Situated at the intersection of film and media studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema provides a trenchant account of the role of cinema in the oeuvre of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The book is animated by Derrida's self-confessed passion for the movies, his reluctance to write about film despite the range of his corpus, and the generative encounters arising between his legacy and the field of (...) film and media studies as a result. Given the expanse of its references, interdisciplinarity, and consideration of Derrida's approach to the experience of both spectatorship and the act of being filmed, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema contributes to the ongoing close analyses of the philosopher's work while also providing a rigorous introduction to deconstruction. (shrink)

ExcerptMany people assume that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was an exclusively or primarily Western project, imposed on the rest of the world by the European and American powers that emerged victorious from World War II. Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon’s 2001 book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, suggests otherwise. It was not the great powers but small powers that pushed hardest for a declaration of rights. And it (...) was often great powers—and one must acknowledge, great powers dominated by people of European ancestry—that did not like the idea of being pushed around by politically and economically weaker inhabitants of the Global South, who were just beginning to emerge from centuries of Western colonialism and other forms of oppression.1. (shrink)

The conventional approach to international development by civil society—that is, the installation of “Western” programs and institutions by “Western” groups in “underdeveloped” regions—has remained largely unchanged since global poverty reduction, whether for political or social justice motivations, gained prominence in public discourse after World War II. Yet poverty rates, literacy, life expectancy, and unemployment in one of the poorest regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, has remained the same if not worsened since the 1970s . And, still, the great Development (...) Project continues: Problems in under-resourced areas are identified by well-meaning people from well-resourced areas, proposals to solve those problems are crafted by project managers and submitted to government and nongovernmental agencies, and successful projects are implemented by other well-meaning people who, for the most part, honestly want to make a difference. This is the system in which Priya seems to .. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

It has come to be expected that collections issued by the Royal Institute of Philosophy will contain work that has quality or is otherwise interesting. This volume runs true to form and presents plenty of both. It gives the proceedings of the conference arranged by the Institute at Exeter in 1973, consisting of five symposia together with Chairman's remarks of about eight pages or so for each symposium, and in three cases postscripts by the first speaker. The contributors and topics (...) are: R. F. Dearden and Elizabeth Telfer on ‘Autonomy as an Educational Ideal’ with R. M. Hare as Chairman; R. K. Elliott and Glenn Langford on ‘Education and the Development of the Understanding’ with Paul Hirst as Chairman; David Cooper and Timothy O'Hagan on ‘Quality and Equality in Education’ with R. F. Atkinson as Chairman; Mary Warnock and Richard Norman on ‘The Neutral Teacher’ with Alan Montefiore as Chairman; Stuart Brown and A. Phillips Griffiths on ‘Academic Freedom’ with R. S. Peters as Chairman. (shrink)

It is sometimes held that rules of inference determine the meaning of the logical constants: the meaning of, say, conjunction is fully determined by either its introduction or its elimination rules, or both; similarly for the other connectives. In a recent paper, Panu Raatikainen argues that this view—call it logical inferentialism—is undermined by some “very little known” considerations by Carnap (1943) to the effect that “in a definite sense, it is not true that the standard rules of inference” themselves suffice (...) to “determine the meanings of [the] logical constants” (p. 2). In a nutshell, Carnap showed that the rules allow for non-normal interpretations of negation and disjunction. Raatikainen concludes that “no ordinary formalization of logic [... ] is sufficient to ‘fully formalize’ all the essential properties of the logical constants” (ibid.). We suggest that this is a mistake. Pace Raatikainen, intuitionists like Dummett and Prawitz need not worry about Carnap’s problem. And although bilateral solutions for classical inferentialists—as proposed by Timothy Smiley and Ian Rumfitt—seem inadequate, it is not excluded that classical inferentialists may be in a position to address the problem too. (shrink)

Many advocates of non-classical logic for reasons external to mathematics claim that their proposed revisions are consistent with the use of classical logic within pure mathematics. Doubts are raised about such claims, concerning the applicability of pure mathematics to natural and social science. -/- .

§0. A familiar if obscure idea: an indicative conditional presents its consequent as holding in the actual world on the supposition that its antecedent so holds, whereas a subjunctive conditional merely presents its consequent as holding in a world, typically counterfactual, in which its antecedent holds. Consider this pair.

In conversations between native speakers, words such as ‘same’ and ‘identical’ do not usually cause much difficulty. We take it for granted that others use them with the same sense as we do. If it is unclear whether numerical or qualitative identity is intended, a brief gloss such as ‘one thing not two’ for the former or ‘exactly alike’ for the latter removes the unclarity. In this paper, numerical identity is intended. A particularly conscientious and logically aware speaker might explain (...) what ‘identical’ means in her. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

I. An argument is presented for the conclusion that the hypothesis that no one will ever decide a given proposition is intuitionistically inconsistent. II. A distinction between sentences and statements blocks a similar argument for the stronger conclusion that the hypothesis that I have not yet decided a given proposition is intuitionistically inconsistent, but does not block the original argument. III. A distinction between empirical and mathematical negation might block the original argument, and empirical negation might be modelled on Nelson''s (...) strong negation, but only on intuitionistically unacceptable assumptions. IV. Intuitionists may have to accept the original argument, and therefore be committed to a dubious view of time on which there cannot be merely inductive evidence for statements about the infinite future. (shrink)

