In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 103-110 [Access article in PDF] Hutcheson's Moral Sense and the Problem of Innateness Daniel Carey National University of Ireland Francis Hutcheson's philosophy arguably represented a delicate, and at times precarious, synthesis of positions laid out by John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. From Shaftesbury, whose influence he acknowledged explicitly in the title page of the first edition of (...) the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson gained an appreciation of the dignity of human nature, reflected in sociable instincts, benevolent impulses, and the moral sense. From Locke he adopted the bias of empiricism, placing moral philosophy on an observational footing, ostensibly free from a priori assumptions.1 The challenge posed by integrating the work of these two mentors arose from their deep incompatibility, evident in Shaftesbury's declared opposition to Locke's mode of philosophizing and rejection of his disagreeable representation of human nature. Nowhere was Hutcheson's combination of Locke and Shaftesbury more difficult to sustain than over the issue of innateness. Locke was intent on jettisoning innate ideas, but Shaftesbury remained keen to rescue them.Of course there are different versions and definitions of innateness at stake here: on one account, it entailed the possession of particular, specifiable ideas or conceptions, somehow inscribed in the soul which might or might not require the trigger of experience to emerge (for example, ideas of God, good and, evil); on another, a predisposition to hold certain beliefs and make certain judgments, provided that 'normal' conditions of maturity and rationality have been met; finally, a faculty, that is, an inborn structure enabling the subject to experience the world in a moral way, and to register ethical responses to it, whatever they may be.2 All of these orientations on innateness impinge on Hutcheson's approach to the problem. On the one hand, he conceded Locke's critique as consistent with modern philosophizing, but he restricted its force to innate ideas or propositions, leaving the moral sense conveniently exempt from the [End Page 103] objection. On the other hand, Hutcheson was determined to reintroduce the content of innate ideas if not the name, assigning the moral sense a familiar, normative role in underwriting perceptions and judgments.The intricacy of the issue has led critics to arrive at contradictory assessments of Hutcheson's outlook on innateness. Stephen Buckle and Knud Haakonssen take Hutcheson at his word and argue that he abandoned innate ideas altogether.3 David Fate Norton agrees that Hutcheson found Locke's critique persuasive, at least against neo-Platonic theories of ethics (such as Cudworth's), but elsewhere Norton maintains that Hutcheson sets up the moral sense as an "innate and independent" moral faculty.4 Charles Taylor, meanwhile, stresses the dispositional inclination of Hutcheson's argument: "Goodness and generosity are natural to us. He might have been tempted in an earlier generation to say 'innate,' but he has internalized enough of the Lockean psychology to shy away from this. So he claims that these sentiments are ones we naturally grow to have, just as we develop to our normal stature and shape."5 Given the disparate of conclusions drawn by historians of philosophy, the issue clearly merits reinvestigation. Differing lines of interpretation have emerged precisely because Hutcheson frequently changed his tack. His shifting strategy appears both in the revisions he made to later editions of the Inquiry, and in the development of his work over the course of his career. Closer attention to these considerations offers an insight into the predicament of moral philosophy in the early decades of the eighteenth century.In the critique of innate practical ideas launched in the first book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke took a sceptical view of Stoic assertions about human uniformity and the existence of "common notions" indicating moral consensus around the world.6 Evidence drawn from contemporary travelers suggested the absence of any moral agreement of this kind; Locke based his conclusion on an investigation of human practice influenced by techniques... (shrink)

n 1902, 70 million years after it tripped lightly through the Mesozoic forests in search of meat, the skeleton of a 20-foothightyrannosaurus was dynamited out of a sandstone bluff near Hell Creek, Mont. Wrapped in burlap and plaster and shipped back to New York, the bones were painstakingly reassembled by fossil curator Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History. It was there, one day in 1947, that they happened to scare the bejesus out of 5-year-old Stephen Jay (...) Gould. With a mouthful of teeth as big as bananas, the great reptile gaped down at the little mammal who had usurped its place at the head of the food chain and set him scurrying for the safety of his daddy's pant leg. It was a sublime epiphany. Long after Gould could stare with equanimity at the skull of tyrannosaurus, he was left with the essential mystery that still motivates him as perhaps America's foremost writer and thinker on evolution: why should dinosaurs have ended up in human museums instead of—as one among an infinite number of evolutionary possibilities—the other way around? (shrink)

