What is culture? What can we learn from art, architecture, and fashion about how people relate? Can cultures embody ethical and moral ideals? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book on the cultural philosophy of three preeminent Japanese philosophers of the early twentieth century, Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

RÉSUMÉ: Pour plusieurs, la troisième notion primitive, celle de l'union de l'esprit et du corps, est un ajout obscur et inexplicable dans la philosophie de Descartes, et qui est venu après coup. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que nous pouvons réconcilier la conception que se fait Descartes de cette troisième notion primitive avec l'approche dualiste des Méditations par le biais d'un modèle non représentationnaliste des passions. Je montre, pour y parvenir, que les passions, qui sont des manifestations de la troisième (...) notion primitive, sont autoréflexives et présentent ainsi la même structure que la conscience du cogito. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉPour plusieurs, la troisième notion primitive, celle de l'union de l'esprit et du corps, est un ajout obscur et inexplicable dans la philosophie de Descartes, et qui est venu après coup. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que nous pouvons réconcilier la conception que se fait Descartes de cette troisième notion primitive avec l'approche dualiste des Méditations par le biais d'un modèle non représentationnaliste des passions. Je montre, pour y parvenir, que les passions, qui sont des manifestations de la troisième notion (...) primitive, sont autoréflexives et présentent ainsi la même structure que la conscience du cogito. (shrink)

In this article, I compare and contrast the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas with that of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher, Kuki Shūzō. In the resulting counterpoint, I put special emphasis on the conception of time espoused by each author. I argue that both go astray by mistakenly basing their ethics on the complete otherness of the other (diachrony) rather than recognizing that both the other (diachrony) and I (synchrony) are originally inseparable in experience before the conceptual separation of “me” and “you.” (...) The fetishization of otherness, which is associated with the feminine in the ethics of both philosophers, leads them to overlook how the details of our everyday concrete experience can provide a guide for action. This paper also explores the two East Asian ethical ideals that Kuki proposes–the Buddhist ideal and the ideal of bushidō, the code of the samurai warrior. In his ethics, Kuki prefers the ethics of bushidō to that of Buddhism. I explain how Kuki’s misunderstanding of Buddhism leads him to this choice, and I explore what he overlooked in Buddhist ethics. (shrink)

The plurivalent logics considered in Graham Priest's recent paper of that name can be thought of as logics determined by matrices whose underlying algebras are power algebras, where the power algebra of a given algebra has as elements textit{subsets} of the universe of the given algebra, and the power matrix of a given matrix has has the power algebra of the latter's algebra as its underlying algebra, with its designated elements being selected in a natural way on the basis (...) of those of the given matrix. The present discussion stresses the continuity of Priest's work on the question of which matrices determine consequence relations which remain unaffected on passage to the consequence relation determined by the power matrix of the given matrix with the corresponding question in equational logic as to which identities holding in an algebra continue to hold in its power algebra. Both questions are sensitive to a decision as to whether or not to include the empty set as an element of the power algebra, and our main focus will be on the contrast, when it is included, between the power matrix semantics and the four-valued Dunn--Belnap semantics for first-degree entailment a la Anderson and Belnap) in terms of sets of classical values, in which the empty set figures in a somewhat different way, as Priest had remarked his 1984 study, `Hyper-contradictions', in which what we are calling the power matrix construction first appeared. (shrink)

What conception of negation a dialetheist might have, in holding that a statement and its negation can both be true, has been the subject to considerable debate. Several of the issues in play in this area—such as the unique characterization of negation, and the interplay between contrariety and subcontrariety—are broached here by considering some positions taken on them by Graham Priest and assorted critics. Some of the more intricate points, as well as detailed discussions of commentators on Priest are (...) handled in explicitly labelled Digressions and in two Appendices. (shrink)

