The most current text available on the international and U.S. law of the sea, this much-needed reference is built around the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and other relevant maritime materials. While it addresses all aspects of ocean usage, much emphasis has been placed on issues of contemporary importance such as international fisheries, maritime boundaries, and deep seabed mining. The first part introduces traditional zones of jurisdiction and doctrine such as inland waters, territorial seas, or (...) high seas, as well as some new concepts related to navigation: the regimes of international straits and archipelagic waters and exclusive economic zones. The latter part analyzes functional issues such as fishing, oil and gas exploitation, mining, scientific research, and maritime pollution, referring on each subject to the U.S. law for comparison. (shrink)

Spatial skills predict important life outcomes, such as mathematical achievement or entrance into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics disciplines. Children significantly vary in their spatial performance even before they enter formal schooling. One correlate of children's spatial performance is the spatial language they produce and hear from others, such as their parents. Because the emphasis has been on spatial language, less is known about the role of hand gestures in children's spatial development. Some children are more likely to fall behind (...) in their spatial skills than others. Children born premature constitute such a risk group. Here, we compared performance of term and preterm-born children on two non-verbal spatial tasks—mental transformation and block design. We also examined relations of children's performance on these tasks to parental spatial language and gesture input and their own production of spatial language and gesture during an independent puzzle play interaction. We found that while term and preterm-born children as a group did not differ in the mental transformation or block design performance, children varied widely in their performance within each group. The variability in mental transformation scores was predicted by both a subset of spatial words and all spatial gestures children produced. Children's spatial language and gesture were in turn related to their parents' spatial language and gesture. Parental spatial language and gesture had an indirect relation on children's mental transformation, but not block design, scores via children's spatial language, and gesture use. Overall, results highlight the unique contributions of speech and gesture in communicating spatial information and predicting children's spatial performance. (shrink)

The Dutch philosopher of religion Hent de Vries has explored and complicated the boundaries between religion and modern thought in order to create the space for an innovative “minimal theology.” This article reconstructs de Vries's interpretation of the changes in Theodor W. Adorno's thought between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics in order to demonstrate its fecundity for a philosophical account of otherness. It also examines and defends de Vries's own rhetorical mode of reading texts as an exemplary approach to (...) philosophical dialogue. Finally, however, the essay challenges de Vries's privileging of the religious as the site of ethical relationality and his intentional bracketing of Adorno's critical social theory. (shrink)

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The (...) Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price. (shrink)

Aquinas occupies an extremely important position in the western philosophical tradition. His work contains influential contributions in logic, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics and philosophy of religion, and his commentaries on Aristotle played a major role in the incorporation of the philosophy of Aristotle into the understanding of Christian doctrine and into western culture at large. Yet many people find it difficult to begin the study of Aquinas's work, daunted by its volume and by its being worked out within in (...) the context of Catholic doctrine, which must now be obscure to most readers. This book can help rectify this. (shrink)

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed the way we think about science. This volume offers an introduction to Kuhn's life (...) and work and then considers the implications of Kuhn's work for philosophy, cognitive psychology, social studies of science and feminism. The volume is more than a retrospective on Kuhn, exploring future developments of cognitive and information services along Kuhnian lines. Outside of philosophy the volume will be of particular interest to professionals and students in cognitive science, history of science, science studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

Moral universalism centrally involves the idea that the moral assessment of persons and their conduct, of social rules and states of affairs, must be based on fundamental principles that do not, explicitly or covertly, discriminate arbitrarily against particular persons or groups. This general idea is explicated in terms of three conditions. It is then applied to the discrepancy between our criteria of national and global economic justice. Most citizens of developed countries are unwilling to require of the global economic order (...) what they assuredly require of any national economic order, for example, that its rules be under democratic control, that it preclude life-threatening poverty as far as is reasonably possible. Without a plausible justification, such a double standard constitutes covert arbitrary discrimination against the global poor. Key Words: contextualism • corruption • discrimination • Rawls • resource exports • world poverty. (shrink)

