Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant (...) responses to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, the classical logic of Frege and Russell dominated the field of formal logic. But, as Ross Brady argues, a new type of weak relevant logic may prove to be better equipped to present new solutions to persistent paradoxes. _Universal Logic _begins with an overview of classical and relevant logic and discusses the limitations of both in analyzing certain paradoxes. It is the first text to demonstrate how the main set-theoretic and semantic paradoxes can be solved (...) in a systematic way and as such will be of great interest to both scholars and students of logic. (shrink)

We assess Meyer’s formalization of arithmetic in his [21], based on the strong relevant logic R and compare this with arithmetic based on a suitable logic of meaning containment, which was developed in Brady [7]. We argue in favour of the latter as it better captures the key logical concepts of meaning and truth in arithmetic. We also contrast the two approaches to classical recapture, again favouring our approach in [7]. We then consider our previous development of Peano arithmetic including (...) primitive recursive functions, finally extending this work to that of general recursion. (shrink)

Among members of the legal profession and judiciarysional throughout the world, there is a genuine concern with establishing and maintaining high ethical standards. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. But, in order to ensure that the standards established are the right ones, it is necessary first of all to examine important philosophical and policy issues. Such an examination is the purpose of this book. Written by a distinguished group of law teachers and practitioners together with (...) senior members of the judiciary, the book has as its underlying themes: BL that the move to more definite rules is not only inevitable but also desirable BL that existing codes of professional practice cannot simply be treated as a system of specific rules BL that the current set of ethical rules is contestable and requires further refinement, perhaps even radical surgery BL and that legal ethics must be conceived in the more general area of professional responsibility. (shrink)

One of Aristotle's logic treatises, this text is published in the Oxford Classical Text series.

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)

Critics of mainstream economics typically rest important weight on the differences between people and the 'agents' that populate economic theory and economic models. Hollis and Nell (1975) is both representative of and ancestral to many more recent variations on the theme. Lately, the upgraded status of behavioral economics (BE) within the discipline's mainstream has encouraged a number of writers to use revolutionary rhetoric in promotion of a 'paradigm shift' that includes the rejection of 'rational economic man' (Ormerod 1994, Heilbroner and (...) Milburg 1995, Fullbrook 2003). The current leading developers of BE are generally more circumspect, claiming that their approach complements standard theory rather than promising to supplant it (Camerer and Loewenstein 2004, Angner and Loewenstein this volume). However, they generally join the more florid critics in supposing that microeconomics is bound to improve its empirical relevance to the extent that it substitutes the study of people for that of abstract economic agents. Another body of thought that promotes this view stems from Sen's (1977) attack on standard economic agents as 'rational fools', amplified in Davis's (2003) argument that since economic agents lack some essential properties of human individuals, economic theory requires fundamental reform if it is to make progress in explaining human behavior. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to identify and partially defend a form of practical reason involved in a number of central cases of human action. Against the claims of rational choice theory that reasoning about action is primarily instrumental, it argues for a form of practical reason which allows for the indeterminate, open?ended and creative nature of the most important examples of human action. Rational choice theory not only gives a distorted account of the reasoning involved in these cases; (...) it also ? and more fundamentally ? misconceives the nature of human agency. What moves us to act are characteristically not our ?preferences?, but our ?desires?, and the logic of desire is not that of means to end, but of narrative coherence. The paper also argues that rational choice theory fails to recognize the essentially social nature of rationality, and in its ambition to construct social theory on the basis of rational choice it fails to recognize the fundamental role of trust in social relationships. (shrink)

In this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin’s approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities ,’ and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 (...) up until his death in 1940 . The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking. Above all, it shows the relevance of a critical consideration of Benjamin’s writing on the image for scholarship in visual culture, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

Currently, it appears that the most widely accepted solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem is the one-third solution. Another widely held view is that an agent’s credences should be countably additive. In what follows, I will argue that these two views are incompatible, since the principles that underlie the one-third solution are inconsistent with the principle of Countable Additivity (hereafter, CA). I will then argue that this incompatibility is a serious problems for thirders, since it undermines one of the central (...) arguments for their position. (shrink)

