Avebury Series in Philosophy – serie

Legal and moral reasoning share much methodology, and they address similar problems. This volume charts two shared problems: the relation between theory, principles and particular judgments; and the role of facts and factual assertions in normative settings. The relation between 'theory' and 'practice' and between 'principle' and 'particular judgment' has become the subject of much debate in moral philosophy. In the ongoing debate, some moral philosophers refer to legal philosophy for a support of their views on the primacy of 'practice' over 'theory'. According to them, legal philosophy should have a more balanced view in that relation. In the contributions to Part One this claim is critically analysed. The role of the facts is underestimated in discussions on legal reasoning and legal theory, as well as moral reasoning and ethical theory. Factual statements enter into moral and legal discussions not only because they link the conclusion with a rule. They also play a role as background assumptions in supporting a theory. Its focus on the role of facts in normative reasoning makes this book of special interest to scholars of legal and moral argumentation.

In just the last twenty years there has arisen a strong interest, especially among teachers of logic at the universities, in teaching techniques of applied logical reasoning and critical thinking. Many universities are now stressing these skills at an introductory level, and to meet the need, informal logic has begun to form and grow as a discipline in its own right. Like all subjects, it helps us to understand it if we can situate it in a context of historical development. This collection of essays provides the readings required to understand the development of a subject whose historical origins have been so far little studied. Many of the chapters are written by scholars in philosophy and speech communication who are themselves leading contributors to the subject, and their contemporary views throw light on how these earlier writers have influenced their thinking. This dimension gives an added interest to the essays, and indicates the way informal logic is currently evolving and seeking out its ancient historical origins.

Within the context of a critique of volitional accounts of action based on trying, Trying Without Willing articulates a conception of intentional action based on the notion of de re intention. A central theme is that volitional theories of action based on the concept of trying presuppose dubious Cartesian assumptions about the nature of mind and mental states. There is an original account of Cartesianism which captures how even the orthodox materialist theories of action are bound by Cartesian assumptions. Articulating criticisms of contemporary volitional theories against the backdrop of this Cartesian picture provides a diagnosis of what is amiss with all these views and helps motivate a new view of the mind and its role in intentional action. This view has some affinities with the view of perception which Hilary Putnam recently articulated in his Dewey Lectures and John McDowell developed in his recent book Mind and World. This book will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students as well as anyone seriously interested in the philosophy of mind, the nature of intentional action, the problem of mental causation, or the influence of Cartesiansim in contemporary analytic philosophy.

This book seeks to explore the understanding of Fabianism of both the Webbs and the Fabian Women’s Group and how this understanding shaped their views regarding such gender-centred issues as the family wage; protective labour law; and women’s place in the welfare state, the home and the labour market.

Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root constitutes a landmark in Schopenhaurian scholarship. It is a translation with concise commentary of Schopenhauer’s doctoral thesis as submitted to the University of Jena and published at Rudolstadt in 1813. In spite of the great and increasing interest in the writings of Schopenhauer in the English-speaking world, this work has never been translated before, and its long awaited appearance fills the only remaining gap in the philosophical works of Schopenhauer available to English-speaking readers. Schopenhauer’s thesis of 1813 is very different from the 1847 edition well known to English readers, and its appearance in translation will enable students and scholars alike to make sense of the development of Schopenhauer’s thought in a way that has been possible so far only to those at ease with Schopenhauer’s German. The translation, which keeps a fine balance between readability and philosophical accuracy, is accompanied by a commentary enabling students as well as established scholars to follow Schopenhauer’s thought with comparative ease.

This book seeks to explore the understanding of Fabianism of both the Webbs and the Fabian Women’s Group and how this understanding shaped their views regarding such gender-centred issues as the family wage; protective labour law; and women’s place in the welfare state, the home and the labour market.

The title of this book derives from C. Wright Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination (Penguin, 1970), in which he sees the essential project of social science as the use of the imagination to 'grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society'. This enables the social scientist to 'range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self'. Another of Mills’ concerns was the relationship between 'the personal troubles of the milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure' and these are most acutely illustrated in human genetics, the most personal of the new technologies. The chapters in this volume address these issues through discussions of choice and informed decision-making, risks and hazards, the economic and political organization of new technology, and the public as well as the scientist’s understanding of science. The methods used range from detailed ethnographies, through deconstruction's of text and action, to surveys and interviews.

This book suggests that religion, in its usual sense, can be replaced by something better, that the human spirit or subjectivity can be the subject of scientific study and that lack of purpose or design in the universe is not a handicap but a positive opportunity for intelligent beings to make of the universe and its contents what they reasonably can. The book breaks new ground in suggesting a radical alternative to religion. It offers a scientific and humanist alternative to religion which appeals to people’s critical faculties rather than emotions or intuitions. It also challenges current views of causation and the principle of sufficient reason by stressing the subjectivity of our reasoning powers and clarifying these in relation to an independent external reality. It develops and elaborates a notion of the ’noosphere’ within a theoretical system, this enables the notion to assume a scientific importance which it currently lacks because it is treated as an isolated, eccentric and rather mystical idea.

In just the last twenty years there has arisen a strong interest, especially among teachers of logic at the universities, in teaching techniques of applied logical reasoning and critical thinking. Many universities are now stressing these skills at an introductory level, and to meet the need, informal logic has begun to form and grow as a discipline in its own right. Like all subjects, it helps us to understand it if we can situate it in a context of historical development. This collection of essays provides the readings required to understand the development of a subject whose historical origins have been so far little studied. Many of the chapters are written by scholars in philosophy and speech communication who are themselves leading contributors to the subject, and their contemporary views throw light on how these earlier writers have influenced their thinking. This dimension gives an added interest to the essays, and indicates the way informal logic is currently evolving and seeking out its ancient historical origins.

Schopenhauer’s Early Fourfold Root constitutes a landmark in Schopenhaurian scholarship. It is a translation with concise commentary of Schopenhauer’s doctoral thesis as submitted to the University of Jena and published at Rudolstadt in 1813. In spite of the great and increasing interest in the writings of Schopenhauer in the English-speaking world, this work has never been translated before, and its long awaited appearance fills the only remaining gap in the philosophical works of Schopenhauer available to English-speaking readers. Schopenhauer’s thesis of 1813 is very different from the 1847 edition well known to English readers, and its appearance in translation will enable students and scholars alike to make sense of the development of Schopenhauer’s thought in a way that has been possible so far only to those at ease with Schopenhauer’s German. The translation, which keeps a fine balance between readability and philosophical accuracy, is accompanied by a commentary enabling students as well as established scholars to follow Schopenhauer’s thought with comparative ease.