I argue that Diego Alvarez and Thomas de Lemos through their participation in the De auxiliis controversy developed and defended Cajetan’s view of the causation of sin in such a way that they were able to defend the predetermination of the material aspect of sin while at the same time assimilating important aspects from his critics. It is important to recognize that Lemos and his associates hold both that the premotion of sin’s material aspect is not necessarily connected with (...) the Catholic faith and that it is knowable by natural reason. Even though they argued that other Molinist theses should be condemned as heretical, they held that this rejection of the Dominican thesis concerning sin is simply wrong but not heretical. First, I consider Cajetan’s position. Second, I consider the reception of this position by Medina, Zumel, and Báñez. Third, I show that Alvarez and Lemos make distinctions that allow them to incorporate the insights of both Cajetan and his critics. (shrink)

Dans la vie d'un lecteur, certains auteurs occupent une place à part : lectures inaugurales, compagnons de tous les jours, sources auxquelles on revient. La collection "Les auteurs de ma vie" invite de grands écrivains contemporains à partager leur admiration pour un classique, dont la lecture a particulièrement compté pour eux. Dans sa jeunesse, Thomas Mann a lu et médité Schopenhauer, philosophe de la volonté et du pessimisme, qui a largement influencé l'oeuvre de celui qui deviendra l'un des plus (...) grands écrivains modernes de la décadence. Cet hommage à son maître nous offre une clé précieuse de son parcours intellectuel. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Gilbertson et al should be commended for their insightful exploration of expanded terminal sedation (ETS)1; however, there are a number of concerns that I will address in this response. I will first better characterise the currently accepted and commonplace ‘standard’ TS (STS), and then argue that the advocated forms of ETS draw very close to—and at times clearly constitute a subtype of—euthanasia, as opposed to representing a similar but separate practice. I will then conclude with concerns regarding the inappropriate application (...) of ETS, particularly in the non-voluntary context. Gilbertson et al distinguish ‘gradual’ TS, which they state is the currently accepted form of TS, from ‘rapid’ TS, which is then argued to be a justifiable form of ETS. However, in my experience working in multiple large public teaching hospitals in New South Wales, Australia and consistent with local clinical practice guidelines,2 3 STS falls somewhere in the middle between ‘gradual’ and ‘rapid’ TS. STS explicitly aims to achieve permanent unconsciousness so as to eliminate the potential for (and therefore relieve) suffering; conversely, lighter or more intermittent forms of sedation, or administering sedatives with aims other than to achieve unconsciousness (eg, anxiolysis), do not constitute TS proper. STS uses doses proportionate to the extent of symptoms so as to avoid ‘overshooting’ and inadvertently administering excessive doses which actually hasten/cause death, in order to distinguish STS from euthanasia in this respect. This is achieved by gradually uptitrating doses when the patient appears distressed, and is therefore by definition …. (shrink)

This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The (...) Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This series offers central philosophical treatises of Aquinas in new, state-of-the-art translations distinguished by their accuracy and use of clear and nontechnical modern vocabulary. Annotation and commentary accessible to undergraduates make the series an ideal vehicle for the study of Aquinas by readers approaching him from a variety of backgrounds and interests.

Discusses the various theories of consciousness from different perspectives: psychological, neurophysiological and philosophical. Theories regarding the interaction of pain, schizophrenia, the brain and the nervous system with consciousness are included. Also includes a discussion of the relative merits of the different theories together with the latest data from the experimental disciplines.

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

Abstract Freedom in the sense of free will is a multiway power to do any one of a number of things, leaving it up to us which one of a range of options by way of action we perform. What are the ethical implications of our possession of such a power? The paper examines the pre-Hobbesian scholastic view of writers such as Peter Lombard and Francisco Suárez: freedom as a multiway power is linked to the right to liberty understood as (...) a right to exercise that power, and to liberation as a desirable goal involving the perfection of that power. Freedom as a power, liberty as a right, and liberation as a desirable goal, are all linked within this scholastic view to a distinctive theory of law as constituting, in its primary form of natural law, the normative recognition of human freedom. Hobbes's denial of the very existence of freedom as a power led him to a radical revision both of the theory of law and of the relation of law to liberty. Law and liberty were no longer harmonious phenomena, but were left in essential conflict. One legacy of Hobbes is the attempt to base a theory of law and liberty not on freedom as a multiway power, but on rationality. Instead of an ethics of freedom, we have an ethics of reason as involving autonomy. The paper expresses some scepticism about the prospects for such an appeal to reason as a replacement for multiway freedom. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

The Questiones libri Porphirii is a commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge by the fourteenth-century logician Thomas Manlevelt. In this text early Ockhamism is being pushed to its extremes. It is edited here in full.