This article argues against privileging the expectations of settlers over those of dispossessed peoples. I assume in this article that historical rights to occupancy do not persist through all changes in circumstances, but a theory of justice should reduce perverse incentives to unjustly settle on land in hopes of legitimating occupancy. Margaret Moore, in her 2015 book, A Political Theory of Territory, tries to balance these intuitions through an argument based on legitimate expectations. I argue that Moore’s attempt to reduce (...) perverse incentives (through expectation-altering institutional design) fails. Moore unduly privileges settler expectations, especially over those of indigenous peoples. I criticize United States court decisions resurrecting the expectations of past settlers in the allotment era (which share structural features with Moore’s arguments). Lastly, distinguishing between ‘final’ supersession of historical injustice through changing circumstances, and ‘dormant’ supersession, shows how indigenous claims to land and jurisdiction may revive. (shrink)

On the epistemic view of vagueness, a vague expression has sharp boundaries whose location speakers of the language cannot recognize. The paper argues that one of the deepest sources of resistance to the epistemic view is the idea that all truths are cognitively accessible from truths in a language for natural science, conceived as precise, in a sense explained. The implications of the epistemic view for issues about the relations between vague predicates and scientific predicates are investigated.

It has often been thought, and has recently been argued, that one of the most profound impacts of Darwin's theory of evolution is the threat that it poses to the very possibility of living a meaningful, and therefore worthwhile, life. Three attempts to ground the possibility of a meaningful life are considered. The first two are compatible with an exclusively Darwinian worldview. One is based on the belief that Darwinian evolution is, in some sense, progressive; the other is based on (...) the belief that the natural world is a thing of value and hence, that our lives are lived in the presence of value. The third is based on a belief in providence, and holds that we must transcend the exclusively Darwinian worldview if we are to find meaning. All three are, for different reasons, rejected. The conclusion reached is that, contrary to what has often been thought and recently argued, the impact of Darwin's theory is precisely to liberate us to lead the most meaningful of lives. (shrink)

Arthur Caplan has argued that the presumptive naturalness, universality, and inevitability of aging are no obstacles to conceptualizing aging as a disease since those traits are themselves merely contingent. Moreover, aging lends itself to discussion in terms of diagnostic symptomatology and etiology. Is aging therefore a disease? I argue that aging need not be shown to be unnatural or a disease in order to make it the subject of biomedical interest. I suggest that rather than ask "Is aging a disease?", (...) the better point of philosophical departure would be to ask "Is aging objectionable such that its prevention and cure ought to be sought?". In this way, the moral issues at stake emerge more clearly. Chief among these issues are the potential results of curing aging and the implications for the prospect of meaningful human life without the de facto limitations that aging (and perhaps death) put upon it. A convincing argument that aging should be cured, therefore, would need to show that human significance warrants and possibly seeks such a cure and that the social costs of curing aging are morally acceptable. Keywords: aging, disease, cure, immortality CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Let us sum up. We began with the question, “What is the interest of a model-theoretic definition of validity?” Model theoretic validity consists in truth under all reinterpretations of non-logical constants. In this paper, we have described for each necessity concept a corresponding modal invariance property. Exemplification of that property by the logical constants of a language leads to an explanation of the necessity, in the corresponding sense, of its valid sentences. I have fixed upon the epistemic modalities in characterizing (...) the logical constants: to be a logical constant in the language of a population is to be invariant over a modality describing complete possible epistemic states of that population (or an idealized analogue thereof). The grounds for this characterization are these: (1) It leads, I believe, to an extensionally reasonable demarcation of the logical constants, including clear cases and excluding clear non-cases. It gives a principled criterion for deciding unclear cases. (2) It provides an analysis of the topic-neutrality of logic. (3) It leads to an explanation of the epistemic necessity of the logical truths in terms of the topic-neutrality of the logical constants.All the same, it is reasonable to ask, even if the suggested demarcation of logic is extensionally correct, whether it can reasonably be expected to be fundamental. The epistemic invariance of an expression is a rather striking property, one which we should want to explain. What is missing, then, is an explanation of the distinguishing epistemic properties of the constants in terms of more fundamental properties involving their understanding and use. It would be these that properly define the nature, not just the extent, of logic. (shrink)

It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying "actually" operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing "actually" instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve (...) material equivalence). For a subjunctive conditional, the natural conclusion to draw is that it is non-congruential. It is much harder to defend the claim that an indicative conditional is non-congruential. The pressure to treat the indicative conditional as truth-functional is correspondingly greater. The implications of these results for attempts to interpret the indicative conditional as an epistemic or doxastic operator are assessed. (shrink)

This book is a careful reexamination of the internal development of Husserl's thought as well as of the ways in which Heidegger used and transformed the phenomenological method.

