If p is false, it isn't evidence for anything. This view is central in one important response to a familiar sceptical argument. I consider and reject various motivations for refusing to accept this view – proposals arising from, e.g., our practice of providing rationalising explanations of people's beliefs, various locutions appearing to relativise evidence to persons, the significance of people's mental states for attributions of reasons to them, and the role of evidence in epistemic principles and requirements. I close by (...) considering responses to the ‘New Evil Demon Argument’. What emerges is an affirmation of the principle that p doesn't provide evidence unless it is true, a response to an important version of the Evil Demon argument for scepticism, and also a deeper interpretation of our epistemic practice. (shrink)

What should maximin egalitarians think about seniority privileges? We contrast a good-specific and an all-things-considered perspective. As to the former, inertia and erasing effects of a seniority-based allocation of benefits from employment are identified, allowing us to spot the categories of workers and job-seekers made involuntarily worse off by such a practice. What matters however is to find out whether abolishing seniority privileges will bring about a society in which the all-things-considered worst off people are better off than in the (...) seniority rule's presence. An assessment of the latter's cost-reduction potential is thus needed, enabling us to bridge a practice taking place within a firm with its impact on who the least well off members of society are likely to be. Three accounts of the profitability of seniority privileges are discussed: the “(firm specific) human capital”, the “deferred compensation” and the “knowledge transfer” ones. The respective relevance of “good-specific” and “all-things-considered” analysis is discussed. It turns out that under certain circumstances, a maximin egalitarian case for seniority privileges could be made. Senior: Do you know that they are planning layoffs? Of course, it is only fair that they lay-off the newcomers first! After all, I have been loyal to the company for many years. Junior: Did I choose to be a newcomer? Footnotes1 Many thanks to two anonymous referees, to P.-M. Boulanger, B. Cockx, C. Fabre, L. Jacquet, E. Lazear, I. Robeyns, G. Vallée, Y. Vanderborght, Ph. Van Parijs, V. Vansteenberghe and J. de Wispelaere for their help and critical comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Louvain-la-Neuve, Ghent, Montevideo and London. I am very grateful to these audiences. Special thanks to G. Brennan for his extensive and extremely valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. (shrink)

Agronomic science or technoscience has an important role in contemporary times and is the focus of necessary philosophical investigations. The present study aimed to relate Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics with the Laudanian concept of philosophy of science, also applied to the philosophy of technology within the agronomic context. The central question to be answered is: can Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics apply to the understanding of agronomy? Given this, central references and commentators were selected, dividing the dialogue between the authors and the argumentation (...) into the following points: sciences, technologies, and Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics; agronomic traditions and their Laudanian progress; reaching the final possibility of intersections between Gadamer and Laudan, when reflecting on agronomy, especially on the theme of traditions. (shrink)

Cicero's philosophical works are now exciting renewed interest, in part because he provides vital evidence of the views of the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic age, and partly because of the light he casts on the intellectual life of first century Rome. This edition uses the 1997 Clarendon text by the acclaimed translator P.G. Walsh.

‘Menander has set up a confrontation between this law [the law about epikleroi] and love… He wants the audience to regard the law as stupid and wrong… Surely one of Menander's purposes in writing this play was to make the Athenians consider seriously whether the law ought to be changed.’ Thus Professor D. M. MacDowell in the concluding paragraph of his article ‘Love versus the Law: an Essay on Menander's Aspis’. A similar view was already implicit in E. Karabelias' treatment (...) of the play as indicative of the general attitude to this law in Athens in Menander's day: ‘A n'en point douter, l'épiclérat est ressenti, á l'epoque de Ménandre, comme une anomalie intolérable pour les mceurs de la societe athénienne à la fin du ive s.av.n.è L'épiclérat est odieux et ridicule… L'hostilité envers l'épiclérat est done un signe des temps’. And Professor E. G. Turner has written: ‘it is hard to imagine that the institution of the epiclerate emerged in good standing from this derisory treatment’. (shrink)

Writing of Terence'sAndria(‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In theAndriathe second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), p. 158). Perhaps (...) in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her. (shrink)

Writing of Terence's Andria in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In the Andria the second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama , or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' , p. 158). Perhaps in 1993 (...) it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her. (shrink)

Writing of Terence'sAndria(‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In theAndriathe second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), p. 158). Perhaps (...) in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her. (shrink)

‘Menander has set up a confrontation between this law [the law about epikleroi] and love… He wants the audience to regard the law as stupid and wrong… Surely one of Menander's purposes in writing this play was to make the Athenians consider seriously whether the law ought to be changed.’ Thus Professor D. M. MacDowell in the concluding paragraph of his article ‘Love versus the Law: an Essay on Menander's Aspis’. A similar view was already implicit in E. Karabelias' treatment (...) of the play as indicative of the general attitude to this law in Athens in Menander's day: ‘A n'en point douter, l'épiclérat est ressenti, á l'epoque de Ménandre, comme une anomalie intolérable pour les mceurs de la societe athénienne à la fin du ive s.av.n.è L'épiclérat est odieux et ridicule… L'hostilité envers l'épiclérat est done un signe des temps’. And Professor E. G. Turner has written: ‘it is hard to imagine that the institution of the epiclerate emerged in good standing from this derisory treatment’. (shrink)

This would be admirably clear and would give excellent sense, but it does entail the deletion of as an interpolation before Marshall is aware that is a word that is not likely to be used by an interpolator, but still feels able to propose its deletion and gives a detailed account of the way in which an interpolator might have approached the sentence. When one attempts to read the mind of an ancient scribe, all sorts of possibilities are opened up; (...) in this instance, it seems equally possible that a reader who, as Marshall suggests, was faced with … and was not able to understand the sentence because he failed to separate from and to see that was to be taken in the second clause, would have been inclined first at least to see whether sense could be obtained by separating from rather than to conjure up the word. (shrink)

as Denniston pointed out in his note on the passage, ‘is difficult’. Various suggestions have been made to explain it, from Kvicala's emendation on the analogy of Medea 923, to Parmentier's note, ‘la joue blanche ou claire, c'est-à-dire en sa fleur de jeunesse’; but none is altogether convincing or satisfactory. May one, then, advance the idea of retaining as the Oxford recension does, not on the ground of faute de mieux, but for the sake of the very striking image it (...) contains? How to Cite This Article. (shrink)

The text of Euripides' Troades depends mainly upon the versions preserved in two manuscripts, viz. Palatinus 287 and Vaticanus 909 . Both these manuscripts are well known and have been several times collated. Their importance in relation to one another and to the other existing manuscripts for the study of the text of Euripides in general has been frequently discussed and is no longer a subject of major controversy. The notes which follow are designed to put on record a number (...) of corrections to the readings ascribed to P and V for the Troades in the apparatus criticus of Prinz-Wecklein and later editors; and to correct and amplify the general descriptions of P and to call attention to certain difficulties in the current views of its relationship to Laurentianus xxxii. (shrink)

Irrationality remains a central issue in the philosophy of psychoanalysis. While some approaches in the philosophy of mind have argued that irrationality demands no special account, one of the central conceptual planks of psychoanalytic theory is the notion that irrational motivations have their origin in the dynamic unconscious. This article reviews recent attempts to account for the phenomenon of motivated irrationality, and argues that the problem of self-understanding will remain central to the philosophy of mind so long as we accept (...) the notion of rational agency. Any account of the mind which ignores or denies the appeal of first-person mental phenomena risks rendering itself unintelligible as a convincing account of the conscious subject. (shrink)