Well, maybe not. It all depends on your philosophy, and perhaps a bit on heaven and earth too. Nothing, though, enrages the average philosopher these days more than the obdurate, even pig-headed refusal of the general public to abandon its belief in ESP and the paranormal. Most philosophers, even in Britain, do not read the London Daily Mail. So their breakfast-time composure will not have been ruffled by the report of its science correspondent on November 26th, 1997, that a survey of 6,238 mainly intelligent and mature Britons showed that 59% believed in ESP. Worse, those who believed were generally speaking no worse judges of the probability of coincidences than those sceptical of the claims of psychics, clairvoyants and the like. Furthermore, it appears that belief in the paranormal has not diminished over time to any great extent. Dr Susan Blackmore, who was responsible for the research for the survey commented that all this goes to show that science education ‘hasn't made any difference’.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University. Besides Mind in Action (Beacon, 1998). She has published numerous articles on the history of moral psychology.

Roger Wertheimer

Author of The Significance of Sense (awarded Harvard University's Carrier Prize) and frequently anthologized essays in theoretical and applied ethics, and formerly a Guggenheim Fellow and professor at a dozen universities has not found employment for several years.

Karen Green

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought and teaches feminism and philosophy of language.

John Bigelow

Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne. He is author of the Reality of Numbers and (jointly with Robert Pargetter) Science and Necessity and teaches history of philosophy.

Maria Alvarez

Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Reading.

John Hyman

Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy, The Queen's College, Oxford.

James Cargile

Professor in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and is a previous contributor to Philosophy.

William Max Knorpp, Jr

Assistant Professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

Russell Wahl

Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University.

Jonathan Westphal

Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University.

Plato's dialogues can be read as a carefully staged exhibition and investigation of paideia, education in the broadest sense, including all that affects the formation of character and mind. The twentieth century textbook Plato — the Plato of the Myth of the Cave and the Divided Line, the ascent to the Good through Forms and Ideas — is but one of his elusive multiple authorial personae, each taking a different perspective on his investigations. As its focused problems differ, each Platonic dialogue exhibits a somewhat different model for learning; each adds a distinctive dimension to Plato's fully considered counsel for education. Setting aside the important difficult questions about the chronological sequence in which the dialogues were written and revised, we can trace the argumentative rationale of Plato's fully considered views on paideia, on who should be educated by whom for what, on the stages and presuppositions of different kinds of learning. Those views are inextricably connected with his views about the structure of the soul, about the virtues and the politeia that can sustain a good life; and about cosmology and metaphysics.

Greece is Hellas and Greeks are Hellenes. Azure is cobalt and everything (coloured) azure is (coloured) cobalt. Pre-Fregeans would call all these statements of identity. Frege taught us to distinguish between

Conaming [Name] [Name]. Ngh: Greece is Hellas g=h. Nac: Azure is cobalt a=c

Copredicating [Predicate] [Predicate]. PGH: Greeks are Hellenes (x)(Gx≡Hx). PAC: Everything azure is cobalt (x)(Ax≡Cx)

Singular Predication [Name] [Predicate]. PcA: Como is azure Ac. PaC: Azure is a colour Ca. PaL: Azure is like indigo Lai. PgD: Greece defeated Persia Dgp.

With Frege the contrasts became marked but misconceived.

I. Logic, rationality and ideology

Herbert Marcuse once claimed that the ‘“rational” is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.’ He echoed a widespread folk belief that a world in which people were rational would be a better world. This could be taken as an optimistic empirical conjecture: if people were more rational then probably the world would be a better place (a trust that ‘virtue will be rewarded’, so to speak). However, it is also worth considering a stronger hypothesis: that if something did not reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression then it would not constitute rationality. On this view there is no mere correlation between rationality and a propensity toward reduction in ignorance and the rest, it is the propensity to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality and oppression which in part constitutes rationality. Call this a broad conception of rationality, because it expands beyond the epistemic goal of reducing ignorance, and reaches out to moral concerns like oppression.