This Bible quotation can be understood as a rudimentary conception of personal morality, affirming that the moral assessment of your life depends, in part, upon your conduct toward your least fortunate neighbors. But a conception of personal morality does not capture all that matters morally about our lives - we must also consider our social institutions. These may be morally flawed; for example, they may define positions of utter dependence. And such flaws are not natural or necessary. Social institutions are (...) created, perpetuated, and changed by human beings, who may then bear some responsibility for such flaws. Thus morality may demand more than to treat the oppressed with kindness and charity: It may require efforts toward institutional reform. And such a requirement presupposes a further moral conception: for the assessment of social institutions. (shrink)

For post-Kantian philosophy, “life” is a transitional concept that relates the realm of nature to the realm of freedom. From this vantage point, what is living seems to have the double char- acter of being both already and not yet free: Compared with the external necessity of dead nature, living beings already seem to exhibit a basic type of spontaneity and normativity that on the other hand still has to be superseded on the path to the freedom and normativity of (...) spirit. The origin of this constellation is to be found in Kant’s discussion of natural purposes in the third Critique; its most articulated shape, however, is developed in Hegel’s conception of life. To introduce the questions that this volume discusses, I will briefly characterize the way in which Kant opens up this conception of the living (I) and outline the way in which Hegel develops this approach (II, III). I will close with a brief outlook on the contributions collected in this volume (IV). (shrink)

A comparative examination of four alternative ways of understandingwhat human rights are supports an institutional understanding assuggested by Article 28 of the Universal Declaration: Human rightsare weighty moral claims on any coercively imposed institutionalorder, national or international (as Article 28 confirms). Any suchorder must afford the persons on whom it is imposed secure accessto the objects of their human rights. This understanding of humanrights is broadly sharable across cultures and narrows the philosophical and practical differences between the friends ofcivil and (...) political and the champions of social, economic, andcultural human rights. When applied to the global institutionalorder, it provides a new argument for conceiving human rights asuniversal – and a new basis for criticizing this order as tooencouraging of oppression, corruption, and poverty in the developing countries: We have a negative duty not to cooperatein the imposition of this global order if feasible reforms ofit would significantly improve the realization of human rights. (shrink)

Drawing on aspects of Foucauldian feminist theory Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent offers original and detailed readings of six critically under-valued novels: Desperate Remedies, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta, A Laodicean, Two on a Tower and The Well-Beloved, demonstrating Hardy's peculiarly modern appreciation of how individuals negotiate the forces which shape their sense of self. Tracing his interest in the evolutionary debate and the woman question this book reveals a new politically engaged rather than a (...) grimly pessimistic Hardy. (shrink)

h e Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development of varieties from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into permanent races and then into new species, by the process of natural selection , which process is essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man has originated the races of domestic animals—the struggle (...) for existence taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of natural selection, that selective action which he performs in artificial selection. (shrink)

The past few years have seen a revival of interest in Thomas Reid's philosophy. His moral theory has been studied by D. D. Raphael (The Moral Sense) and his entire philosophical position by S. A. Grave (The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense). Prior to both, A. D. Woozley gave us the first modern reprint of Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man - in fact the first edition of any work by Reid to appear in print since the (...) Philosophical Works was edited in the nineteenth century by Sir William Hamilton. But Reid's aesthetic philosophy has not received its due. Woozley, in abridging the Essays, omitted the whole final essay, "On Taste," which is the only extended work on aesthetic theory that Reid ever published. Raphael, being interested primarily in Reid's moral theory, understand ably, treated aesthetics only as it was related to morality. And Grave, although he did present a short and very cogent resume of Reid's aes thetic position, obviously found himself drawn to other elements of Reid's philosophy. There are, of course, some accounts of Reid's aes thetic theory to be found in the various studies of eighteenth-century British aesthetics and criticism. None, however, appears to me to do any kind of justice to the philosophical questions which Reid treats in his aesthetics and philosophy of art. (shrink)

