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Articles 151 - 176 of 176
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Untimely Punishment And Dubious Desert, John N. Williams
Untimely Punishment And Dubious Desert, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Discussions of punishment have always assumed (e.g.[4, pp. 80-5]) that there are no circumstances in which someone can be justifiably punished for a crime that he will commit. This assumption has been directly challenged by Christopher New’s apparent example of morally justified ‘prepunishment’ [7]. In a recent paper, Fred Feldman rejects the ‘received wisdom’1 that desert cannot precede its basis by giving apparent examples of ‘predeserved’ charity, reward and apology [3, pp. 71-75]. If there can be cases of predeserved punishment as well, then anyone who holds that it is morally justifiable to punish an offender if and only if …
Is Public Space Suited To Co-Operative Inquiry?, Sor-Hoon Tan
Is Public Space Suited To Co-Operative Inquiry?, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article questions the nature of the philosophical commitment to the problem of 'the public' in modernity. To what extent does the natural form of the public determine the use and value of the instruments of pragmatism in the public-private divide. In this interpretation, John Dewey's ideas about 'the public' are presented in terms of how to solve a specific problem through what he sees as 'co-operative inquiry'. The article also examines the role of public space in the process of democratization through the potential of co-operative inquiry. More often than not, it appears that the politics of public space …
Ethical Pluralism From A Classical Liberal Perspective, Chandran Kukathas
Ethical Pluralism From A Classical Liberal Perspective, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Is the ideal society one that embodies or aims for ethical uniformity, orone that emphasizes instead the accommodation of ethical pluralism?From a classical liberal perspective the answer can only be that ethicalpluralism should be accommodated.
Externalism And Knowledge Of Comparative Content, Yoo Guan Tan
Externalism And Knowledge Of Comparative Content, Yoo Guan Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Concepts are the constituents of thoughts, which in turn, are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are also what the predicates of our language express. According to a tradition going back to Plato, questions about comparative content – questions of the form Is concept F the same as concept G? – are purely about relations of ideas, and so are answerable a priori. This does not mean that no experience at all is necessary to answer such questions, for experience may be needed to grasp their content. Call a piece of information about Fs extraneous if it is not required …
Mentors Or Friends: Confucius And Aristotle On Equality And Ethical Development In Friendship, Sor-Hoon Tan
Mentors Or Friends: Confucius And Aristotle On Equality And Ethical Development In Friendship, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In Thinking from the Han, David Hall and Roger Ames compare Plato's - and Confucius's views of friendship in relation to the question of transcendence and arrive at the sad conclusion that Socrates and Confucius could not be friends. "Socratic irony would not allow the inequality Confucius requires as a means of self-betterment. Confucius would not permit he and Socrates to hold all things in common." Along the way, they articulate an understanding of Confucius’ view of friendship as "a one-directional relationship in which one extends oneself by association with one who has attained a higher level of realization." Hall …
The Ethics Of Placebo-Controlled Trials In Developing Countries To Prevent Mother-To-Child Transmission Of Hiv, John N. Williams
The Ethics Of Placebo-Controlled Trials In Developing Countries To Prevent Mother-To-Child Transmission Of Hiv, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Placebo-trials on HIV-infected pregnant women in developing countries like Thailand and Uganda have provoked recent controversy. Such experiments aim to find a treatment that will cut the rate of vertical transmission more efficiently than existing treatments like zidovudine. This scenario is first stated as generally as possible, before three ethical principles found in the Belmont Report, itself a sharpening of the Helsinki Declaration, are stated. These three principles are the Principle of Utility, the Principle of Autonomy and the Principle of Justice. These are taken as voices of moral imperative. But although each has intuitive appeal, it can be shown …
Experience As Art, Sor-Hoon Tan
