In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the name of Adam Smith was popularly associated with the sort of ‘laissez faire’ policy that is expounded with all the fervour of a religious faith. Smith, so the story ran, in his eagerness to combat the excessive mercantilist government intervention of his day, had resorted to supra-natural claims in his general onslaught against central control and planning by governments. Such intervention was ‘unnatural’ and conflicted with Deistic Design. Only through private actions could mankind reach satisfying and ‘natural’ fulfillment. Action through private self-interest was twice blessed; it. blessed him who profited and his fellows who were ‘profited from’. True there was a kind of central planning that was of supreme importance; but it had a divine origin and it worked not through governments but through individual free trade. Private actions in fact were directed by an Invisible Hand which brought society into a grand and spontaneous Natural Harmony.

In 1987, Roy Sorensen coined the term ‘parahistory’ to denote the study of genuinely anachronistic artefacts delivered by time travel.1 ‘Parahistory’ would thus stand to history rather as parapsychology is claimed to stand to psychology, i.e. the parahistorian would study historical data that were obtained through channels that orthodox science does not recognise. How might one establish credentials as a time traveller? What sort of evidence could a time-traveller point to in support of claims that would presumably command a great deal of scepticism? While successful predictions might be one confirmatory tool, supporting evidence needn't take the form of predictions. (Although Sorensen offers an intriguing argument that a Humean about miracle-testimony would be obliged to reject any testimony to the occurrence of time travel.) Perhaps artefacts that time travellers retrieve from other times (past or future) could usefully supplement testimonial or predictive evidence for the parahistorian. However, this paper will argue, any appeal to past-artefactual evidence for parahistorical claims faces a dilemma that threatens to undermine its value: appeals to past-artefact evidence must either collapse into appeals to predictive evidence or see their value diminished by such past artefacts' necessarily exhibiting contradictory indicators of age and period.

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.

This article concerns arguments for the impossibility of contact action and, subsequently, the use of force fields to render intelligible apparent cases of contact action. I argue that instead of unraveling the mystery of contact action, fields only deepen the mystery. Further, I show that there is a confusion underlying arguments for the impossibility of contact and present an analysis of contact, based upon Körner's treatment of empirical continuity, which restores intelligibility to apparent cases of contact action.

This paper examines the role of knowledge in education. It proposes that the arguments of Paul Hirst on liberal education can be updated using the idea of a ‘space of reasons’ drawn from the epistemology associated with John McDowell. It further argues that for education to flourish within the space of reasons the idea of ‘epistemic freedom’ needs to be both recognised and developed. Such freedom is particularly exemplified in the ability to form judgements. It is noted that education at all levels has been subjected to processes of ‘rationalisation’, processes identified by Max Weber over one hundred years ago: these processes severely restrict epistemic freedom. However, the paper argues that Alistair McIntyre's concept of a practice can be used to inform our thinking about subject disciplines. The pursuit of knowledge can therefore be seen in terms of practices which operate within the space of reasons. Moreover, we can see the idea of a practice as a counterweight to rationalisation

At the beginning of Book II of the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus ask Socrates to tell them what it is to be just or unjust, and why a man should be the former. Socrates suggests in reply that they consider first what it is for a polis to be just or unjust—a polis is bigger than an individual, he says, so its justice should be more readily visible. Now if we were to view in imagination (logōi) a polis coming into existence, he goes on, we should see also its justice and injustice coming into existence, and this might help us to discover what these qualities are.

The paper offers a general critique of physicalism and of one variety of nonphysicalism, arguing that such theses are untenable. By distinguishing between the absolute conception of reality and the causal completeness of physics it shows that the ‘explanatory gap’ is not merely epistemic but metaphysical. It defends the essential subjectivity and unity of consciousness and its inseparability from a self-conscious autonomous rational and moral being. Casting a favourable light on dualism freed from misconceptions, it suggests that the only plausible way forward in the search for an understanding of both physical and mental reality is a recognition of the mind as a metaphysically distinct entity.

This essay aims to develop the so-called ‘transformational view’ of human development (advocated by McDowell and Bakhurst) by advancing a play-based model of learning. I first consider challenges to this view posed by Luntley and Rödl who argue that the learning encounter must presuppose some rational faculty already present in the prelinguistic child. Rödl in particular considers joint attentional episodes in which child and adult attend to objects in their environment together as signifying a uniquely rational consciousness active in the human child. I however argue on phenomenological grounds that this intellectualist treatment is implausible and unconvincing. I propose a play-centered treatment (inspired primarily from Huizinga) that is more sensitive to the life of the child. This perspective of play I maintain scaffolds a shared normative space which enables self-conscious, responsive, and intelligible thought and action. This account motivates what I call a participatory play model of learning which is constitutively non-intellectual but is nonetheless intelligent. It is non-intellectual because it emphasizes building co-reactive relationships and participation in shared cultural practices. But it is also intelligent because it makes possible a distinctively human mode of understanding grounded on an interactive, relational, and imaginatively reflexive engagement with the world.

I compare Locke's views on the nature and powers of the self with E. J. Lowe's view, ‘non-Cartesian substance dualism’. Lowe agrees with Locke that persons have a power to choose or not to choose. Lowe takes this power to be non-causal. I argue that this move does not obviously succeed in evading the notorious interaction problem that arises for all forms of substance dualism, including those of Locke and Descartes. However, I am sympathetic to Lowe's attempt to give a metaphysical account of a robust sort of agency that would explain how human beings might be genuinely autonomous.

I Wish to suggest both that three (and not two) values are often used for the appraisal of moral judgments and also that there are some generally shared purposes which would be furthered if this usage became even more common. In doing this I shall by-pass two problems which have been not infrequently discussed in recent years:

Walter Burleigh in his c. 1323 De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior considers a counterexample to hypothetical syllogism. The paradox implied by Burleigh's inference has come to be known as the problem of the ass (asinum), or, more prosaically, ‘You are an ass’. The argument states: ‘If I call you an ass, then I call you an animal; if I call you an animal, then I speak truthfully; therefore, if I call you an ass, then I speak truthfully’. Burleigh's paradox is reconstructed and formalized for purposes of critical analysis, in which the putative counterexample is ultimately shown to involve a fallacy of equivocation.

The prediction of future events from our knowledge of past events is one of the main functions of Science. Such predictions are made possible by inferring causal relations between events from observed regularities. These relations are then codified into “laws of nature,” and it is through knowledge of these laws that prediction becomes possible. The concept of “causal relation” is thus a fundamental one in the structure of science. Now recent advances in physics have led scientists to modify considerably their views of this concept. It has been found necessary to abandon the idea of rigidly deterministic causal relations, and substitute in its stead relations that are only determined with a certain degree of probability. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the meaning of these changes in our concepts of causality.

This fact about the grammar of selfhypenreference doesn't answer the ontological question, however, of what sort of entity I am in so far as I am a speaker. Thinking about what is presumed in my understanding the concepts ‘one’ and ‘one who is speaking’ tells us this much, that I must be able to differentiate myself from other speakers at the same time as I must be like them. If I cannot differentiate myself from you then of course I cannot refer to myself to begin with. But I must be like you enough to be intelligible to you, and I must know that I am. Otherwise I could not know myself as ‘the one who is speaking’, speaking in the first person to others who also speak in the first person.