We characterize the proof-theoretic strength of systems of explicit mathematics with a general principle asserting the existence of least fixed points for monotone inductive definitions, in terms of certain systems of analysis and set theory. In the case of analysis, these are systems which contain the Σ12-axiom of choice and Π12-comprehension for formulas without set parameters. In the case of set theory, these are systems containing the Kripke-Platek axioms for a recursively inaccessible universe together with the existence of a stable (...) ordinal. In all cases, the exact strength depends on what forms of induction are admitted in the respective systems. (shrink)

[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement (...) relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)

In the first systematic study of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, Alan Thomas discusses Nagel's contrast between the "subjective" and the "objective" points of view throughout the various areas of his wide ranging philosophy. Nagel's original and distinctive contrast between the subjective view and our aspiration to a "view from nowhere" within metaphysics structures the chapters of the book. A "new Humean" in epistemology, Nagel takes philosophical scepticism to be both irrefutable and yet to indicate a profound truth (...) about our capacity for self-transcendence. The contrast between subjective and objective views is then considered in the case of the mind, where consciousness proves to be the central aspect of mind that contemporary theorising fails to acknowledge adequately. The second half of the book analyses Nagel's work on moral and political philosophy where he has been most deeply influential. Topics covered include the contrast between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons and values, Nagel's distinctive version of a hybrid ethical theory, his discussion of life's meaningfulness and finally his sceptical arguments about whether a liberal society can reconcile the conflicting moral demands of self and other. (shrink)

Prior's project of tense logic has both a formal-logical and a philosophical side. Both aspects were important for Prior. The paper suggests viewing Prior's philosophical project as a continuation of the tradition of "logic as language", or "universalism", identified by van Heijenoort and Hintikka, respectively. The label "tense-logical universalism" is chosen in order to stress Prior's emphasis on the foundational role of natural language for the three fields of logic, semantics, and philosophy of science. The paper draws on Prior's works (...) in all three mentioned areas. In particular, we comment on Prior's universalist approach to model theory, which has recently given rise to hybrid logic, and on the interesting perspective on relativity theory offered through his writings. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on the Intellectual (...) Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham disagree over how and whether virtues are specified by their objects. For Thomas, habits and acts are specified by their formal objects. For instance, the object of theft is something that belongs to someone else, and more particularly theft is distinct from robbery because theft is the open taking of another’s good, whereas robbery is open and violent. A habit such as a virtue or a vice shares or takes (...) the act’s object. For Scotus, although the same virtue or act cannot have objects which differ formally, different virtues and acts can have an object which is identical according to its formal ratio, in the way that the different theological virtues might even formally have God as their object. Ockham accepts Scotus’s view that charity and hope are two kinds of love, we will see how, unlike Scotus, he argues that these theological virtues differ on account of their immediate complex objects. The disagreement between these three figures raises important difficulties concerning what it even means to be a formal object. (shrink)

Although Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham are all broadly Aristotelian, their different Aristotelian accounts reflect underlying disagreements in these three areas. These trends may represent a shift from an earlier to a later medieval intellectual culture, but they also reflect views that continued to exist in different schools. Thomists continued to exist alongside Scotists through the end of the eighteenth century, and Ockham’s views had a more varied but continued influence through the modern period. The different views of Thomas, (...) Scotus, and Ockham are not only in themselves plausible attempts at understanding human action, but they formed the background to late medieval and early modern descriptions of human action. (shrink)

Holderlin's essays and letters constitute essential documents for an understanding of the transitional period from neo-classical poetics to what can only be characterized as a unique and, in its frequently experimental structure, essentially modernist poetics. This book contains virtually all of Holderlin's theoretical writings translated for the first time. In spite of the great significance of Holderlin's ideas for contemporary critical thought, most of his highly important theoretical oeuvre has been unavailable to English readers until now. Here also are a (...) number of letters which chart the development of Holderlin's thought on issues that today remain fundamental to poetics and philosophy. The work's critical introduction discusses both the historical genesis of Holderlin's theoretical writings out of the enlightenment as well as their systematic interaction with post-Kantian Idealism. Through interpretations of three short fragments, Pfau indicates that it would be insufficient to consider Holderlin as the mere precursor of the great systematic philosophers of German Idealism--Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Instead, Holderlin's earliest theoretical fragments already mark a turn away from the rigorous systematicity that underlies the philosophical discourse of his contemporaries. Holderlin's theoretical writings may be the most seminal texts in the widely discussed interimplication of Idealistic philosophy and Romantic poetry and poetics. (shrink)

Reid's ideas on education are a direct development of his theory of the mind, and the writings in this volume form an integral part of his philosophy that has, until now, been ignored.