Experience As Art, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Chinese philosophy views experience as intrinsically aesthetic. This world view could be elucidated through a consideration of John Dewey's aesthetics and features of Chinese art. Dewey's philosophy of art starts with an understanding of experience as 'live processes' of living creatures interacting with their environment. Such processes are autopoietic in being self-sustaining, ever-changing, capable of increasing complexity, capable of generating novelty, direction and progress on its own. Its autopoietic character is a precondition of the aesthetic in the process of experience. An aesthetic experience is rhythmic, focused, consummatory, and reaches beyond the transitory boundaries of concrete existence. The aesthetic is …
Tolerating The Intolerable, Chandran Kukathas
Tolerating The Intolerable, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Presenting a lecture[1] on the virtue of toleration anywhere, let alone in the chambers of the Australian Senate department, should strike most people as a peculiarly pointless kind of exercise. Would anyone not in favour of toleration bother to turn up? (And what is the point of preaching to the converted? Would anyone against it bother to listen? And could such a person be converted?) In truth, it might not be easy to find anyone who openly professed intolerance. Almost everyone is in favour of tolerance; though of course, each will hasten to add, this does not mean that ‘anything …
Paternalism: A Deweyan Perspective, Sor-Hoon Tan
Paternalism: A Deweyan Perspective, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
“No, dear, you must not eat the soap; it’s not good for you.” Well-intentioned interference frustrates our desires even in the happiest childhood. Less happy is the perpetual state of adolescent rebellion against apparently arbitrary and unreasonable curtailments of one’s freedom, too frequently justified by the familiar refrain “It’s for your own good” adding insult to injury. Such interference does not necessarily cease with the eagerly awaited entry into adulthood. Not only parents are guilty of it; the state also engages in such interference. Can paternalism where one person deliberately interferes with another for the latter’s own good be morally …
Wittgensteinian Accounts Of Moorean Absurdity, John N. Williams
Wittgensteinian Accounts Of Moorean Absurdity, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Whatever Comes To Be Has A Cause Of Its Coming To Be: A Thomist Defense Of The Principle Of Sufficient Reason, Mark Nowacki
Whatever Comes To Be Has A Cause Of Its Coming To Be: A Thomist Defense Of The Principle Of Sufficient Reason, Mark Nowacki
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Moorean Absurdities And The Nature Of Assertion, John N. Williams
Moorean Absurdities And The Nature Of Assertion, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
I argue that Moore's propositions, for example, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' cannot be rationally believed. Their assertors either cannot be rationally believed or cannot be believed to be rational. This analysis is extended to Moorean propositions such as God knows that I am an atheist and I believe that this proposition is false. I then defend the following definition of assertion: anyone asserts that p iff that person expresses a belief that p with the intention of causing relevant epistemic change in the cognition of an actual or potential audience.
Moorean Absurdity And The Intentional 'Structure' Of Assertion, John N. Williams
Moorean Absurdity And The Intentional 'Structure' Of Assertion, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Liberty, Chandran Kukathas
Liberty, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Such is the rhetorical appeal of the idea of liberty that a variety of political philosophiesclaim to honour it. Republicans and Marxists, no less than libertarians and liberals,maintain that they and they alone are the true defenders of freedom. The literature ofcontemporary political theory is thus replete with rival analyses of the meaning ofliberty, and disputes about its measurement, distribution and institutional requirements. Our aim here is to gain some understanding of the meaning and the conditionsof liberty by working through the thicket of contemporary argument, though we mayhave to rest content with a better knowledge of the terrain.
Belief-In And Belief In God, John N. Williams
Belief-In And Belief In God, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Of all the examples of ‘belief-in’, belief in God is both the most mysterious and the most challenging. Indeed whether and how an apologist can make a case for the intellectual respectability of theistic belief, depends upon the nature of this ‘belief-in’. I shall attempt to elucidate this matter by an analysis of the relation of ‘belief-in’ to ‘belief-that’ and by treating belief in God as a special case of ‘belief-in’.
