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.

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)

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)

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)

Manipulation cases are usually seen as a problem for compatibilists, and a strength for incompatibilist theories. I present a new case of indirect manipulation, which I claim does not interfere with the manipulated agent's freedom under libertarian criteria. I argue that the only promising libertarian response to my case would undermine Widerker's response to Frankfurt cases, which I take to be the best libertarian strategy for dealing with Frankfurt-type manipulation. I outline a satisfactory compatibilist explanation of my case.

_Ideas of Human Nature_ presents twelve of the most influential Western thinkers on the topic of human nature. Roger Trigg examines the thinkers in their historical context and discusses their relevance to contemporary controversies.

My essay argues that neoliberal forms of government emerged through the shifting political trajectory of the therapeutic ethos in the postwar period in Anglo-American societies. In the postwar era, the therapeutic ethos attracted the attention of conservative cultural critics who described it as a destructive force on communal obligation. Initially, the therapeutic ethos appeared to align naturally with New Left ideas of democratization in the workplace and private sphere. However, I argue that the New Right was subsequently able to sever (...) the therapeutic ethos from its alignment with social democratization by imbuing it with an alternative set of meanings centered on the ideas of market freedom and the entrepreneur. The result was the construction of the new, neoliberal forms of power, which, I argue, take the form of the management of subjectivity. Finally, I outline the two major social pathologies of the neoliberal era, namely, the consequences of its contractualized notion of citizenship and the explosion of social inequality, both of which are traceable to the influence of therapeutic notions of the self. (shrink)

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)

Cognitive and rational assessments of competence do not fully capture the way in which individuals normally make decisions. Human beings have always used stories to explain their experiences and values. Narrative ethics should be used to understand the perspective in context of a patient whose competence is in question, and so avoid a destructive clash. Psychiatry and professionals within it also have a narrative that may join with that of science, but there is no special privilege for these narratives unless (...) survival is at stake. The narrative approach should be used to try to make different stories compatible. This article examines the background to this approach, and indicates some ways in which it could be used in the specific cases addressed in the series. (shrink)

Within the nursing ethics literature, there has for some time now been a focus on the role and importance of character for nursing. An overarching rationale for this is the need to examine the sort of person one must be if one is to nurse well or be a good nurse. How one should be to live well or live a/the good life and to nurse well or be a good nurse seems to necessitate a focus on an agent's character (...) as well as actions because character is (for the most part) expressed in action (e.g. seeLaird). This paper will give an overview of the reasons for the role and importance of character in nursing practice and explain its relation to nursing's frequent use of virtue ethics in order to recommend caution. While the paper agrees that the role of character is important in nursing caution is needed in both how much moral and thus normative, emphasis is being placed on the psychology of character and on the drift to virtue ethics. The psychological which may be explanatory needs to be linked with the normative, and a justification for the normative is needed. A justification as virtue ethics is contested, and nursing practice does not need to take on this explanatory and justificatory burden.A tentative proposal raised but not discussed in depth in this paper is that when an ultimate explanation or explanatory ground is needed, nursing practice leads quite naturally to a form of consequentialism as well as a realist metaethic. On this account, there are two levels of moral thinking, and nursing practice entails the virtues at one level and leads quite naturally to moral thinking at another more critical level of the criterion of what makes something right and good independently of character. (shrink)

The natural bias towards the contemporary in teaching and in research, combined with numerous specialized journals, mean that certain areas of philosophy, including ethics, are in danger of forgetting their past. In that context, history of philosophy of the high standard exemplified in this book is particularly important.

