This good-humoured book offers an antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today and a profound apology for the drink on which..

The waters part at the Crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews. Water is turned into wine by Jesus at the Wedding Feast at Cana. For Christians, these miraculous events have really or truly happened. But aren't miracles rather fictions full of deep meaning? Aren’t Christians invited to pretend (make-believe) that miracles have taken place? Aren’t miracles fictions? Fictionalism answer positively to these questions. This account is sometimes presupposed in the hermeneutics of the biblical narrative. Fictionalism can be theological, (...) that is global: God himself is fiction; it can be partial: only miracles are fictions, not God. The article shows that a Christian may not adhere to fictionalism and must assume the reality of miracles. The Christian may not make them a matter of simple interpretation and deep meaning. He must believe that the waters parted when the Jewish people fled Egypt, that Jesus did indeed turn the water into wine in Cana. (shrink)

Of all the things we eat or drink, wine is without question the most complex. So it should not be surprising that philosophers have turned their attention to wine: complex phenomena can lend themselves to philosophical speculation. Wine is complex not just in the variety of tastes it presents – ‘wine tastes of everything apart from grapes’, I once heard an expert say – but in its meaning...

This paper provides an account of the nature of our appreciation of wine, and a defence of the aesthetic value of tastes and smells. Focusing primarily on Roger Scruton’s recent claims, I argue against him that our appreciation of wine meets his own constraints on aesthetic interest and, moreover, that the cultural significance he grants to wine is in large part grounded in its aesthetic value. I show that Scruton’s claims are thus in tension with each other, not because (...) he has misunderstood the nature of aesthetic interest, but because he fails to appreciate the aesthetic capabilities of wine. Appealing to a well-known argument of Kendall Walton’s, I defend the aesthetic interest and value of tastes and smells by demonstrating that our judgements of wine can be correct or incorrect relative to the categories that govern its production and proper appreciation and understanding. I thereby show that tastes and smells can attain aesthetic significance in virtue of the types of objects they constitute. In particular, I hold that this significance, in the case of wine, rests in large part on its ability to be expressive and to embody certain kinds of meaning. (shrink)

In his own time, Lao Sze-Kwang formulated his own intra-cultural approach to the philosophy of culture that begins from the interdependence and organic nature of our cultural experience. In this essay, I address three questions: Why did Lao abandon his early reliance on the Hegelian model of philosophy of culture and formulate his own “two- structured” theory? Again, given Lao’s profound commitment and contribution to Chinese philosophy and its future directions, why is it not proper to describe him as a (...) “Chinese philosopher?” And why is the much accomplished Lao Sze- Kwang not installed in the CUHK pantheon as yet one more of the great “New Confucian” philosophers (xinruxuejia 新儒學家) to be associated with this institution? (shrink)

Wittgenstein's contribution to musical aesthetics is not often discussed, which is surprising, given his rare musicality and musical connections. His distinctive achievement is to have focused on the question of musical understanding, and to have connected this with two other philosophical problems: the nature of the first-person case, and the understanding of facial expressions. Wittgenstein's third-person approach to philosophical psychology leads him to emphasize the role of performance in the understanding of music, and also to introduce an ‘intransitive’ concept of (...) expression. At times Wittgenstein seems to be arguing for an entirely non-relational account of musical meaning; however, a proper analysis of the first-person case shows that his theory of musical understanding might allow that, at some level, you understand a piece of music only if you imaginatively grasp the state of mind expressed by it. (shrink)

Univocalist analyses of the modal auxiliary verbs ('ought'/'must'/'can'/'may''/'will') and the adjectives 'right'/'wrong'.