Ontological Disproof Of God's Existence, John N. Williams
Ontological Disproof Of God's Existence, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
An initial reading of Hume's Principle is that no necessary truth can be denied without contradiction, whereas all existential propositions can. Therefore it is self-contradictory to say,that any existential claim is necessarily true, since it follows that this claim both can and cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Thus any claim of the form 'X necessarily exists' is a self-contradiction, even if X is God.
Foreword, Chandran Kukathas
Foreword, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
What is the conservative committed to? According to some, the answer is quite simply nothing. Certainly, the argument goes, they are not committed to individual freedom: they defend only order, morality, religion and virtue - all 'traditionally' conceived. So it seemed to many classical liberals, libertarians and 'Old Whigs' in the early 1960s when they denounced traditionalists in the name of individual liberty, private property and reason. And so it also seems to many classical liberals and libertarians today.
Foreword, Chandran Kukathas
Foreword, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Hayek's essay 'Why I am not a Concervative' first appeared in 1960 as the final chapter of his treatise, The Constitution of Liberty. Strictly speaking, it was not really a concluding chapter; it was presented as a 'postscript' to the main text-a text whose concern was to articulate and elaborate upon the fundamental principles of classical liberalism. In this postscript Hayek attempted a task which the main treatise did not take up: to explain how the principles of classical liberalism set it apart from the conservatism with which it seemed to have so much in common.
Welfare, Contract, And The Language Of Charity, Chandran Kukathas
Welfare, Contract, And The Language Of Charity, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Confucius, Mencius And The Notion Of True Succession, John N. Williams
Confucius, Mencius And The Notion Of True Succession, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
The Preface Paradox Dissolved, John N. Williams
The Preface Paradox Dissolved, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The preface paradox strikes us as puzzling because we feel that if a person holds a set of inconsistent beliefs, i.e. beliefs such that at least one of them must be correct, then he should give at least one of them up. Equally, if a person's belief is rational, then he has a right to hold it. Yet the preface example is prima facie a case in which a person holds an inconsistent set of beliefs each of which is rational, and thus a case in which that person has a duty to relinquish what he has a right to …
Believing The Self-Contradictory, John N. Williams
Believing The Self-Contradictory, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Clearly, if a man holds a self-contradictory belief, then his belief cannot be rational, for there can be no set of evidence sufficient to justify it. This is most apparent when the self contradictory belief is a belief in a conjunction, (e.g., a belief that p & ~p), rather than when it is a non-conjunctive self-contradictory belief, e.g. a belief that red is not a color.
The Absurdities Of Moore's Paradoxes, John N. Williams
The Absurdities Of Moore's Paradoxes, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
No abstract provided.
Inconsistency And Contradiction, John N. Williams
Inconsistency And Contradiction, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Inconsistency and contradiction are important concepts. Unfortunately, they are easily confused. A proposition or belief which is inconsistent is one which is self- contradictory and vice-versa. Moreover two propositions or beliefs which are contradictories are inconsistent with each other. Nonetheless it is a mistake to suppose that inconsistency is the same as contradiction.
Justified Belief And The Infinite Regress Argument, John N. Williams
Justified Belief And The Infinite Regress Argument, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The background to this paper is the question of how rational belief is possible in the light of the commonly presented infinite regress in reasons. The paper investigates the neglected question of whether this regress is vicious. I argue that given the genuine requirements of rational belief, the regress would require the rational believer to hold an infinity of beliefs, which is impossible. The regress would not entail the rational believer holding an infinitely complex belief, which, admittedly, would be logically impossible.
Moore's Paradox: One Or Two?, John N. Williams
Moore's Paradox: One Or Two?, John N. Williams
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Discussions of what is sometimes called 'Moore's paradox' are often vitiated by a failure to notice that there are two paradoxes; not merely one in two sets of linguistic clothing. The two paradoxes are absurd, but in different ways, and accordingly require different explanations.