The title is unashamedly plagiarized from Stephen Todd's excellent book, The Shape of Athenian Law. The plagiarism is slightly misleading, however, since my interest is in law as enactment while Todd's title expresses his interest in law as system . The issue I wish to address is the formulation of written laws in Athens during the late archaic and classical period, specifically the balance between procedural and substantive law. Substantive law deals with rights, obligations, offences, etc. Its role is (...) to define behaviour which is required, allowed, or prohibited. These are what Hart terms ‘primary rules’. Procedural law, on the other hand, deals, as the name suggests, with the administration of justice, that is with jurisdiction, process, etc. Hart's term for these is ‘secondary rules’. The two cannot be separated quite as neatly as I have suggested, of course. A procedural law can scarcely avoid mentioning the offences or rights whose punishment or protection it regulates, while a substantive law may need to address issues such as jurisdiction. This is therefore an issue of orientation, not a simple binary division. However, as a broad basis for classification it is of value. (shrink)

In our paper, “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the question of natural compatibilism” , we seek to advance empirical debates about free will by measuring the relevant folk intuitions using the scale methodology of psychology, as a supplement to standard experimental methods. Stephen Morris raises a number of concerns about our paper. Here, we respond to Morris's concerns.

This article argues that inquirers should adopt an active orientation to the limits of their knowledge, an approach referred to as “Transformational Fallibilism”. Drawing on the Popperian tradition, this approach treats the fallibility of knowledge as more than a philosophical nicety, rather seeing the questioning of claims, including those that have been successful, as a key way to improve the understandings of inquirers. This is illustrated with reference to the example of Newtonian and Einsteinian understandings of gravity and time in (...) the natural sciences, and debates about the role of fathers in child-rearing in the social sciences. I compare this approach to that found within critical realism, arguing that while defenders of the latter acknowledge fallibility to some extent, certain of their arguments also place problematic limits on it. Examining Sayer’s work, I argue that his view that practically successful understandings reveal something about the structure of the world involves an overconfidence in these understandings. I suggest that Elder-Vass’s use of the idea of approximate truth involves a similar difficulty. By contrast, I argue for the importance of treating all elements of the understanding, including those bound up with practical successes, as potentially in need of reconstruction at any point. (shrink)

This article explores the difficulties raised for social scientific investigation by the absence of experiment, critically reviewing realist responses to the problem such as those offered by Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer. It suggests that realist arguments for a shift from prediction to explanation, the use of abstraction, and reliance upon interpretive forms of investigation fail to demonstrate that these approaches compensate for the lack of experimental control. Instead, it is argued that the search for regularities, when suitably conceived, provides the (...) best alternative to experiment for the social sciences. (shrink)

The increasing global demand for energy necessitates devoted attention to the formulation and exploration of mechanisms of thermal heat exchangers to explore and save heat energy. Thus, innovative thermal transport fluids require to boost thermal conductivity and heat flow features to upsurge convection heat rate, and nanofluids have been effectively employed as standard heat transfer fluids. With such intention, herein, we formulated and developed the constitutive flow laws by utilizing the Rossland diffusion approximation and Stephen’s law along with the (...) MHD effect. The mathematical formulation is based on boundary layer theory pioneered by Prandtl. Governing nonlinear partial differential flow equations are changed to ODEs via the implementation of the similarity variables. A well-known computational algorithm BVPh2 has been utilized for the solution of the nonlinear system of ODEs. The consequence of innumerable physical parameters on flow field, thermal distribution, and solutal field, such as magnetic field, Lewis number, velocity parameter, Prandtl number, drag force, Nusselt number, and Sherwood number, is plotted via graphs. Finally, numerical consequences are compared with the homotopic solution as a limiting case, and an exceptional agreement is found. (shrink)

