My One Fallacy theory says there is only one fallacy: equivocation, or playing on an ambiguity. In this paper I explain how this theory arose from rnetaphilosophical concerns. And I contrast this theory with purely logical, dialectical, and psychological notions of fallacy.

Ad hominem arguments argue that some opponent should not be heard and no argument of that opponent should be heard or considered. The opponent has generally pernicious views, false and harmful. Moreover he is diabolically clever at arguing for his views. Thus, the ad hominem argument is essentially a device by which non-intellectuals try to wrest control of a dialectical situation from intellectuals. Stifling intellectuals, disrupting the dialectical situation, is an unpleasant conclusion, but no fallacy has been shown in what (...) leads up to that conclusion. (shrink)

According to the one-fallacy theory, the only real fallacy is equivocation. In particular, the fallacy of incomplete evidence draws a conclusion inductively from parts of our evidence while ignoring other parts of it which undermine the conclusion. T his is an equivocation on the relative term 'probable': the conclusion is probable relative to a part of our evidence but not relative to the whole of it. Unfortunately, this view is not entirely consistent with my meta-theory of fallacies which allows t (...) hat some failures of rationality are errors simply in inductive reasoning rather than being equivocations. (shrink)

Francis Robin Houssemayne Du Boulay, historian of England and Germany in the later Middle Ages, is remembered with admiration and affection by his colleagues as a fine scholar, and as a witty, charitable, and sometimes mercurial companion. Many professors of history and writers in Britain and the USA can testify to Boulay's inspiring gifts as a teacher. His unique historical vision, which is most powerfully communicated in his books on England in the later middle ages and Piers Plowman, offers his (...) readers a richly documented understanding of the lives and mentalities of medieval people, informed by sympathy and a deep charity. This is a valuable gift from a historian to a society in danger of losing its identity through forgetfulness of its past. (shrink)

_The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals^ is one of the most important works of moral philosophy ever written, and Kant's most widely read work. It attempts to demonstrate that morality has its foundation in reason and that our wills are free from both natural necessity and the power of desire. It is here that Kant sets out his famous and controversial 'categorical imperative', which forms the basis of his moral theory. This book is an essential guide to the groundwork_ (...) and the many important and profound claims that Kant raises. The book combines an invaluable introduction to the work offering an exploration of these arguments and setting them in the context of Kant's thinking, along with the complete H.J Paton translation of the work, and a selection of six of the best contemporary commentaries. It is the ideal companion for all students of Kantian ethics and anyone interested in moral philosophy. _ _ _. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ Introduction“Between the Bible and the Philosophers”: ShakespearePeter Atterton (bio) and Sean Lawrence (bio)It is not clear when Levinas first read Shakespeare, but we do have some clues. The first complete translation of Shakespeare’s works into Russian, Levinas’s mother tongue, appeared between 1865 and 1868. These volumes doubtless graced the shelves of his family’s bookstore in Kovno (now Kaunas), in Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. Kovno (...) served as capital of one of three губернии gubernias (provinces), but also as the de facto center of Lithuanian intellectual life. The family bookstore catered to the highbrow tastes of government officials and served the needs of teachers and students at the local lycée. One also imagines that it fired the literary imagination of the young Levinas, who taught himself to read Russian at a young age. However, it would have been highly unusual for one so young, even for one as precocious as Levinas, to have read Shakespeare recreationally and self-educationally during this period (1906–1915). It probably was not until he entered the lycée in Kharkov, in Tsarist Ukraine, where his family emigrated at the beginning the Great War, or after his family’s return in 1920 to Lithuania, where Levinas attended the Hebrew lycée in Kovno, that Levinas read Shakespeare for the first time. We know that Russian gymnasiums and technical schools assigned Shakespeare.1 His gymnasium education, between the ages of eleven and seventeen, is therefore the latest point by which Levinas could have read Shakespeare for the first time, though we do not know what or how much.He certainly acknowledged Shakespeare’s influence on his early thought. In an interview broadcast on Radio France Culture in February 1981, Philippe Nemo asked Levinas what were “the first great books” he encountered, “the Bible or the philosophers?” Levinas answered by saying that he read the Bible while very young but only began to read philosophy with any seriousness at university. He proceeded, however, to volunteer a third category of great books, [End Page 1]between the Bible and the philosophers, the Russian classics—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.2If we treat this as a chronology, then Levinas would have first read Shakespeare at some time “between” the age of six, when he began reading the Bible and other Hebrew texts with a private tutor, and the age of seventeen, when he enrolled at the University of Strasbourg.A polyglot, Levinas could have read Shakespeare in English as well as in Russian translation, but also in French, German, or Hebrew translation. For that matter, he could have read it in Lithuanian translation.3 We don’t know which French edition he read first or drew upon most closely.4 In Time and the Other, he follows the translation of Émile Montégut for Macbeth but for Romeo and Juliet, as noted in Sean Lawrence’s article, he does not repeat verbatim any of the major translations. When he quotes Shakespeare in English, he follows an original spelling edition. In the notebooks that he kept during imprisonment, and part of which we have translated here, Levinas appears to quote Shakespeare in English from memory, but incorrectly.This error notwithstanding, the Carnets de captivité show the imprisoned Levinas reading widely in English. Perhaps he expected a victory by the anglo-phone powers, or perhaps he practiced a sort of defiance in reading the language of his captors’ enemies, or perhaps he sought to strengthen his understanding of one of the European languages he had neglected in the precocity of his youth. Besides Shakespeare, we find him reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke within our selection. Elsewhere in the notebooks, he refers to Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, L. Ryder Haggard, Maurice Baring, Millen Brand, Pearl Buck, and Edgar Allan Poe.5 His references range from the cursory—in the case of Brand’s The Outward Room, it consists only of its title and author—to the surprisingly detailed and suggestive. After reading... (shrink)