In recent years philosophers have attempted to clarify the units of selection controversy in evolutionary biology by offering conceptual analyses of the term 'unit of selection'. A common feature of many of these analyses is an emphasis on the claim that units of selection are entities exhibiting heritable variation in fitness. In this paper I argue that the demand that units of selection be characterized in terms of heritability is unnecessary, as well as undesirable, on historical, theoretical, and philosophical grounds. (...) I propose a positive account of the proper referent of the term 'unit of selection', distinguishing between the processes of evolution and phenotypic selection. The main result of this analysis is greater clarity about the conceptual structure of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

This article examines the reception of Roy Bhaskar amongst some contemporary Deleuzians. It proceeds by rejecting the all too often predilection of opposing realism to ‘postmodernism’ or ‘post-structuralism’ arguing instead for the need to bring one into dialogue with the other. To this end, the paper explores the resonances and points of departure between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Roy Bhaskar. In particular, it examines the language of causation, object-oriented versus process-oriented ontologies, as well as the charge by Deleuzians (...) that Bhaskar is an essentialist. Through this engagement it attempts to develop and rethink explanation and causation in terms of a more chaotic ontology of machines, centered around the concept of structure, process, and production in an open, heterogeneous, and dynamic world. The end result is a more chaotic concept of realism. (shrink)

N. B. Prof Williamson is now based at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the category of ''religion'' to describe a distinctive form of human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that ''religion'' was not a private area of human existence that could be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion as such was thus impossibility. In this new book he examines a wide range of English-language texts (...) to show how religion became transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society. These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are also tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively indiscriminate use of ''religion'' as an a priori valid cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to link the argument about religion to the parallel formation of the ''non-religious'' and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument is that the category ''religion'' has a different logic compared to the category ''sacred,'' but the two have been consistently confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade. Fitzgerald contends that ''religion'' imagined as a private belief in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space for the simultaneous imagining of ''secular'' practices and institutions such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of ''religion'' as a universal type of experience, practice, and institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying ''scientific'' rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a different logic of use. (shrink)

In the Postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn addresses charges of relativism by exhibiting his notion of scientific progress, a notion he claims is not relativistic. Critics have largely bypassed this as an evasion on Kuhn’s part. This essay argues that Kuhn’s model of progress does not rescue him from self-refutation charges, and that this criticism can be pressed regardless of whether he embraces global relativism. It concludes by tracing the ongoing controversy regarding Kuhn (...) and relativism to the elusive nature of Kuhn’s prose. (shrink)

According to the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can precisely define the state of an individual particle in a many-body system by its position, momentum, and spin. It is shown in the EPR spin experiment that the quantum torque brings about an instantaneous change in the state of one of the particles when the other undergoes a local interaction, but that such a transfer of “information” cannot be extracted by any experiment subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Perception is commonly regarded by philosophers as being the only basis of empirical knowledge. I challenge this assumption by investigating how we come to have beliefs about the emotional experiences of ourselves and others, and how we come to have beliefs about the emotional properties of inanimate objects, such as the belief that the church is somber. Before presenting my account of this type of belief formation, I argue that the observation that someone is in a particular emotional state, or (...) the observation that an inanimate object displays an emotional property, should not be subsumed under the rubric of perception. I argue that this subsumption oversimplifies the nature of such observations and leaves too many interesting and important philosophical questions unanswered. In addition to suggesting how these sorts of beliefs are formed, I argue that philosophers should endeavor to include them in their discussions of knowledge, and I examine how three contemporary accounts of knowledge can be expanded to accommodate such beliefs in the capacity of knowledge claims. (shrink)

This brief annotated bibliography is intended to help students get started with their research. It is not a substitute for personal investigation of the literature, and it is not a comprehensive bibliography on the subject. For those just beginning to study probabilistic confirmation theory and Bayesian reasoning, I suggest the starred items as good places to start your reading.

I am concerned with the subject as an ethico-religious problem. Is suicide all right or isn't it; and if it isn't, why not?The question should not be assumed to be susceptible of an answer in the way the question whether arsenic is poisonous is susceptible of an answer. Moreover in the case of arsenic the question what it is, and the question whether it is poisonous, are separable questions: you can know that arsenic is poisonous without having analysed its nature. (...) But to know or believe that suicide is objectionable is to have analysed its nature or construed its significance in one way rather than another. (shrink)

Spinoza is in a potentially untenable position. On the one hand, he argues that those who claim to see harmony in the universe are badly mistaken; they are falsely imagining rather than properly reasoning. On the other hand, harmony is positively discussed in his ethical writings and even serves as the basis for his vision of society. How can both be maintained? In this chapter l argue that this prima facie conflict between the two treatments of harmony is resolvable, but (...) that in resolving it, a new set of questions for Spinoza is raised. In doing so, I explore how harmony was used in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which will help us better situate Spinoza. In doing so, we can recognize new possibilities and new connections between Spinoza and philosophers who are not often discussed in connection with him. (shrink)

In an earlier paper, I claimed that one version of Putnam's model-theoretic argument against realism turned on a subtle, but philosophically significant, mathematical mistake. Recently, Luca Bellotti has criticized my argument for this claim. This paper responds to Bellotti's criticisms.