In “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism,” Deery, Davis, and Carey recommend that experimental philosophers employ a new methodology for determining the extent to which the folk are natural compatibilists about free will and moral responsibility. While I agree that the general methodology that the authors developed holds great promise for improving our understanding of folk attitudes about free will and moral responsibility, I am much less enthusiastic about some of the conclusions that they reached (...) on the basis of the particular studies they ran. Key among these are that the folk harbor some compatibilist intuitions and that the findings of both Nichols and Knobe , on the one hand, and Nahmias and Murray , on the other, are undermined by their reliance upon a particular formulation of determinism in the cases they presented to their subjects. (shrink)

Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the (...) evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour.Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen. (shrink)

This article is a commentary on Carey (2009) The Origin of Concepts. Carey rightly rejects the building blocks model of concept acquisition on the grounds that new primitive concepts can be learned via the process of bootstrapping. But new primitives can be learned by other acquisition processes that do not involve bootstrapping, and bootstrapping itself is not a unitary process. Nonetheless, the processes associated with bootstrapping provide important insights into conceptual change.

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains, which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables (...) under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions. (shrink)

The work and ideas of Rudolf Laban, dancer, choreographer and seminal theoretician of movement and dance, have had a profound impact across a range of disciplines. This book explores this impact.

How can an agent's desire or will give him reasons for acting? Not long ago, this might have seemed a silly question, since it was widely believed that all reasons for acting are based in the agent's desires. The interesting question, it seemed, was not how what an agent wants could give him reasons, but how anything else could. In recent years, however, this earlier orthodoxy has increasingly appeared wrongheaded as a growing number of philosophers have come to stress the (...) action-guiding role of reasons in deliberation from the agent's point of view. What a deliberating agent has in view is rarely his own will or desires as such, even if taking something as a reason is intimately tied to desire. Someone who wants to escape a burning building does not evaluate her options by considering which is likeliest to realize what she wants or wills. She is focused, rather, on her desire's object: getting out alive. The fact that a successful route would realize something she wants is apt to strike her as beside the point or, at best, as a trivial bonus. (shrink)

With great energy and clarity, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), author of History of the Criminal Law of England, and judge of the High Court from 1879-91, challenges John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and On Utilitarianism, arguing that ...

This paper argues for a novel account of deceitful scientific communication, as “wishful speaking”. This concept is of relevance both to philosophy of science and to discussions of the ethics of lying and misleading. Section 1 outlines a case-study of “ghost-managed” research. Section 2 introduces the concept of “wishful speaking” and shows how it relates to other forms of misleading communication. Sections 3–5 consider some complications raised by the example of pharmaceutical research; concerning the ethics of silence; how research strategies—as (...) well as the communication of results—may be misleading; and questions of multiple authorship. The conclusion suggests some more general conclusions. (shrink)

This article proposes 3 principles and 3 imperatives as the philosophical foundations of a global journalism ethics. The central claim is that the globalization of news media requires a radical rethinking of the principles and standards of journalism ethics, through the adoption of a cosmopolitan attitude. The article explains how and why ethicists should construct a global journalism ethics, using a contractualist approach. It then formulates 3 "claims" or principles: the claims of credibility, justifiable consequence, and humanity. The claim of (...) humanity is developed further by the formulation of 3 imperatives: to act as a global agent, to serve world citizens, and to enhance nonparochial understandings. The article concludes by considering some implications of a cosmopolitan attitude for the practice of journalism. (shrink)

In an earlier paper, Stephen Kershnar argued for the following thesis: An instance of trash-talking is permissible if and only if the relevant sports organization’s system of rules permits the expression. One person trash-talks a second if and only if the first intentionally insults the second during competition. The above theory sounds implausible. Surely, the conditions under which a player may insult another do not depend on what the owners arbitrarily decide. Such an approach doesn’t appear to be true (...) in the workplace, bar, or sandlot, so it is hard to see why it should be true in sport. With this general skepticism in mind, this paper evaluates Nicholas Dixon’s objections. Dixon rejects Kershnar’s argument because trash-talking conflicts with the internal value of a sport, violates a right, and degrades the person toward whom the trash-talking is directed. (shrink)