Thomas Brown (1778-1820) is the third member, after Thomas Reid and Dugald Steward, traditionally associated with the Scottish School of Common Sense. This collection makes this major thinker's work available in a modern scholarly edition.

Ce texte a déjà paru dans L'espace Géographique, n° 1, 1er trim. 2007, p. 15-26. Nous remercions Rachel Thomas de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : La thématique de la marche en ville a occupé une grande partie de la littérature du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle. Au point qu'aujourd'hui, la figure du flâneur, décrite par Walter Benjamin, domine encore nos représentations. Pour autant, si marcher en ville requiert un art du voir dont le (...) flâneur demeure un artiste accompli, il engage aussi le - Sociologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

States of Consciousness extends Thomas Natsoulas' development of the psychology of consciousness by giving sustained attention to the stream of consciousness and its component 'pulses of experience'. Natsoulas' unrivalled scholarship across psychology, philosophy and cognate fields means that very often surprising connections are made between the works of leading theorists of consciousness, including Brentano, Mead, Bergmann, Strawson, James, Freud, Skinner, Hebb, Gibson, O'Shaughnessy and Woodruff Smith. At a time when interest in consciousness and the brain is growing rapidly, this (...) book provides an in-depth analysis of sophisticated psychological accounts that pertain to consciousness. Its breadth of coverage and interdisciplinary nature will be of interest to postgraduates and specialists in a range of fields, particularly the history of psychology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Georg Simmel, as well as being a major philosopher, is one of the founding figures of sociology whose work is comparable in importance to that of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. His writings on money, metropolises, and modernity have inspired generations of thinkers for over a century. In this book, leading expert Thomas Kemple clearly and accessibly introduces Simmel’s sociological and philosophical work, ranging from his masterpiece The Philosophy of Money to his famous essays ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ and (...) ‘Fashion’ and beyond. The author situates his writings within his social and intellectual circles and analyses them in light of current debates surrounding urban sociology and social networks, phenomenology and metaphysics, cultural criticism and the study of everyday life. He brings Simmel’s most famous works into conversation with others that have received less attention, such as his writings on nature, art, religion, and sexuality. Through diagrams, everyday examples, and expositions of the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and successors, this highly readable book captures the innovative spirit of Simmel’s unique method of thinking about cultural objects and his original style of writing about social life. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of Simmel’s death, it will be the leading guide to Simmel’s thought for generations of students and scholars. (shrink)

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural rather than miraculous causes has been interpreted both by his contemporaries and by some historians as an essentially Cartesian principle. On (...) this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation. Burnet's commitment to natural over miraculous causes, I argue, was grounded in an anti-voluntarist theology which he inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. This anti-voluntarism, moreover, also dictated the kind of miracles to which he did appeal. This reading of Burnet contrasts with the view that he was simply following Cartesian principles. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism. Second, Burnet's and Descartes's views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson is among the most important and controversial of American political thinkers: his influence (libertarian, democratic, participatory, and agrarian-republican) is still felt today. A prolific writer, Jefferson left 18,000 letters, Notes on the State of Virginia, an Autobiography, and numerous other papers. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball have selected the most important of these for presentation in the Cambridge Texts series: Jefferson's views on topics such as revolution, self-government, the role of women and African-American and Native Americans emerge (...) to give a fascinating insight into a man who owned slaves, yet advocated the abolition of slavery. The texts are supported by a concise introduction, suggestions for further reading and short biographies of key figures, all providing invaluable assistance to the student encountering the breadth and richness of Jefferson's thought for the first time. (shrink)

The continuing philosophical interest in the famous 'Protocol Sentence Debate' in the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists is, to a large measure, due to the focus on the epistemological issues in the dispute, and the neglect of differences among the leading players in their philosophical views of logic and language. In Protocols, Truth and Convention, the current understanding of the debate is advanced by developing the contemporaneous views of logic and language held by the principal disputants. Rudolf Carnap and Moritz (...) Schlick. It is argued - largely on the basis of unpublished manuscripts and correspondence - that, despite apparent differences in their respective conceptions of language, there are nonetheless striking similarities, particularly with respect to the conventionality of language. Nonetheless, one key issue - concerning the syntacticism inherent in Carnap's early Thirties' philosophy - separates the two viewpoints in the clash over protocols. Finally, it is argued that Carnap's syntacticism is untenable, a conclusion that Carnap himself finally reached in the closing exchanges of the protocol sentence controversy. (shrink)