Graham Priest has asked whether the consequence relation associated with the Anderson–Belnap system of Tautological Entailment,1 in the language with connectives ¬, ∧, ∨, and countably many propositional variables as tomic formulas, maximal amongst the substitution-invariant relevant consequence relations on this language. Here a consequence relation is said to be relevant just in case whenever for a set of formulas Γ and formula B, we have Γ B only if some propositional variable occurring in B occurs in at least (...) one formula in Γ. (It follows that relevant consequence relations are atheorematic in the sense that whenever Γ B for some such consequence relation , Γ = ∅.) Here I write up in more detail the upshot of the conversation – returning an affirmative answer to Priest’s question – about this in the common room that Greg Restall and I were participating in last Friday [ = October 6, 2006], dotting some “i”s and crossing some “t”s (and adding the odd further reflection). (shrink)

Impossible worlds are regarded with understandable suspicion by most philosophers. Here we are concerned with a modal argument which might seem to show that acknowledging their existence, or more particularly, the existence of some hypothetical (we do not say “possible”) world in which everything was the case, would have drastic effects, forcing us to conclude that everything is indeed the case—and not just in the hypothesized world in question. The argument is inspired by a metaphysical (rather than modal-logical) argument of (...) Paul Kabay’s which would have us accept this unpalatable conclusion, though its details bear a closer resemblance to a line of thought developed by Jc Beall, in response to which Graham Priest has made some philosophical moves which are echoed in our diagnosis of what goes wrong with the present modal argument. Logical points of some interest independent of the main issue arise along the way. (shrink)

In a paper on the logical work of the Jains, Graham Priest considers a consequence relation, semantically characterized, which has a natural analogue in modal logic. Here we give a syntactic/axiomatic description of the modal formulas which are consequences of the empty set by this relation, which is to say: those formulas which are, for every model, true at some point in that model.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 129-142 Hume on ''Greatness of Soul" GRAHAM SOLOMON The "great-souled man" was first described in detail in Book iv of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Simon Blackburn concisely summarizes Aristotle's portrait of this "lofty character": "The great-souled man is of a distinguished situation, worthy of great things, 'an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in (...) respect of the Tightness of them', perfectly virtuous, good at conferring benefits but ashamed of receiving them, neither humble nor vain. The combination involves proper pride or magnanimity." Such men will enter politics with the aim of preserving justice and working for the good of society, or they will exhibit great personal courage in battle, or, more generally, they will aim at virtuous action at all times, even when faced with painful choices and life-threatening circumstances. Historians disagree about whether Aristotle held that the great-souled man is motivated in part by a desire to be admired by others, but certainly he held that the great-souled man was capable of performing great and virtuous actions that would be admired.1 By the mid-eighteenth century, greatness of soul could be found in much less distinguished situations. Consider, for example, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Tristram attributes greatness of soul to his mother for wanting to give birth to him under the care of a midwife rather than a doctor. His father thinks that turning down a large purse of money offered in exchange for naming one's son Judas is an act of greatness of mind. And Tristram says his friend Jenny exhibited greatness of soul by purchasing a much less expensive piece of silk than the one she initially wanted, deferring to Tristram's unvoiced but Graham Solomon is at the Philosophy Department,Wilfrid Laurier University,Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5. e-mail: [email protected] 130 Graham Solomon obvious judgment.2 For an example from the nineteenth century, consider the following passage from the novel The Wrecker (1891) by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. The narrator, a wealthy young American, is slumming as a bohemian art student in the Latin Quarter of Paris: "I always looked with awful envy... on a certain countryman of my own, who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur Ie Prince, wore boots, and long hair in a net, and could be seen tramping off, in this guise, to the worst eating-house of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and calling. It takes some greatness of soul to carry even folly to such heights as these."3 There the character's greatness of soul seems to involve an ability to ignore or overlook or misinterpret the opinions others might have of him. While the phrase "greatness of soul" or "greatness of mind" is not commonly used nowadays,4 the Latin form "magnanimity" is still in use in ordinary, everyday, reasonably educated discourse. And occasionally "highmindedness " is used. The capacity to make magnanimous gestures is still widely felt to be a virtue. "Magnanimity" nowadays refers to a mix of unselfishness, generosity, the capacity to rise above petty feelings of resentment and revenge, and more generally and vaguely to a kind of nobility of heart and mind. These are features that Aristotle would recognize. But, it seems to me, we are prepared to apply the term to a far wider class of people than Aristotle would. Magnanimity is nowadays thought to be a virtue that can be exhibited by almost anyone. The first extended discussion in English-language philosophy of the concept of greatness of soul or mind is in David Hume's Treatise III iii 2, a section titled "Of greatness of mind." Hume's discussion contributed to a domesticated and democratized understanding of the concept, a more serious ancestor of the concept found in Tristram Shandy5 and The Wrecker. Donald Siebert argues in the chapter "In Search of the Hero of Feeling" in The Moral Animus of David Hume6 that after the initial exploration of the concept in the Treatise, Hume eventually settled in The History... (shrink)