The calculus of relations was created and developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by Augustus De Morgan, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ernst Schröder. In 1940 Alfred Tarski proposed an axiomatization for a large part of the calculus of relations. In the next decade Tarski's axiomatization led to the creation of the theory of relation algebras, and was shown to be incomplete by Roger Lyndon's discovery of nonrepresentable relation algebras. This paper introduces the calculus of relations and (...) the theory of relation algebras through a review of these historical developments. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of some themes from Justice: Rights and Wrongs, by Nicholas Wolterstorff. The paper begins with a discussion of Wolterstorff’s distinction between justice as inherent rights and justice as inherent worth. It is suggested that what especially distinguishes Wolterstorff’s position is his grounding of rights in divine love. An elucidation and defence of an Aristotelian eudaimonist grounding for rights is offered. The paper ends with a critique of the ideas that human well-being can be understood in (...) terms of what God desires for us and that our worth depends on God’s love. (shrink)

This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem (...) to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach. (shrink)

Many AIDS-related issues are polarised. At the social level, civil rights or liberties are seen as being in conflict with general utility, and an analogous distinction is often assumed to exist at the one-to-one, individual level at which doctors work. In this paper the latter form of the distinction is argued to be false. By seeing autonomy as part of welfare, doctors can think more directly about such issues as paternalism, confidentiality, and consent. A number of these issues are discussed (...) in the light of the revised conception of welfare, in the form of simplified case studies. (shrink)

In his recent paper on Aristotelian dialectic, Professor Hamlyn claims that ‘what may be important for Aristotle's purposes is not the truth but the acceptance of the truth’ . Dialectic is protreptic, and not strictly philosophical, spadework: ‘[t]he appeal to endoxa is, as it were, a setting of the scene, providing the context for argument out of which, it is hoped, will emerge the insights from which demonstration and thus further understanding can follow’.

Roger White; X*—Wittgenstein on Identity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 157–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

This paper argues that Milonakis and Fine, in their bookFrom Political Economy to Economics, offer an account of history that systematically omits discussion of how economics has been shaped by the political and social context in which it developed. This contrasts with work by intellectual historians who have argued that such factors were crucial to understanding the history of economic ideas. It is ironic given that Milonakis and Fine are criticising economists for excluding the political and the social from economics.

Selected Readings in the Anthropology of Religion. Edited by Stephen D. Glazier and Charles A. Flowerday. Westport, Praeger, 2003. 304 pp. ISBN 0313300909. $72.95 (cloth).

"I imagine the two friends crossing the deserted streets of Paris at night and talking—about what? They speak of philosophy, intellectual matters."David M. Robinson's article "In the Golden Hour of Friendship": Transcendentalism and Utopian Desire locates a reversal in Emerson's essay "Friendship." Emerson, according to this reading, propounds and then rejects philosophy as a foundation of friendship; "Emerson enacts in this essay a quite extraordinary repudiation of his own philosophy. He first describes the desire of one individual for another as (...) an unchosen or fated condition, the initial promise of which is by nature impossible to fulfill… But Emerson then simply dismisses this iron law of existence as a... (shrink)

This paper is a review of Emotion and Virtue, by Gopal Sreenivasan. Besides providing an overview of the book, it is suggested that the view of the virtues which gives less weight to the emotions remains plausible, as does the thesis of the unity of virtue.

The Westphalian model of international relations has given us a zero-sum game of winners and losers that has proven to be ineffective in addressing the pressing issues of our times. Philosopher Zhao Tingyang has argued that by conceptualizing international relations from the planetary perspective of tianxia, we can develop a sense of "worldness" that at once acknowledges the plurality of moral ideals defining of the world's cultures and seeks practical ways to formulate a shared morality for the solidarity needed to (...) bring the world's people together. In this spirit, political theorist Michael Walzer, in his Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, wants "to endorse the politics of difference and, at the same time, to describe and defend a certain sort of universalism." For Walzer "thin" morality does not mean minor or emotionally shallow morality; on the contrary, thin and intensity come together as "morality close to the bone." Turning to alternative philosophies, the contributors to this volume seek to move beyond liberal thinking on a minimalist ethic to include other cultural values-those of the Confucian, Buddhist, Indian, Islamic, Ubuntu, Japanese, European, and Jewish traditions. In order to reconceive of the world as a world, these scholars seek to formulate an answer to the contemporary challenge of a fragmented and failing Westphalian "internationality," and in so doing, to offer possible conceptions of a shared and practicable morality sorely needed at a planetary scale. (shrink)