Life is short and transient--Japanese people call this sentiment mujokan. However, what if we could sweep away the "despair" looming over the present age by proactively accepting this mujo (transience)? Perusing the thought of mujo from the perspectives of philosophy, literature, art and religion, Takeuchi delves into the view of life and death unique to the Japanese people who have shared "grief" and "pain" with each other, as well as into the very core of their underlying spirit." -- Publisher's (...) description. (shrink)

1-3. [without special titles] -- 4. "Kogaku" no shisō.

In this article, we develop and clarify some of the basic combinatorial properties of the new notion of n-dependence recently introduced by Shelah. In the same way as dependence of a theory means its inability to encode a bipartite random graph with a definable edge relation, n-dependence corresponds to the inability to encode a random -partite -hypergraph with a definable edge relation. We characterize n-dependence by counting φ-types over finite sets, and in terms of the collapse of random ordered -hypergraph (...) indiscernibles down to order-indiscernibles. (shrink)

This book provides a collection of sources, many of them fragmentary and previously scattered and hard to access, for the development of Peripatetic philosophy in the later Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. It also supplies the background against which the first commentator on Aristotle from whom extensive material survives, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), developed his interpretations which continue to be influential even today. Many of the passages are here translated into English for the first time, (...) including the whole of the summary of Peripatetic ethics attributed to 'Arius Didymus'. (shrink)

Reason and Value collects 15 new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the work of Joseph Raz. Raz has made major contributions in a wide range of areas, including jurisprudence, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason; but all of his work displays a deep engagement with central themes in moral philosophy. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. Especially significant are his (...) explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value, which constitute a sustained and penetrating treatment of a set of issues at the very center of moral philosophy as it is practiced today. The contributors to the volume acknowledge the importance of Raz's contributions by engaging critically with his positions and offering independent perspectives on the topics that he has addressed. The volume aims both to honour Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and to contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject. (shrink)

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

In this first paperback edition, a new introduction by Tom Burke establishes the ongoing importance of Sleeper's analysis of the integrity of Dewey's work and ...

When a central government deals with local demands, it may strengthen political accountability of the local governments by political decentralization or offer benefits through economic assistance. An authoritarian regime uses economic assistance policy because political decentralization may contradict regime survival. Although economic benefits can be used to buy political support, the distribution of these benefits is seldom equal. We argue that the unequal distribution is more salient in regions where ethnic minorities reside because the unusual demographic composition of those areas (...) make it difficult for the national government to evaluate the performance of the local government who is responsible for the distribution of the economic benefits. As a result, economic assistance may backfire in ethnic regions and intensify their existing conflicts. We develop a simple formal model to illustrate our arguments and explore the cases of Xinjiang and Hong Kong for empirical analysis. (shrink)

This book is not a study of Plato's philosophy, but a contribution to the literary interpretation of the dialogues, through analysis of their formal structure, ...

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

Nishida Kitaro's reformulation of the major issues of Western philosophy from a Zen standpoint of "absolute nothingness" and "absolutely contradictory self-identity" represents the boldest speculative enterprise of modern Japan, continued today by his successors in the "Kyoto School" of philosophy. This English translation of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness evokes the movement and flavor of the original, clarifies its obscurities, and eliminates the repetitions. It sheds new light on the philosopher's career, revealing a long struggle with such thinkers as Cohen, (...) Natorp, Husserl, Fichte, and Bergson, that ended with Nishida's break from the basic ontological assumptions of the West. Throughout labyrinthine arguments, Nishida never loses sight of his theme: the irreducibility and unobjectifiability of the act of self-consciousness which constitutes the self. Extensive annotation is provided for the first time in any edition of Nishida's work. Historians of Japanese philosophy and culture, and all those interested in the interaction of Eastern and Western thought-forms, now have a document which highlights many of the cultural, psychological, and intellectual dynamics that have shaped Japanese intellectual life in one of its most fascinating and ambitious manifestations. (shrink)

The Hellenistic philosophers and schools of philosophy are emerging from the shadow of Plato and Aristotle and are increasingly studied for their intrinsic philosophical value. They are not only interesting in their own right, but also form the intellectual background of the late Roman Republic. This study gives a comprehensive and readable account of the principal doctrines of the Stoics, Epicureans and various sceptical traditions from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to around 200 A.D. Discussions are (...) arranged topically in order to address underlying issues and to make clear what the different schools have in common and how they differ. At the same time the coherence of each system as a whole is emphasized. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

R. G. Swinburne; XIII*—Personal Identity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 231–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

"The philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects," writes John Searle, "in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false." In Mind, Searle dismantles these famous and influential theories as he presents a vividly written, comprehensive introduction to the mind. Here readers will find one of the world's most eminent thinkers shedding light on the central concern of modern philosophy. Searle begins with a look at the twelve problems of philosophy of mind--which he calls "Descartes (...) and Other Disasters"--problems which he returns to throughout the volume, as he illuminates such topics as the freedom of the will, the actual operation of mental causation, the nature and functioning of the unconscious, the analysis of perception, and the concept of the self. One of the key chapters is on the mind-body problem, which Searle analyzes brilliantly. He argues that all forms of consciousness--from feeling thirsty to wondering how to translate Mallarme--are caused by the behavior of neurons and are realized in the brain system, which is itself composed of neurons. But this does not mean that consciousness is nothing but neuronal behavior. The main point of having the concept of consciousness, Searle points out, is to capture the first person subjective features of the phenomenon and this point is lost if we redefine consciousness in third person objective terms. Described as a "dragonslayer by temperament," John Searle offers here a refreshingly direct and open discussion of philosophy, one that skewers accepted wisdom even as it offers striking new insights into the nature of consciousness and the mind. (shrink)

We introduce several concepts concerning the indiscernibility of trees. A tree is by definition an ordered set such that, for any a∈O, the initial segment {b∈O:b (...) A of the form η∈O, where O is a tree, and aη labeled by η is an element in M. Such a set A is also called a tree in this paper. We study the indiscernibility of trees A in general settings and apply the obtained results to the study of unstable theories. (shrink)

Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about (...) the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case ofonlyour own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that thea prioriarguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

Sections include: experiments and generalised causal inference; statistical conclusion validity and internal validity; construct validity and external validity; quasi-experimental designs that either lack a control group or lack pretest observations on the outcome; quasi-experimental designs that use both control groups and pretests; quasi-experiments: interrupted time-series designs; regresssion discontinuity designs; randomised experiments: rationale, designs, and conditions conducive to doing them; practical problems 1: ethics, participation recruitment and random assignment; practical problems 2: treatment implementation and attrition; generalised causal inference: a grounded theory; (...) generalised causal inference: methods for single studies; generalised causal inference: methods for multiple studies; a critical assessment of our assumptions. (shrink)

Praise for the First Edition: '... a unique and lively business ethics text... fresh and delightful... Sekhar's witty use of stories and cases will engage and enlighten business people in India and the rest of the world' - Joanne B Ciulla, The Journal of Business Ethics 'Richly international in scope and contributes to global concern' - Newsltter IIAS Leiden University 'This book makes an important contribution through its holisitc and balanced approach to the issue... Each chapter has a fair number (...) of relevant cases - many of which are good living examples one can learn from' - Business Standard This Second Edition of Sekhar's highly acclaimed book on business ethics has been revised keeping the student reader in mind. This unique text discusses the way ethical conflicts are handled in reality. The author argues that ethical education should be designed to produce balanced, pleasant and effective managers with the power of insight. Only then will they have the courage to create and use ethically desirable means to sustain organizations in an ambience of liberalism and democratic choice. (shrink)