More than forty years of commitment to nuclear weapons may have prepared Britain to take part in Armageddon, but not to defend itself against attack. What made British governments choose this path and how have they justified it? How have they responded to the moral questions it raises? Using material from recently-released official documents, Roger Ruston presents a moral history of British defence policy, from the 'lesson' of Appeasement to the nuclear modernizations of the eighties, and answers many of (...) the questions that governments have avoided. The book will be of great interest to defence historians, moralists, politicians, and general readers who need a clear account of their country's defence predicament as a basis from which to devise workable and morally acceptable alternatives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Roger A. Shiner GETTING TO KNOW YOU IN pursuits OF happiness, Stanley Cavell attempts to establish the existence of a previously unrecognized genre of film — "comedies of remarriage " — which both includes and is defined by such movies as Adam's Rib, Bringing Up Baby, and TL· Philadelphia Story. l By "marriage" and "remarriage " is meant a certain kind of enduring emotional intimacy with which we (...) as adult men and women will be involved, an intimacy which is an integral part of the human form of life and whose relationship to an institutionally supported legal status in our culture is not one of identity. The same is true for the concept of "divorce" in this context. Using some of Cavell's interpretive ideas as a starting point, I shall seek to present the genre of remarriage as a figure for the profoundest relationships of epistemology and metaphysics — the relationship of the knower to the world which is known and the relationship of the individual to die other individuals widi whom society is shared. Specifically, divorce and remarriage as part of human life are to be seen as figures for separation and kinship, avoidance and acknowledgement in the philosophical sense of those terms.2 My discussion proceeds on several levels. There is film criticism, which attempts to find significance in certain movies. There is an examination of values, which presents a certain view ofmarriage as a human relationship. There is some metaphysics, which addresses certain traditional philosophical problems in a nontraditional way. And finally there is metaphilosophy, which attempts to present a different way ofhow to ask, and how to acknowledge as being answered, the great questions of philosophy. Only the latter two projects could be described as "philosophical" in a conventional sense. Yet, as Arthur Danto has rightly remarked,3 Cavell in Pursuits ofHappiness seems to be trying to suggest that to blur deliberately the distinction between criticism and philosophy is to show something 80 Roger A. Shiner81 important about philosophy (and thus criticism as well). If this essay in some small way is thought to show something similar, I shall be pleased. Cavell begins his chapter on It Happened One Night with some ruminations on Locke, Hume, Kant, and the idea of the limitations of human reason. Kant undertakes to show, Cavell claims (PH, pp. 75-76), that our position as human knowers is both better and worse than the Empiricists suggest. It is worse, because even if we pressed human knowledge to its Kantian limits, we would know more but not enough to fulfill the philosopher 's dream. It is better, because the very facts that are limitations of human knowledge are also the necessary conditions ofknowledge as such and to know those conditions clearly is enormously to increase human knowledge. The link between the limitations ofhuman knowledge and the comedies of remarriage is forged by the thought (CR, p. 74) that the capacity to relate oneself to the world by knowledge and the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage are both constitutive ofhuman society. Human community is based in part on the fact that there are limitations as to what each of us as individual knowers can know. We need each other's knowledge. If one of us were per impossibile to transcend the limitations of human knowledge, he would know, as it were, what God knows and thus have the power that God has. But the existence of these limitations reveals something deep about human knowledge, something which traditional theory of knowledge rejects, namely that it is human. Human knowledge is limited, but it is genuine. It rests on no surer a foundation than human community, but human beings are a community. We need each other, but we are there for each other. Community, and therefore knowledge, does not need to be achieved: it exists.4 Similarly, the conventions in society limiting the capacity to relate oneselfto others by marriage (one at a time, and only under protest not one forever) reveal something deep about the nature of marriage. The mutuality of the intimacy ofmarriage is possible only in conjunction with the exclusiveness of marriage. Only by turning away from all others can the taking into... (shrink)

This paper grew out of a reaction to Elisabeth Selkirk's contribution to the Handbook of Phonology (Goldsmith 1996). Section 1.2 of that article is concerned with syntactic and semantic aspects of the placement of pitch accents in English. As will be seen in the data to be presented below, the constellation of pitch accents in an utterance is determined in part by properties of the preceding discourse, including the distinction between new and old information. This means for example, that a (...) phrase containing accent is appropriate in a different set of contexts than that same phrase unaccented. Since accents are assigned within words but the pragmatics can make reference to phrases, the following question arises. Given a word that is accented, which phrases count as containing accent as far as the pragmatics is concerned and which not? This question is known as the projection problem, though I have characterized it in slightly different terms than is normally done, for reasons to be made clear below. As Selkirk shows, projection is sensitive to argument structure and other syntactic notions (see Gussenhoven(1984), Rochement(1986), Schmerling(1976) and Selkirk 1984)). In Selkirk's system, a sentence can have one or more foci and these foci are marked with an F in the syntactic tree. Focussing a phrase leads to a certain kind of.. (shrink)