This anthology includes cutting edge scholars who bring Augustine into dialogue with Soren Kierkegaard on topics such as exile and pilgrimage, time and restlessness, inwardness and the church, as well as suffering, evil, and humility. The contrasts and surprising connections between these prominent thinkers are highlighted.

Review of an edited book of articles by various authors, each article on some aspect of both thinkers.

Many philosophers came to regard “causation” as an illegitimate pseudo-concept. This was a dominant view in analytic philosophy until quite late in the twentieth century. Russell famously quipped that “the law of causality” was “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm”.

Many philosophers came to regard “causation” as an illegitimate pseudo-concept. This was a dominant view in analytic philosophy until quite late in the twentieth century. Russell famously quipped that “the law of causality” was “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm”.

In an article recently published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the legal scholar Helen Reece argues that the prevalence and effects of rape myths have been overstated and the designation of certain beliefs and attitudes as myths is simply wrong. Feminist researchers, she argues, are engaged ‘in a process of creating myths about myths’ in a way that serves to close down and limit productive debate in this ‘vexed’ area. In this article we argue that Reece’s analysis is (...) methodologically flawed, crudely reductionist and rhetorically unyielding. We locate Reece’s analysis within the wider theoretical field to show how her failure to engage with feminist literature on rape other than in the narrowest, most exclusionary terms, yields an approach which impedes rather than advances public understanding and panders to a kind of simplistic thinking which cannot begin to grapple with the complexity of the phenomenon that is rape. We conclude by emphasizing the continuing commitment of feminist researchers carefully to theorize and map the fraught field of progressive legal strategizing in order to identify and counter the kinds of risks and shortcomings of political activism with which Reece is rightly concerned. (shrink)

During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes contributed significantly both to the sciences and to their philosophies. The volume consists of papers by an international group of Suppes colleagues, collaborators, and students in many of the areas of his expertise, building on or adding to his insights. Michael Friedman offers an overview of Suppes accomplishments and of his unique perspective on the relation between science and philosophy. Paul Humphreys, Stephen Hartmann, and Tom Ryckman present essays in the philosophy (...) of physics. Jens-Erik Fenstad, Harvey Friedman, and Jaako Hintikka consider problems in the foundations of mathematics, while the late Duncan Luce, Jean-Claude Falmagne, Brian Skyrms, and Hannes Leitgeb have contributed essays in theory of measurement, decision theory and probability. Foundations of economics and political theory are addressed by Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra, Russell Hardin, and Kenneth Arrow. Psychology, language, and philosophy of language are addressed by Elizabeth Loftus, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Willem Levelt, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Marcos Perreau-Guimares and some of Suppes most recent research in neurobiology is addressed in essays by Colleen Crangle, Acadio de Barros and Claudio Carvalhes. Finally Nancy Cartwright and Alexandre Marcelles consider the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy. Each of the essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes.". (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

Mix & Stir', this book's aim is an endeavour to understand art as being a panhuman phenomenon of all times and cultures; to steer away from the persistent Eurocentric/Western-centric viewpoint towards a transcultural and transnational interconnected model of exchange and processes of interculturalization. Mix & Stir wants to expand this landscape by bringing to the fore new, recalcitrant, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods and concerns that open up ways to approach art from a global perspective. Analogous (...) to a cookery book filled with recipes and instruction, Mix & Stir explores new outlooks on contemporary art from global perspectives. It intends to encourage studying art beyond national constraints, cultural dominances, and hierarchies: a voyage similar to that of culinary discovery. The book brings a variety of tastes and flavours to the table, and breaks new ground by allowing innovative, contrary, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods, and concerns to access art in its global dimensions. Researchers, curators and artists with a special interest in this topical issue were invited to present, develop, outline, and contemplate compelling frames of reference, both theoretical and artistic, in order to arrive at a true 'world art studies'. Their contributions are structured in seven thematic fields: Undecidability and Spectatorship, Collectives, Circulations, Exhibitions, Artists at Work, Postcolonial Perspectives, and Deep Art History. The reader is invited to explore the vast supply of dishes, to taste and test the aromas and to feast. (shrink)

The paper attempts to explicate and justify the position I call `Agency Incompatibilism'- that is to say, the view that agency itself is incompatible with determinism. The most important part of this task is the characterisation of the conception of agency on which the position depends; for unless this is understood, the rationale for the position is likely to be missed. The paper accordingly proceeds by setting out the orthodox philosophical position concerning what it takes for agency to exist, before (...) going on to explain why and how that orthodoxy should be challenged. The relations between my own views and those of others writing on the issues of free will and moral responsibility, in three crucial and inter-connected areas are then explored. These are (1) the question how animals should figure in the philosophy of action; (2) the question what the lesson is of `Frankfurt-style' examples; and (3) the distinction between so-called `leeway' incompatibilism and `source' incompatibilism. The paper moves on to consider and respond to various objections to Agency Incompatibilism, including the claim that to embrace the conception of agency that makes incompatibilism plausible is to beg the question against the compatibilist, and also the worry that determinism is an empirical thesis which ought not to be straightforwardly falsifiable by such a priori reasoning as Agency Incompatibilism appears to involve. I also try to rebut the worry that Agency Incompatibilism is committed to the existence of an unintelligible and/or naturalistically impossible variety of irreducible agent causation. (shrink)