In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the consensus. For example, the entry for Agency in a recently published reference guide to the philosophy of mind begins with the following sentence:

A central task in the philosophy of action is that of spelling out the differences between events in general and those events that fall squarely into the category of human action.

There is no consensus about what events are. But it is generally agreed that, whatever events may prove to be, actions are a species or a class of events. We believe that the received view is mistaken: actions are not events. We concede that for most purposes, the kind of categorial refinement which is involved in either affirming or denying that actions are events is frankly otiose. Our common idiom does not stress the difference between actions and events, at least not in general terms, because it has no need to. Perhaps it sounds a little odd to say that some events are performed; but if we balked at describing, say, the abdication of Edward VIII as one of the politically significant events in Britain in 1936, it could not be for metaphysical reasons. And since actions, like events, are datable — though often, as we shall see, only imprecisely — actions are said to take place and to occur. But an important class of actions consist in moving something; indeed, according to many philosophers, every action consists in moving something. And when we consider actions of this sort from a theoretical point of view it becomes imperative to distinguish between actions and events. Or so we shall argue.

No one doubts that philosophers have discussed at length ‘the problem of induction’, but it would also be generally recognized that there would be disagreement as to precisely what that problem is. Rather than tackle the formulation problem, I will borrow from a popular text:

Our existence as well as science itself is based on the principle of induction that tells us to reason from past frequencies to future likelihoods, from the limited known of the past and present to the unknown of the past, present, and future ... But though inductive probability is psychologically inescapable, we have trouble providing a rational justification for it.

We might say, then, that there is such a practice as induction, and a problem associated with it is that of justifying engaging in it. We engage in reasoning from things we know about the past and present to conclusions about the past, present and future. We can't resist doing this but we have trouble finding a rational justification for doing so. This problem suggests a generalization. We engage in reasoning, reaching new conclusions. It would be hard to resist engaging in this practice. How do we provide a rational justification for it?

Introduction

There is an enormous amount of confusion about what relativism is. In this paper I aim to take a step toward clarifying what it is by discussing some things that it is not — that is, by distinguishing it from some other views with which it is often confused or conflated, such as nihilism and scepticism. I do this primarily because I think that the question of the character of relativism is interesting in itself. A clearer characterization of relativism would also be important instrumentally, however, as before we can accurately assess relativism we must have a clear idea of what it is. The secondary aim of this paper, then, is to function as a prolegomenon to an assessment of relativism. The tertiary aim of the paper is to make a few observations about the view which most clearly stands opposed to relativism, the view which I will call ‘objectivism.’ Because relativism is often confused with views like fallibilism and pluralism, objectivism often finds itself unjustly associated with views like infallibilism and political authoritarianism. (If this paper had a subtitle, it would be: ‘And What Objectivism Isn't.’) Although it is not the point of this paper to criticize relativism, I should make it clear that it began as a part of an anti-relativistic project, and, although anti-relativism is not necessarily objectivism, I should perhaps make it clear that I am more than a little sympathetic to the latter type of view.

We wish to defend Jonathan Westphal's view that colour is complex against a recent ‘phenomenological’ criticism of Eric Rubenstein. There is often thought to be a conflict between two kinds of determinants of colour, physical and phenomenal. On the one hand there are the complex physical facts about colour, such as the determination of a surface colour by an absorption spectrum. There is also, however, the fact that the apparently simple phenomenological quality of what is seen is a function of the physiological and psychological state of the viewing subject. Should the physical trump the phenomenal, or is it the other way round?

Much of the phenomenal variation of colour, however, is explained by physical facts. There is a physics and a psychophysics of colour. Colours appear, to the colour scientists at least, to be in some sense objective, a sense not explained by the view that they are purely phenomenal. Taking physics and psychophysics into account will mean rejecting the claim that the content of what our concepts of colours are concepts of is exhausted by the purely phenomenal, or that we can determine these concepts simply by gazing at a colour. Taking account of physics will lead, as Westphal argued, instead to a view about white and the other colour terms like Putnam's account of gold. Necessary truths about colours cannot be explained without reference to the logic of the compossibility of what is given in reflection and absorption spectra, the analogue of H2O.