A virtual community is generally described as a group of people with shared interests, ideas, and goals in a particular digital group or virtual platform. Virtual communities have become ubiquitous in recent times, and almost everyone belongs to one or multiple virtual communities. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated national lockdowns, has made virtual communities more essential and a necessary part of our daily lives, whether for work and business, educational purposes or keeping in touch with friends (...) and family. Given these facts, how do we ensure that virtual communities become a true community qua community? We address this question by proposing and arguing for a ‘virtual communitarianism’—an online community that integrates essential features of traditional African communitarianism in its outlook and practice. The paper’s position is that virtual communitarianism can make for a strong ethical virtual community where members can demonstrate a strong sense of group solidarity, care and compassion towards each other. The inclusion of these virtues can bring members who often are farapart and help create a stronger community bond. This will ensure that the evolution of virtual communities does not happen without the integration of progressive African communitarian values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient CommentatorsK. KapparisCraig A. Gibson. Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xii + 261 pp. Cloth, $55.This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of the ancient scholarship on Demosthenes. Gibson points out that Demosthenes was widely read in later antiquity, and this created the need for linguistic and historical commentaries (...) on his speeches. Of these, some have partially survived on papyrus, while excerpts have also been preserved in later lexicographers and the Byzantine scholia found in the margins of Demosthenic manuscripts. The purpose of Gibson's study is to clarify some confusing and difficult issues related to the ancient scholarship on Demosthenes and to provide the text and commentary on the main sources. [End Page 481]Gibson's introduction includes an informative outline of key parameters in the debate, such as the accuracy of excerption from an ancient commentary, the significance of date and place, and the intended readership of these commentaries. The first chapter discusses the form and transmission of ancient commentaries, their relation with lexicographic works, and their impact on the Byzantine scholia. Gibson convincingly argues that the scholia do not reveal direct dependency upon the surviving ancient commentaries but were compiled from lexicographic works such as Harpocration or the Suda, and possibly other works lost for us. The second chapter deals with the sources, critical agenda, and readership of the ancient commentaries. Here, Gibson provides a clear account of the purposes and guiding principles behind the composition of these works. He concludes that ancient commentators were familiar with interpretative problems of the Demosthenic text and tried to explain allusions and references to specific events, people, and places and also provide semantic, etymological and textual explanations of difficult or unusual terms. In this and the third chapter, Gibson discusses in considerable detail the scholarship on Didymus. He rejects the view that Didymus was merely a filter for a "golden era" of Alexandrian scholarship and argues that his prominent position as a commentator is due to the vast quantity of his work and its impact on later scholars. In sum, the first part of the study offers an informative account of ancient Demosthenic scholarship written in a clear and accessible style.The second part of the book contains the texts of ancient commentators of Demosthenes, with English translations, and also linguistic and historical commentary. In the translation, Gibson chooses to leave out many lines from the papyrus texts where only single words or fragments of words are legible; he translates only the most extant sections of the text. This is a valid choice, but readers should be aware of the fact that many important details may be hiding in the leftovers and fragments that have been omitted. Gibson does not provide the readily available text of P.Berol.inv. 9780, the most extensive surviving work of Didymus, while he cites the rest of the texts from reliable modern editions. In the commentary there are interesting discussions on the Spartan mora, the building of the Parthenon, the Helliastic courts, and many other topics noted by the ancient commentators on Demosthenes. An appendix presents and discusses P.Lond.Lit. 179, a prologue and commentary on Dem. 21. The reader will probably find useful the indexes and rich bibliography provided in the last part of this study.Gibson's commentary is certainly thorough but contains a number of errors in detail, and important bibliography is missing on individual topics. For example:Page 113: Gibson adopts the text of Pearson-Stephens. The adjective is, or, as here (later Greek),. Therefore the text should be (see LSJ s.v.).Page 120: Gibson has missed several important contributions to the issue of the theoric fund in recent years (M. H. Hansen, GRBS 17 [1976] 235-46; E. M. [End Page 482] Harris in E. M. Harris and R. Wallace, eds., Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History 360-146 B.C., in Honor of E. Badian [Norman, Okla., 1996]; C. Carey, Apollodoros Against Neaira [Warminster, 1992] 152-57). As a result, his note on P.Berol. 9780, Col. 8.32-44 is... (shrink)

