In the Critique of Pure Reason, in a chapter of the Transcendental Dialectic entitled "The Antinomy of Pure Reason," Kant addresses the question whether a thoroughgoing mechanistic determinism is reconcilable with the ascription of free agency to human beings. In the third antinomy, reason is shown to be divided against itself insofar as both of two competing, and seemingly irreconcilable claims, can be justified on independent grounds; on the one hand, the claim that everything in nature proceeds according to the (...) law of causality - that every event is determined by antecedent events and causal laws; on the other hand, the claim that agents act freely, i.e., that there are some occurrences, namely human actions, which cannot be accounted for by antecedent states or events and causal laws. (shrink)

The recived view in contemporary philosophy of action, inspired and sustained largely by Donald Davidson and his followers, holds that an action is intentional if and only if it is caused in the right way by beliefs and desires. In what follows below I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily intentionality, with the aim of showing that it offers us an account of a form of intentional behavior that cannot be understood in terms of causally efficacious mental states like beliefs or (...) desires. the aim, in short, is to show that, however things may stand with other forms of intentional behavior (deliberate action, for example), bodily intentional behavior is autonomously intentional --- it doesn’t derive its intentionality from the intentionality of mental states. (shrink)

Thomas Reid delivered philosophical orations triennially, in Latin, at graduation ceremonies in King's College, Aberdeen, 1753-1762. Each of the four orations is a summary of Reid's views on several philosophical topics, e.g. the "laws of practising philosophy"; the philosophy of science; the "theory of ideas". This translation from the Latin text is prefaced with an historical and philosophical introduction to the thought of Reid and his school. The text is footnoted with cross-references to Reid's published writings to enable the reader (...) to compare these early expressions of Reid's philosophy with his mature thought. A thorough bibliography of the most available editions of Reid's works and of the most important modern books and articles on Reid is appended. (shrink)

Gray's neuropsychological model of consciousness uses a hierarchical feedback loop framework that has been extensively discussed by many others in psychology. This commentary therefore urges Gray to integrate with, or at least acknowledge previous models. It also points out flaws in his feedback model and suggests directions for further theoretical work.

The impulse to speculate about this phenomenon—the sudden eruption of dictionaries of philosophy in our own fin de siècle—is difficult to resist, particularly since a similar eruption of dictionaries is occurring in other intellectual disciplines as well. My own speculation is that we are witnessing the Owl of Minerva in full and somewhat frantic flight. As old hands in the trade know—but perhaps not many undergraduates, graduate students, or laymen—definitions in philosophy, unless they are purely stipulative, are almost never starting (...) points in inquiry; even more rarely are they stopping points. Normally, they are more in the nature of summaries pro tempore. In the normal course of things the motive for such quick backward-glancing summaries is a quite innocent desire, or need, for conceptual ballast and bearing before proceeding to the next intellectual task. But the flood of dictionaries and such-like reference books in the past couple of decades in philosophy, and in other disciplines, raises the suspicion—and not, I think, in my mind alone—that something more is going on. There is widespread malaise in the profession at present and some energetic treading of the waters on the sound principle, enunciated by Woody Allen, that “swimming is what you should do so you shouldn’t drown,” and nobody seems to know or have much of an idea of where we go from here. The volumes under review are part and parcel of this phenomenon. Honderich’s cheerful remark that “Philosophy... is not a dead or dying subject, but one whose vigour... is as great as ever it has been. It is only the sciences and the superstitious that come and go” seems suspiciously like whistling past the graveyard; it would not need remarking if it were true, or at any rate if it were not so dubious. (shrink)

This book is the second volume of a critical edition of the writings of Thomas Reid, an edition that will include many of his manuscript remains as well as his previously published works. These volumes are intended to displace the heretofore standard 8th edition of Reid’s works edited by Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton’s edition is marred by his numerous, often intrusive, and obtuse footnotes. Reid’s spelling and punctuation were also sometimes “corrected” by Hamilton, so his edition does not present a (...) fully accurate version of the original editions whose publication was superintended by Reid. The type in the Hamilton edition is also archaic and very small, making reading the text excessively difficult. The present and subsequent volumes are intended to present canonical texts free of the flaws in the Hamilton text. This volume succeeds admirably in that project. (shrink)