In this book, S. A. Lloyd offers a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the common good.

This book is a unique contribution to the philosophy of religion. It offers a comprehensive discussion of one of the most famous arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument. The author provides and analyses a critical taxonomy of those versions of the argument that have been advanced in recent philosophical literature, as well as of those historically important versions found in the work of St Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel and others. A central thesis of the book is that (...) ontological arguments have no value in the debate between theists and atheists. There is a detailed review of the literature on the topic (separated from the main body of the text) and a very substantial bibliography, making this volume an indispensable resource for philosophers of religion and others interested in religious studies. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

Introduction -- Euripides, philosopher of the stage -- The world of men and gods -- Agreeing with nature : fate and providence in stoic ethics -- Augustine : divine justice and the "ordering" of evil -- The philosopher and the princess : Descartes and the philosophical life -- Living with necessity : Spinoza and the philosophical life -- Designer worlds -- Providence as progress -- Providence lost.

Ethics, truth and reason -- Egoism -- Hedonism -- Naturalism and virtue theory -- Existentialism -- Kantianism -- Utilitarianism -- Contractualism -- Ethics, religion, and the meaning of life.

This two-part volume collects the complete fragments and most important testimonies for the leading presocratic philosophers. The Greek and Latin texts are translated on facing pages and accompanied by a brief commentary for each philosopher.

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

v. 1. Introduction, text & indices -- v. 2. Introduction and English translation.

This book was originally published in 1981 and the theme of universals attracted a great deal of attention in the decade preceding publication.

Frege's scathing comments on Mill on the empirical grounds of arithmetical truth are elaborated. The suggestion is made that some entities are ‘well-behaved' : if you perform two acts and then two more, the ‘result' will be that exactly four acts have occurred. How much it all matters or means is not further discussed.

This chapter examines the pioneering work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) on various number systems, in particular binary, which he independently invented in the mid-to-late 1670s, and hexadecimal, which he invented in 1679. The chapter begins with the oft-debated question of who may have influenced Leibniz’s invention of binary, though as none of the proposed candidates is plausible I suggest a different hypothesis, that Leibniz initially developed binary notation as a tool to assist his investigations in mathematical problems that were (...) exercising him at the time, namely those concerning the divisibility of composite numbers, primality, and perfect numbers. The chapter then explores Leibniz’s development of binary, his little-known work on binary fractions and expansions, his use of binary as a symbol for creation in his philosophical-theology, and his response to the suggestion that there was a correlation between binary numeration and the hexagrams of the ancient Chinese divinatory text, the Yijing. The chapter then focuses on Leibniz’s work on other number systems, in particular his invention and exploration of hexadecimal as well as his work on duodecimal. The chapter concludes by revealing a hitherto unknown practical application of binary that Leibniz devised in the last year of his life. (shrink)

One of the key questions to have exercised green political theorists in recent years concerns the relationship of the environment 'agenda' and democracy. Both environmentalists and democrats have a tendency to think of each other as natural bedfellows but in fact there is little theoretical or practical reason why they should be. Indeed some theorists have argued that the environmental movement has grown from fundamentally authoritarian roots and it is arguable that the only really effective way of implementing environmental politics (...) is by imposing them in an authoritarian manner. This book deals with the tensions between democracy and environmentalism from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. (shrink)