Polemical Papers by Jenny Teichman (Ashgate 1997) will certainly engage and amuse the bystander. They will not amuse Jonathan Lear or Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer or Ronald Dworkin or Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, to name only some of the most prestigious of Teichman's targets. But then home truths usually do not amuse their recipients. Teichman's points are certainly not unsubtle, but they are expressed with the directness characteristic of the home truth, and indeed of good thinking.

This, doubtless, is part of Teichman's object. Through the directness of her writing and her own rootedness in good sense, she communicates to the reader that a big reputation and inflated style are no guarantees of good sense. She says that in her essays she is discussing cases where philosophers are explicitly or implicity recommending or condemning various important human practices and institutions. There is, therefore, a sense in which her targets are already polemical and ought to be ready for ‘replies of a somewhat polemical character’.

Another reason for polemic ‘has to do with puffs and blurbs’. Puffs are ‘brief recommendations signed by authoritative people, usually but not always friends or colleagues of the authors’ and put on the covers of academic books. Blurbs are usually written by the authors themselves. Despite being aware of the provenance of puffs and blurbs, even seasoned academics are taken in occasionally. But the case is far worse with students who don't understand the conventions, and who are discouraged from intellectual self-reliance by what appears to them to be the weight of authoritative opinion.

Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing. Routledge. 1998. Pp. v and 210. £12.99. Adams, E. M. A Society Fit for Human Beings. SUNY Press. 1997. Pp. xxii and 269. $16.95. Archard, David. Sexual Consent. Westview Press. 1998. Pp. x and 189. £37.95, £13. Arrington, Robert L. Western Ethics. Blackwell. 1997. Pp. xi and 419. £15.99 or $29.95. Barnes, Annette. Seeing Through Self-Deception. Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. x and 182. £32.50, $54.95. Battersby, Christine. The Phenomenal Woman. Polity Press. 1998. Pp. xii and 236. No price given. Becker, Lawrence C. A New Stoicism. Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. ix and 216. £22.50 or $29.95. Benn, Piers, Ethics. Taylor & Francis. 1997. Pp. xiv and 223. £10.95. Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar. (Eds). The Story of Analytic Philosophy. 1997. Pp. xiv and 276. £45. Blystone, Jasper. (Robert Reichle, Ed.) The Pragmatics of the Human Heritage. Long Beach Publications. 1997. Pp. 92. $19.95. Bohlin, Henrik. Groundless Knowledge. Almqvist & Wiksell International. 1977. Pp. 231. No price given. Brülde, Bengt. The Human Good. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. 1998. Pp. xi and 490. No price given.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference 1998

‘Prospects for Pragmatism’

The Conference will be held at the University of Sheffield, 11–13 September, 1998

Details and booking information may be obtained from Professor Christopher Hookway, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN.

Kierkegaard and Freedom

An International Conference of The British Society for the History of Philosophy

Madingley Hall, University of Cambridge, 3–5 July 1998

Proceedings:

1. Michael Weston (Essex)—Kierkegaard: The Literature on Freedom

2. David Campbell (Glasgow)—Kierkegaard, Freedom, and Self-Interpretation

3. George Pattison (Cambridge)— Sublimity and the Experience of Freedom

4. Antony Rudd (Bristol)— The Subjective Problem of Freedom

5. Paul Bauer (Copenhagen)— Freedom, Motion, and the Self

6. Peter Rogers (Lancaster)— Indirect Communication: Training in Freedom?

7. Joerg Disse (Lucerne)— Autonomy in ‘Either/Or’

8. James Giles (Hawaii)— Anxiety and Tangled Freedom

9. Elsebeth Wulff (Open University)— Kierkegaard: Freedom and Determinism

10. D. Z. Phillips (Swansea)— Freedom and Self-deception in ‘Purity of Heart’