sets of equal cardinality.

How far should religious practices be curtailed in pursuit of other social goals, such as equality and the removal of discrimination? This book reasons that religious freedom is one of our most precious freedoms, and essential to democracy, drawing on examples from across the Western world.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LUBLIN THOMISM 1 THE TEXTS of the philosophers associated with the Catholic University of Lublin, thanks to the tireless work and energy of an editorial board under bhe direction and support of Marie Lescoe, are at last appearing in English.2 'Dhe Lublin school is Thomist in inspiration and avowed adherence. It is Thomist, however, in a manner which makes liberal use of the works of Continental philosophers in the (...) phenomenological and "existentialist" traditions: hence the label, "existential personaiism." 3 A supplementary label of this sort is needed if we are to include within the Lublin school the work of one of its most iIIustrious members, Karol Wojtyia, whose writings employ the phenomenological method, eschew scholastic argument, and acknowledge a chief indebtedness to Max Scheler. Even the more recognizably scholastic Lublin philosophers, such as Mieczylaw Krapiec, O.P., President -Rector of the University, whose I-Man is the first complete book to be translated and printed in English, quote Roman Ingarden generously, speak familiarly about man as Being-towards-death, and discuss religion and culture in terms of intentionality. 1 Mieczylaw A. Krapiec, O.P., I-Man (New Britain: Mariel Press, 1983); (an abridged, student edition of I-11.fon-Mariel Press, 1985-is now available also); Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, (Boston: D. Reidel, 1979); Edmund Morawiec, "L'Objet et La Tache de la Philosophie Chretienne" in J. N. Zycinski, ed., The Human Person and Philosophy in the Contemporary World (Krakow: The Pontifical Faculty of Theology, 1980). 2 It may interest readers to know that a Chinese translation of I-Man is in preparation. The project is coordinated by Dr. Audrey Donnithorne involving the collaboration of Louis Chow and Matthias Lu. s Of. Andrew Woznicki, A Christian Humanism; Karol Wojtyla's Existential Personalism, and Ronald F. Lawler, The Christian Personalism of John Paul II (Fransciscan Herald Press, 1981). 307 308 ROGER DUNCAN Just because of their deep indebtedness to and immersion in Continental philosophy, it is important to begin by stating what the Lublin philosophers are not. They are not, first of all, phenomenologists or existentialists in the strict sense, by which I mean they do not hold the sceptical epistemological premises usually associated with these labels. Existentialists deny the classical doctrine of truth according to which truth is the adaequatio ad rern of the intellect. Instead they maintain that when I look at, say, an egg, and say to myself, " Here I am, one being among others like this egg here ", I am being naive because I have not yet seen that the distinction between myself and the egg arises within t:he phenomenal field and therefore cannot be uncritically assumed in an account of knowing. The subject-object distinction, they say, is not one more distinction between objects, like that between the egg and the chicken it came from; it cannot be understood as an intellectual grasp of one individual substance by another individual substance. For this reason, according to the existentialists, we must not think of knowledge as an overcoming of the isolation of self-consciousness, but rather as the origination of a distinction, a negative act identical with that of selfconsciousness in its self-transcendence. Awareness of the egg is not a grasp of the egg in itself so much as a self-conscious mitosis which incidentally constitutes the egg as object.4 The realist answer, as Chesterton said, is that eggs are eggs. The fact that the distinction between the egg and the chicken appears within consciousness, and that the subject can see a similarity with the distinction btween himself and the egg,.provides no argument for the unreality of either distinction unless you assume from the start that intentional objectification falsifies or fails to reach being " in itself". But this is a decision, not an a.rgument. Of course once you make it all kinds of curious and very deep condusions follow, conclusions which the Lublin Thomists deny. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 174; Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 75. LUBLIN THOMISM 309 Nevertheless, it does not seem advisable to have to... (shrink)

An international line-up of fourteen distinguished philosophers present new essays on topics relating to well-being and morality, prominent themes in contemporary ethics and particularly in the work of James Griffin, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in whose honour this volume has been produced. Professor Griffin offers a fascinating development of his own thinking on these topics in his replies to the essays.

Reid thought that testimony possesses positive epistemic value. Epistemic autonomy is not necessarily the royal road to truth; nor is credulity a systematic epistemic fault and indeed, it can be an intellectual virtue. Even though the notion of epistemic virtue does not explicitly appear in Reid’s epistemology, it seems inherent to his views that what will give a heteronomous agent exercising the social operations of the mind the best chance to acquire and develop true beliefs is the epistemic virtues that (...) permit her to recognize reliable authorities. This is why it seems to me possible to associate Reid with to the virtue epistemology tradition. (shrink)