Addiction may or may not be a highly prevalent condition, but the concept of addiction is undeniably ubiquitous. From the people who cheerfully and publicly announce their addiction to coffee, or chocolate, or shopping, to those who ruefully and perhaps only in very special settings admit their addiction to alcohol or drugs, ‘‘addiction” is an oft-invoked explanatory frame for the presentation and characterization of individual behavior. Lately, it has even been applied to the behavior of super-personal entities, as in America’s (...) ‘‘addiction” to oil. Although the ubiquity of the concept is surely a sign of its usefulness, it also gives one pause; can a term of such broad application really have precise meaning (compare the word ‘‘thing”)? And if not—if there is nothing that all the ‘‘addicted” entities above have in common—then why is the concept so apparently useful, and what is it useful for? Such questions may seem tailor made for Ivory Tower semantic analysis, but in fact the matter is much more urgent than that. For we live in a world where involuntary commitments and other coercive measures are sometimes considered justified in the course of dealing with addicted persons. Why is this so? What could be wrong with addicted persons that would justify such treatment? And why is the word extended to apply to persons for whom such treatment would presumably not be justified? These are some of the several questions asked by the authors of Midbrain Mutiny, and they have not just scientific, but also political and philosophical motivations for wanting to answer them. So what is an addict? One possible definition—one that would seem to accord with the widespread use of the term—is an agent with abnormal preferences, in the sense that the addict is willing to pay far more, and to pay for far higher quantities of a good than is the average consumer. Here we should think not just of the novelist maniacally devoted to the twin pleasures of writing and alcohol, but also of the late Steve Irwin ‘‘addicted” to contact with dangerous animals, or of the infinitely more prosaic CEO who devotes all of her time to work.. (shrink)

The question is about contextual adaptation of meaning, a matter of philosophy of language, occasioned here by a disagreement among philosophers of religion about whether words, like “knows,” “wills,” “loves,” “commands,” “does,” used for common attributes of humans and the divine, and even “exists” as applied to both, mean the same or acquire divergences of meaning from the discourse contexts. I call the first group “reformers” and the other “analogists.” Analogists think the reformers are anthropomorphic, contributing to popular naive imaginings (...) about God as “a person like us,” while the reformers think the analogists are grafting Hellenic ideas onto biblical faith. That is not a new dispute, of course. But there is a separable linguistic facet of it, examined here, that has wider applications to philosophy in general. (shrink)

In your simulation you will devise measures to try to relieve the severity of the current global recession and speed the re-emergence of global growth. Each of you will be assigned the identity of an actual person with a specific institutional role. You will be required to undertake web-based research on that person, that person’s institution, and the utility function the person would be expected to behave in accordance with, given their role.

Successful applications of hierarchical complexity to the behaviors of organisms, animals and humans, and social entities evidence the scaling properties of self-similarity, thus the bounded fractal characteristics of orders of hierarchical complexity. The theory specifies an identical sequence of discrete-state transition steps required from each stage of performance to the next. It repeats at all scales. Tasks nested within the step sequence evidence self-similarity with the orders of complexity. This model introduces questions about noise categories when system tasks are fully (...) accounted for, dependent, self-similar, and measurable. Ubiquitous transition steps are inherent dynamics of evolution. (shrink)

(2008). Postformal Resistance to Concepts of “Higher” Development. World Futures: Vol. 64, Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity, pp. 524-529.

According to my entire understanding here, art is itself an emanation of the absolute. The history of art will show us most revealingly its immediate connections to the conditions of the universe and thereby to that absolute identity in which art is preordained. Only in the history of art does the essential and inner unity of all works of art reveal itself, a unity showing that all poetry is of the same spirit, a spirit that even in the antitheses of (...) ancient and modern art is merely showing its two different faces. §14. The indifference of the ideal and the real as indifference manifests itself in the ideal world through art, for art is in itself neither mere activity nor mere knowledge, but is rather an activity completely permeated by knowledge, or in a reverse fashion knowledge that has completely become activity. That is, it is the indifference of both. (shrink)