René Guénon is a major figure for anyone who recognises a need to rediscover the spiritual roots from which Western society has become so comprehensively alienated. Immersing himself in the search for spiritual truth, he chose Islam as the vehicle for his spiritual life. Settling in Egypt, he clarified and deepened our understanding of the teachings of traditional metaphysics, his central message being that there is at the source of all humanity's traditions a 'Primordial Tradition' -- a Universal Metaphysics which (...) sets out the principles that underlie this Tradition. The truths it embodies are universal and unchanging, and form part of a unified body of higher knowledge which transcends the multiplicity of religious dogmas and philosophical systems that abound in Western society. He wrote about the need to transcend the formal and emotional aspect of religion in order to prepare ourselves for an understanding of 'pure metaphysics'. He explained how traditional societies achieved this, exploring the symbols used, in order to help individuals forward to levels of understanding which are otherwise inaccessible to minds blinkered by the limitations of the currently prevailing Western approach to existence and its meaning. (shrink)

In this book, Graham Oppy examines arguments for and against the existence of God. He shows that none of these arguments is powerful enough to change the minds of reasonable participants in debates on the question of the existence of God. His conclusion is supported by detailed analyses of the arguments as well as by the development of a theory about the purpose of arguments and the criteria that should be used in judging whether or not arguments are successful. (...) Oppy discusses the work of a wide array of philosophers, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, Hume and, more recently, Plantinga, Dembski, White, Dawkins, Bergman, Gale and Pruss. (shrink)

Examines the influence of the physical and biological sciences on society, ethics, and philosophy during the twentieth century.

This is the first introductory textbook on non-classical propositional logics.

The point of the present paper is to draw attention to some interesting similarities, as well as differences, between the approaches to the logic of noncontingency of Evgeni Zolin and of Claudio Pizzi. Though neither of them refers to the work of the other, each is concerned with the definability of a (normally behaving, though not in general truth-implying) notion of necessity in terms of noncontingency, standard boolean connectives and additional but non-modal expressive resources. The notion of definability involved is (...) different in the two cases (‘external’ for Zolin, ‘internal’ for Pizzi), as are the additional resources: infinitary conjunction in the case of Zolin, and for Pizzi, first, propositional quantification, and then, later, most ingeniously, the use of a propositional constant. As well as surveying and comparing of the work of these authors, the discussion includes some some novelties, such as the confirmation of a conjecture of Zolin’s (Theorem 2.7). (shrink)

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in (...) sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases. (shrink)

Genocide in Rwanda, multiple murder at Denver or Dunblane, the gruesome activities of serial killers - what makes these great evils, and why do they occur? In addressing such questions this book, unusually, interconnects contemporary moral philosophy with recent work in New Testament scholarship. The conclusions to emerge are surprising. Gordon Graham argues that the inability of modernist thought to account satisfactorily for evil and its occurrence should not lead us to embrace an eclectic postmodernism, but to take seriously (...) some unfashionable pre-modern conceptions - Satan, demonic possession, spiritual powers, cosmic battles. Precisely because it strives to observe the high standards of clarity and rigour that are the hallmarks of philosophy in the analytical tradition, the book makes a powerful case for the rejection of humanism and naturalism, and for explaining the moral obligation to struggle against evil by reference to the New Testament's cosmic narrative. (shrink)

This book is an exploration of philosophical questions about infinity. Graham Oppy examines how the infinite lurks everywhere, both in science and in our ordinary thoughts about the world. He also analyses the many puzzles and paradoxes that follow in the train of the infinite. Even simple notions, such as counting, adding and maximising present serious difficulties. Other topics examined include the nature of space and time, infinities in physical science, infinities in theories of probability and decision, the nature (...) of part/whole relations, mathematical theories of the infinite, and infinite regression and principles of sufficient reason. (shrink)

Written for students coming to Spinoza for the first time, Spinoza and the Ethics is the ideal guide to this rich and illuminating work. This GuideBook provides an overview of critical interpretations, relating the Ethics to its intellectual context, considers its historical reception; and highlights why the work continues to be relevant today. In addition, the most intriguing final sections of the Ethics , usually ignored in introductory commentaries, are given special attention and illuminated as the climax of the work.