Thomas Reid, contemporary and philosophical foe of David Hume, was the chief figure in the group of philosophers constituting the Scottish school of common sense. Between 1753 and 1762, Reid delivered four "Philosophical Orations" at graduation ceremonies at King’s College, Aberdeen. This is the first English translation of those Latin orations, which reveal Reid’s philosophical opinions during his formative years. Reid’s influence was strong in America until the middle of the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson was a convert to the commonsense (...) philosophy of Reid and his school, and for the first dozen academic generations after the revolutionary war, American students were steeped in the thought of Reid and his associates. Thus Reid profoundly influenced American political, literary, and philosophical culture. His philosophy served as a cornerstone of American education. (shrink)

It is impossible to summarize this book at all adequately in a review; the book itself is a summary of various relativist/anti-relativist arguments. Any attempt to condense these still further can only yield something too coarse and shallow to be useful. Instead, I shall set out as briefly as I can how the authors conceive the debate between relativists and their opponents. Their programmatic conception foreshadows the remainder of the book.

This book will be received ill-naturedly by those who think that a book with such a title ought, mainly anyway, to consist of critical exegesis of the work of its philosophical heroes and/or villains on the “central themes” which Professor Bennett selects for his attention. Such readers are likely to feel that when Bennett attributes this or that view, error, or insight to one of the protagonists, he ought usually t o put the man's name in quotation marks. But such (...) a reaction to this book would be at least churlish, for Bennett explicitly eschews both historical concerns and scholarship except in the limited sense that he sometimes pays close attention to textual details. (shrink)

Lehrer's “reason for writing this book is that the philosophy of Thomas Reid is widely unread, while the combination of soundness and creativity of his work is unexcelled.” The book contributes to the ongoing Reid revival. Chapter 1 presents an overview of Reid's life and works and the last, Chapter 15, gives Lehrer's appraisal of Reid's philosophy. Chapter 2, “Beyond Impressions and Ideas,” outlines Reid's “refutation of what he called the Ideal System” of impressions and ideas that dominated philosophy from (...) Descartes through Hume, and summarizes Reid's theory of the mind. The remaining chapters conduct the reader through the three books Reid published during his lifetime. There are three chapters covering the Inquiry of the Human Mind, five on the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, a chapter comparing Reid on conception and evidence in the Inquiry and the Essays, and three chapters on Essays on the Active Powers of Man. The index is helpful despite occasional references to a page number larger than the number of pages. The bibliography is generally good, although, oddly, Lehrer lists the inaccessible 1937 Latin edition of Reid's important Philosophical Orations and not the English translation published by the Philosophy Research Archives in 1977 and republished by the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series early in 1989. The text is remarkably free of typographical errors, but on p. 130 Putnam's 1973 article, “Meaning and Reference,” is said to have been published in 1983. (shrink)

After over a century of total neglect, the philosophy of Thomas Reid has attracted increasing interest over the past several decades. A new scholarly edition of Reid’s works is underway, with two volumes already available. Even more important than such scholarship is the fact that contemporary philosophers too numerous to list are finding in Reid’s philosophy substantial material useful for their own work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and action theory. This book is a welcome addition to the growing (...) Reid literature, but readers should be on guard while reading it because Wolterstorff, with breathtaking audacity, says that his “aim throughout is not so much to present what Reid said as to discover what he was trying to say”, as though Reid were somehow incompetent at saying what he meant or meaning what he said, despite being “one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century”, “one of the most lucid writers of philosophy in the history of philosophy”, and “the greatest stylist of all who have written philosophy in the English language”. (shrink)

The present volume is an important and highly useful contribution to Reid studies that adds considerably to our knowledge of his work. The book is well made, and I noticed only one misprint. It contains three sets of manuscripts, one dealing with natural history, another on physiology, and a third, much the largest, on Reid’s work on materialism. It also contains a statement by Paul Wood of very sensible editorial principles, seventy-four pages of introductions to the manuscript material, some explanatory (...) notes with translations of Latin passages in the manuscripts and information about the papers and books Reid quotes or refers to in his texts, an index of manuscripts, a set of textual notes, and a not very useful index for the volume as a whole. Lamentably, the usefulness of the volume is compromised by Wood’s having used editions of Reid’s printed works that are rare and not easily available instead of the standard 1895 Hamilton eighth edition in the Georg Olms reprinted edition. Wood does, on rare occasions, quote from or refer to the Hamilton 1854 fourth edition of Reid’s work whose pagination appears to coincide with the 1895 edition, but these references are too few to be helpful. (shrink)