Chimpanzee behaviour with mirrors makes it plausible that they can recognise themselves as themselves in mirrors, and so have a 'self-concept'. I defend this claim, and argue that roughly similar behaviour in pigeons, as reported, does not in fact make it equally plausible that they also have this mental capacity. But for all that it is genuine, chimpanzee self-consciousness may differ significantly from ours. I describe one possibility I believe consistent with the data, even if not very plausible: that the (...) chimpanzee is aware of itself only as a material being, and not as a subject of any psychological states. As I try to make clear, this possibility exists even if the chimpanzee has psychological states, and is aware of some of them. (shrink)

One might expect functionalism to imply that personal identity is preserved through various operations on the brain, including transplantation. I argue that this is not clearly so even where the whole brain is transplanted. It is definitely not so in cases where only the cerebrum is transplanted, a conceivable kind of hemispherectomy, and even certain cases in which the brain is "gradually" replaced by an inorganic substitute. These results distinguish functionalism from other accounts taking what Eric T. Olson calls the (...) "Psychological Approach" to personal identity, enabling it to avoid some of his objections to them. (shrink)

Scientists and historians have often presumed that the divide between biochemistry and molecular biology is fundamentally epistemological.100 The historiography of molecular biology as promulgated by Max Delbrück's phage disciples similarly emphasizes inherent differences between the archaic tradition of biochemistry and the approach of phage geneticists, the ur molecular biologists. A historical analysis of the development of both disciplines at Berkeley mitigates against accepting predestined differences, and underscores the similarities between the postwar development of biochemistry and the emergence of molecular biology (...) as a university discipline. Stanley's image of postwar biochemistry, with its focus on viruses as key experimental systems, and its preference for following macromolecular structure over metabolism pathways, traced the outline of molecular biology in 1950.Changes in the postwar political economy of research universities enabled the proliferation of disciplines such as microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, immunology, and molecular biology in universities rather than in medical schools and agricultural colleges. These disciplines were predominantly concerned with investigating life at the subcellular level-research that during the 1930s had often entailed collaboration with physicists and chemists. The interdisciplinary efforts of the 1930s (many fostered by the Rockefeller Foundation) yielded a host of new tools and reagents that were standardized and mass-produced for laboratories after World War II. This commercial infrastructure enabled “basic” researchers in biochemistry and molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s to become more independent from physics and chemistry (although they were practicing a physicochemical biology), as well as from the agricultural and medical schools that had previously housed or sponsored such research. In turn, the disciplines increasingly required their practitioners to have specialized graduate training, rather than admitting interlopers from the physical sciences.These general transitions toward greater autonomy for biochemistry and allied disciplines should not mask the important particularities of these developments on each campus. At the University of Caliornia at Berkeley, agriculture had provided, with medicine, significant sponsorship for biochemistry. The proximity of Lawrence and his cyclotrons supported the early development of Berkeley as a center for the biological uses of radioisotopes, particularly in studies of metabolism and photosynthesis. Stanley arrived to establish his department and virus institute before large-scale federal funding of biomedical research was in place, and he courted the state of California for substantial backing by promising both national prominence in the life sciences and virus research pertinent to agriculture and public health. Stanley's venture benefited significantly from the expansion of California's economy after World War II, and his mobilization against viral diseases resonated with the concerns of the Cold War, which fueled the state's rapid growth. The scientific prominence of contemporary developments at Caltech and Stanford invites the historical examination of the significance of postwar biochemistry and molecular biology within the political and cultural economy of the Golden State.In 1950, Stanley presented a persuasive picture of the power of biochemistry to refurbish life science at Berkeley while answering fundamental questions about life and infection. In the words of one Rockefeller Foundation officer,There seems little doubt in [my] mind that as a personality Stanley will be well able to dominate the other personalities on the Berkeley campus and will be able to drive his dream through to completion, which, incidentally, leaves Dr. Hubert [sic] Evans and the whole ineffective Life Sciences building in the somewhat peculiar position of being by-passed by much of the truly modern biochemistry and biophysics research that will be carried out at Berkeley. Furthermore, it seems likely that Dr. S's show will throw Dr. John Lawrence's Biophysics Department strongly in the shade both figuratively and literally, but should make the University of California pre-eminent not only in physics but in biochemistry as well.101Stanley, Sproul, Weaver, and this officer (William Loomis) all testified to a perceptible postwar opportunity to capitalize on public support for biological research that relied on the technologies from physics and chemistry without being captive to them, and that addressed issues of medicine and agriculture without being institutionally subservient. What is striking, given the expectation by many that Stanley would ‘be able to drive his dream through to completion,” was that in fact he did not. Biochemists who had succeeded in making their expertise valued in specialized niches were resistant to giving up their affiliations to joint Stanley's “liberated” organization. Stanley's failure was not simply due to institutional factors: researchers as well as Rockefeller Foundation officers faulted him for his lack of scientific imagination, which made it difficult for him to gain credibility in leading the field. Moreover, many biochemists did not share Stanley's commitment to viruses as the key material for the “new biochemistry.”In the end, Stanley's free-standing department did become a first-rate department of biochemistry, but only after freeing itself from Stanley's leadership and his single-minded devotion to viruses. Nonetheless, the falling-out with the Berkeley biochemists was rapidly followed by the establishment of a Department of Molecular Biology, attesting to the unabating economic and institutional possibilities for an authoritative “general biology” (or two, for that matter) to take hold. In each case, following Stanley's dream sheds light on how the possible and the real shaped the (re)formation of biochemistry and molecular biology as postwar life sciences. (shrink)