The immediate aim of this paper is to articulate the essential features of an alternative compatibilist position, one that is responsive to sources of resistance to the compatibilist program based on considerations of fate and luck. The approach taken relies on distinguishing carefully between issues of skepticism and pessimism as they arise in this context. A compatibilism that is properly responsive to concerns about fate and luck is committed to what I describe as free will pessimism, which is to be (...) distinguished from free will skepticism. Free will skepticism is the view that our vulnerability to conditions of fate and luck serve to discredit our view of ourselves as free and responsible agents. Free will pessimism rejects free will scepticism, since the basis of its pessimism rests with the assumption that we are free and responsible agents who are, nevertheless, subject to fate and luck in this aspect of our lives. According to free will pessimism, all the major parties and positions in the free will debate, including that of skepticism, are modes of evasion and distortion regarding our human predicament in respect of agency and moral life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (summer 2012): 83–6 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA RUSSELL Kenneth Blackwell Russell Archives/Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 [email protected] B ertrand Russell took his (...) own advice not to marry a woman novelist, but he did marry women who wrote for publication. His third wife, Patricia Russell (née Marjorie Spence, then Patricia Helen Spence, and, after divorcing Russell, Mrs. P.yH. Spence) was no exception. Having studied history at Oxford, she did a great deal of research for Russell and some actual writing. She did some public speaking during the ccny case in 1940, and in 1946 she organized a major meeting in Cambridge for the Save Europe Now organization. Later in the 1940s she began employment in town planning, and brief mentions of that topic show up in Authority and the Individualz (1949). The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has a box of her papers, placed, at her instructions, under a very lengthy embargo. On one occasion while they were in America there was an employment opportunity for her. It involved her writing skills, and her husband drafted the following testimonial. With its strikeouts, it is unWnished in the form in which it survives, and we cannot be sure it was sent. It is dated December 6, 1941. My wife, Patricia Helen Russell, has, throughout the last ten years acted both as my collaborator and as my secretary. In the latter capacity she has drafted and written, on my behalf, letters on a great variety of subjects, and has shown great skill in doing so, both as regards literary style and grasp of the matter concerned. As regards collaboration: In “Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914”, she did a very large part of the research and a considerable part of the actual writing. In “The Amberley Papers”, which was published under our joint names, she did considerably more than half the work, not only as regards detail, but also as regards the general plan. In addition to this work on books, she has written magazine articles on my behalf, sometimes in part, sometimes wholly. Her purely secretarial work has been very extensive and always admirable. (ra1 142.079883) books By “the last ten years” Russell is dating the start of their collaboration to 1932. This is consistent with the acknowledgements he makes to her in several books on which she collaborated with him in various ways, in addition to her title-page June 25, 2012 (9:21 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3201\russell 32,1 060 red.wpd 84 kenneth blackwell 1 See Brett Lintott, “Russell’s Aborted Book on Fascism”, Russellz 28 (2008): 39–64. credit in The Amberley Papers. They even planned a joint work, on the rise of Nazism and Fascism,1 but after some years it was discontinued. She contributed much to the unpublished book manuscript, “The Problems of Democracy”, written in 1941–42. Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914. London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: W.xW. Norton, 1934. Preface, p. viii: “Throughout the writing of this book, the work has been shared by my collaborator, Peter Spence, who has done half the research, a large part of the planning, and small portions of the actual writing, besides making innumerable valuable suggestions.” (The Wrst edition omitted “valuable” and an erratum slip was inserted.) In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. London : George Allen & Unwin; New York: W.xW. Norton, 1935. Preface, p. 6: “I have also to acknowledge the assistance of Peter Spence in suggesting and discussing many of the subjects.” The Amberley Papers: the Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley. Edited by Bertrand and Patricia Russell. 2 vols. London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; New York: W.yW. Norton & Company, 1937. The preface is signed “B.R.” above “P.R.” From Russell’s letter to The Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 1937: “Your reviewer treats the work as more mine and less my wife’s... (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

Recent work on the early development of episodic memory in my laboratory has been fuelled by the following assumption: if episodic memory is re-experiential memory then Kant’s analysis of the spatiotemporal nature of experience should constrain and positively influence theories of episodic memory development. The idea is that re-experiential memory will “inherit” these spatiotemporal features. On the basis of this assumption, Russell and Hanna (Mind and Language 27(1):29–54, 2012) proposed that (a) the spatial element of re-experience is egocentric and (...) (b) that the temporal element of re-experiencing involves order/simultaneity. The first of these assumptions is immediately problematic for two reasons. In the first place, if we assume that early episodic recall mediated by processing in the hippocampus, then (a) is clearly in tension with the fact that spatial coding in the hippocampus is allocentric/environment-centred. Second, two of our own recent experiments (described here) show that when only egocentric cues are available in a What/When/Where episodic memory task it is not possible to distinguish young children’s performance from semantic memory. I argue that this tension should be resolved by recognising that the egocentric coding of the original experience as being of an objective scene relies upon allocentric representations and these are preserved in re-experiential memory, allowing a recollection of the objective nature of the scene on which one takes a subjective view. (shrink)

Bracken offers two new approaches to the God-world relationship. He replaces substance metaphysics with Whitehead’s field metaphysics or social ontology “in which societies or structured fields of activity are the conventional units of reality ”, and here he makes a solid contribution. He also introduces emergence to explain the God-world relation; here he could have explored more potentially valuable options.