This chapter provide an introductory portrait of global media ethics as an evolving discipline in broad strokes—its motivating questions, its distinct concerns and methods, how the discipline is related to other forms of ethics, and why we need a global media ethics. Since our global world is linked by many forms of media, the chapter argues that we need an accompanying global media ethics that challenges the use of media to promote racism, xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and the denial of human (...) rights. The chapter explores the types of research and writing that comprise global media ethics and concludes with an outline of how a global media ethics can be realized in practice. (shrink)

Critics of survival research often claim that the survival hypothesis is conceptually problematic at best, and literally incoherent at worst. The guiding intuition behind their skepticism is that there’s an essential link between the concept of a person (or personality or experience) and physical embodiment. Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. However, critics can’t simply beg (...) the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary. On the other hand, defenders of ostensible mediumistic communication need to explain how postmortem awareness and knowledge of the current physical world can occur without a physical body that experiences the world and represents it accurately enough to ground veridical postmortem reports. This paper will fi rst consider why survivalists face potentially serious problems in trying to make sense of apparent postmortem perception. Then it will consider a plausible—and arguably the only—way to deal with the issues. However, that solution turns out to be a double-edged sword. Ironically, the best way to deal with the problem of perspectival postmortem awareness may render the survival hypothesis gratuitous. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S83-S88, March‐April 2022.

It is hard to argue with the proposition that value for money should guide health spending. However, even after decades of development, economic evaluation is still a work in progress. As applied, it deals poorly with issues of social justice, ageing and end of life issues; cases involving small numbers—such as decisions about orphan drugs—are also contested. Unfortunately, differences in incremental cost-effectiveness ratios are presented with a degree of precision which contributes to an ‘illusion of validity’.1 Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (...) has suggested that ‘when all the requirements of ubiquitous market-centred evaluation have been incorporated into the procedures of cost–benefit analysis, it is not so much a discipline as a daydream’.2 As with any approach to public decision making, the use of economic evaluation rests on an implicit social licence, including that the decision making is fair and reasonable. Many countries have developed special policies for rare, ‘ultrarare’ or ‘orphan’ diseases to moderate the effect of a ubiquitous application of economic evaluation. The threshold for defining ‘small’ or rare is a matter of judgement and ranges between 2 and 80 per 100 000 population.3 Magalhaes challenges the ethical basis of special programmes for low incidence conditions and argues against such provisions. In this commentary, I will argue the contrary: that there are good reasons …. (shrink)

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity -- and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West. Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings (...) of yoga from its everyday practice -- most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings -- particularly Schopenhauer -- have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India -- which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine. Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements -- air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences -- breathing and the fact of sexual difference -- she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization. (shrink)

The history of Communism in the twentieth century, if the current orthodoxy is to be believed, was no more than a detour in a process in which history ends in a world of civil societies organized as liberal democracies that increasingly relate to each other following the model of liberal democracy itself, through the rule of law, collective discussion, the general recognition of human and civil rights, and so forth. In this image of world history, the worldwide dominance of liberal (...) democracy is the culmination of a process that appears as a first draft in the Westphalian peace, which gradually spread through time, for example, through the internationalist ideology of Woodrow Wilson. In this teleological image of history, Communism appears as a developmental error, an error produced by an accidental combination of erroneous ideology and special circumstances of delayed development in certain countries that made them particularly susceptible to it. (shrink)

Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, find some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

William James argued for a philosophy of democracy and pluralism that advocates individual and collective responsibility for our social arrangements, our morality, and our religion. In James' view, democracy resides first and foremost not in governmental institutions or in procedures such as voting, but rather in the characteristics of individuals, and in qualities of mind and conduct. It is a philosophy for social change, counselling action and hope despite the manifold challenges facing democratic politics, and these issues still resonate strongly (...) today. In this book, Stephen Bush explores how these themes connect to James' philosophy of religion, his moral thought, his epistemology, his psychology, and his metaphysics. His fresh and original study highlights the relevance of James' thought to modern debates, and will appeal to scholars and students of moral and political philosophy. (shrink)