As the originator of the Scottish school of "common sense" philosophy and the foremost contemporary critic of David Hume's moral skepticism, Thomas Reid (1710-1796) played a hitherto unknown role in applying the tradition of natural law to morality and politics. When Reid succeeded Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow in 1764, he taught a course covering pneumatology (theory of mind), practical ethics, and politics. In presenting for the first time the philosopher's manuscript lectures and papers on (...) practical ethics, Knud Haakonssen shows how these writings not only add depth to Reid's criticism of Hume but also clarify his own social, moral, and political thought. As a whole, Reid's Practical Ethics constitutes a most significant addition of source material for the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The papers assembled here demonstrate the extent to which the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment was influenced by natural jurisprudence. At the same time they reveal Reid's involvement with republican, utopian, and radical themes and elucidate the relations between religion and politics in the Enlightenment. Haakonssen's introduction is the first substantial systematic treatment of Reid's moral-political thought, connecting it with his general philosophy and setting it in the context of his life and time. (shrink)

In this paper I will offer a comprehensive defense of the safety account of knowledge against counterexamples that have been recently put forward. In Sect. 2, I will discuss different versions of safety, arguing that a specific variant of method-relativized safety is the most plausible. I will then use this specific version of safety to respond to counterexamples in the recent literature. In Sect. 3, I will address alleged examples of safe beliefs that still constitute Gettier cases. In Sect. 4, (...) I will discuss alleged examples of unsafe knowledge. In Sect. 5, I will address alleged cases of safe belief that do not constitute knowledge for non-Gettier reasons. My overall goal is to show that there are no successful counterexamples to robust anti-luck epistemology and to highlight some major presuppositions of my reply. (shrink)

The paper locates, appreciates, and extends several dimensions of Simon’s work in the direction of more recent contributions by people such as Gigerenzer and Dennett. The author’s “crowbar model of method” is compared to Simon’s scissors metaphor. Against an evolutionary background, both support a pragmatic rather than strong realist approach to theoretically deep and complex problems. The importance of implicit knowledge is emphasized, for humans, as well as nonhuman animals. Although Simon was a realist in some respects, his work on (...) bounded rationality, satisficing, problem solving, heuristics, models, and scientific discovery mark him as a pragmatist. Indeed, he should be regarded as one of the great American pragmatists, alongside Peirce, James, Dewey, and a few others. (shrink)

This article argues that Lara Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility (REU) theory fails to offer a true alternative to expected utility theory. Under commonly held assumptions about dynamic choice and the framing of decision problems, rational agents are guided by their attitudes to temporally extended courses of action. If so, REU theory makes approximately the same recommendations as expected utility theory. Being more permissive about dynamic choice or framing, however, undermines the theory’s claim to capturing a steady choice disposition in the (...) face of risk. I argue that this poses a challenge to alternatives to expected utility theory more generally. (shrink)

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the (...) whole. How do we reconcile these two standpoints--intellectually, morally, and practically? To what extent are they irreconcilable and to what extent can they be integrated? Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching, as it does, every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as: the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death. Excessive objectification has been a malady of recent analytic philosophy, claims Nagel, it has led to implausible forms of reductionism in the philosophy of mind and elsewhere. The solution is not to inhibit the objectifying impulse, but to insist that it learn to live alongside the internal perspectives that cannot be either discarded or objectified. Reconciliation between the two standpoints, in the end, is not always possible. (shrink)

Thomas Brown, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, was among the most prominent and widely read British philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century. An influential interpreter of both Hume and Reid, Brown provided a bridge between the Scottish school of 'Common Sense' and the later positivism of John Stuart Mill and others. The selections in this volume illustrate Brown’s original ideas about mental science, cause and effect, emotions and ethics. They are preceded by an introduction situating (...) Brown’s career and writings in their intellectual and historical context. (shrink)