Ritalin use has increased by 500 percent in the last five years. The reasons for this dramatic surge are rooted in changes and pressures in psychiatry and society at large.

What distinguishes actions of persons from other events? Too big a question; we make a customary substitution: what distinguishes a person's raising his arm from a person's arm rising? In each case, the arm rises. But in the former, we have something in addition. Let us say that in the former case, the person causes the arm's rising. Our problem then is to interpret this notion of causation by an agent.It can be done, I believe, in terms of the notion (...) of causation of events by other events-events which may not be “mental,” contrary to one common view. My account of agent causation is presented in the concluding section of this paper. I set the stage for this account by first examining rivals of three types: one asserting that agent causation is or involves a causal concept which cannot be interpreted further, but which we all understand well enough; one which invokes causation by mental events of certain kinds; and one which avoids all reference to causation. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker has claimed that functionalism, a theory about mental states, implies a certain theory about the identity over time of persons, the entities that have mental states. He also claims that persons can survive a "Brain-State-Transfer" procedure. My examination of these claims includes description and analysis of imaginary cases, but-notably-not appeals to our "intuitions" concerning them. It turns out that Shoemaker's basic insight is correct: there is a connection between the two theories. Specifically, functionalism implies that "non-branching functional continuity" (...) is sufficient for personal identity. But there is no implication that it is necessary. And the "BST" procedure may not preserve functional continuity. I consider several possibilities. On what may be the most attractive, the survivor of this-or any similar-procedure is not identical with the original person, but related to him or her as are the survivors in a case of fission. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker has claimed that functionalism, a theory about mental states, implies a certain theory about the identity over time of persons, the entities that have mental states. He also claims that persons can survive a “Brain-State-Transfer” procedure.My examination of these claims includes description and analysis of imaginary cases, but-notably-not appeals to our “intuitions” concerning them.It turns out that Shoemaker’s basic insight is correct: there is a connection between the two theories. Specifically, functionalism implies that “non-branching functional continuity” is sufficient (...) for personal identity. But there is no implication that it is necessary. And the “BST” procedure may not preserve functional continuity. I consider several possibilities. On what may be the most attractive, the survivor of this---or any similar---procedure is not identical with the original person, but related to him or her as are the survivors in a case of fission. (shrink)

What distinguishes actions of persons from other events? Too big a question; we make a customary substitution: what distinguishes a person's raising his arm from a person's arm rising? In each case, the arm rises. But in the former, we have something in addition. Let us say that in the former case, the person causes the arm's rising. Our problem then is to interpret this notion of causation by an agent.It can be done, I believe, in terms of the notion (...) of causation of events by other events-events which may not be “mental,” contrary to one common view. My account of agent causation is presented in the concluding section of this paper. I set the stage for this account by first examining rivals of three types: one asserting that agent causation is or involves a causal concept which cannot be interpreted further, but which we all understand well enough; one which invokes causation by mental events of certain kinds; and one which avoids all reference to causation. (shrink)

In contrast to what merely happens to us, or to parts of us, actions are what we do. My moving my finger is an action, to be distinguished from the mere motion of that finger. My snoring likewise is not something I ‘do’ in the intended sense, though in another, broader sense, it is something I often ‘do’ while asleep.