This volume will be the starting point for future discussion and research.

We report in this paper the result of three experiments on risk, ambiguity and time attitude. The first two differed by the population considered (students vs. general population) while the third one used a different protocol and concerned students and portfolio managers. We find quite a lot of heterogeneity at the individual level. Of principal interest was the elicitation of risk, time and ambiguity attitudes and the relationship among these (model free) measures. We find that on the student population, there (...) is essentially no correlation. A non negligible fraction of the population behaves in an extremely cautious manner in the risk and ambiguity domain. When we drop this population from the sample, the correlation between our measures is also non significant. We also raise three questions linked to measurement of ambiguity attitudes that come out from our data sets. (shrink)

This chapter will argue that due to a lack of genuine consent, some of Russell’s practices in his romantic/sexual relationships are morally objectionable according to his own normative theory (utilitarianism) and these practices are intellectually objectionable according to his post-1913 meta-ethics (expressivism) and his understanding of rationality. On utilitarian grounds, Russell’s actions would maximize pleasure and minimize pain for all the parties affected by the relationship if the authenticity of his partners’ consent were maintained either by a more (...) or less equal social and political standing of the partners or, failing that, by the powerful partner’s exercise of the virtue of restraint; neither of these conditions was satisfied in Russell’s relationships with Vivien Eliot or Helen Dudley. On expressivist grounds, the expressions of desires upon which Russell’s romantic/sexual practices were based, such as the disregard for the humanity of women, conflict with his calls for world peace based on a concern for the well-being of humanity. (shrink)

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in (...) ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers. (shrink)

We argue, in the spirit of some of Jean-Yves Jaffray's work, that explicitly incorporating the information, however imprecise, available to the decision maker is relevant, feasible, and fruitful. In particular, we show that it can lead us to know whether the decision maker has wrong beliefs and whether it matters or not, that it makes it possible to better model and analyze how the decision maker takes into account new information, even when this information is not an event and finally (...) that it is crucial when attempting to identify and measure the decision maker's attitude toward imprecise information. (shrink)

The tobacco industry first began to promote the idea that a minority of smokers are 'genetically predisposed' to lung cancer in the 1950s. We used tobacco industry documents available as a result of litigation to investigate the role of the tobacco industry in funding the 'scientific bandwagon' described by Fujimura, in which genetics has come to dominate the cancer research agenda. From 1990-1995 inclusive, 52% of the project funding allocated by British American Tobacco's Scientific Research Group went to genetic research, (...) mainly based in universities and at one cancer charity. The largest project involved a pharmacogenetic research unit, based in a UK medical school, which was established with the help of tobacco industry PR consultants in 1988. The unit received half its project funding from the industry in 1992. Its main aim was to identify a minority of smokers who are supposedly 'genetically susceptible' to lung cancer, so that smoking cessation measures could be targeted at them. This aim was adopted and promoted by influential scientists at the US National Institutes of Health and the UK Medical Research Council in the late 1980s, in the run up to the Human Genome Project.BAT's research funds were also used to counter claims by others to have identified a unique 'genetic fingerprint' for tobacco smoke in lung cancer cells. We conclude that the tobacco industry has played a significant role in shaping research agendas, in particular, by promoting the idea that individual genome screening would be of benefit to public health. (shrink)

Explores the avant-garde history of twentieth-century Europe through the lifestyle and music of the Sex Pistols.

Hume is traditionally credited with inventing the ‘regularity theory’ of causation, according to which the causal relation between two events consists merely in the fact that events of the first kind are always followed by events of the second kind. Hume is also traditionally credited with two other, hugely influential positions: the view that the world appears to us as a world of unconnected events, and inductive scepticism: the view that the ‘problem of induction’, the problem of providing a justification (...) for inference from observed to unobserved regularities, is insoluble. Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects. (shrink)

Most people believe that it is sometimes morally permissible for a person to use force to defend herself or others against harm. In Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe offers a detailed exploration of when and why the use of such force is permissible. She begins by considering the use of force between individuals, investigating both the circumstances under which an attacker forfeits her right not to be harmed, and the distinct question of when it is all-things-considered permissible to use force against (...) an attacker. Frowe then extends this enquiry to war, defending the view that we should judge the ethics of killing in war by the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. She argues that this requires us to significantly revise our understanding of the moral status of non-combatants in war. Non-combatants who intentionally contribute to an unjust war forfeit their rights not to be harmed, such that they are morally liable to attack by combatants fighting a just war. (shrink)