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Moral Language
Widespread disagreements about matters of right and wrong have led many philosophers and non-philosophers to conclude that moral knowledge is impossible. Nevertheless, we all make moral pronouncement every day. In this book, Mary Gore Forrester considers the nature of the language we use in ordinary life to make those moral evaluations, what that language indicates about the criteria we use for making such evaluations, and the conditions for determining the truth or falsity of moral evaluations. Specialists in ordinary language philosophy will enjoy Forrester's arguments to the effect that the descriptivist's position on moral language is correct and that non-descriptivist positions on the matter can be disproved.
Persons, Animals, and Fetuses
Forrester discusses animal rights, obligations concerning future generations, abortion, limiting medical treatment, and euthanasia. Persons are defined as individuals who ought to be treated in accordance with all sound moral principles. The author develops an account of what moral principles are sound, how we can apply them to complex situations, and what makes it reasonable to treat individuals in accordance with particular moral principles. This discussion puts the book's practical conclusions on a sounder basis than much other work on practical ethics. Most such authors state some general principles, but say little about why these principles should be accepted. Moreover, they rarely show...
Being Good and Being Logical
This work represents an attempt to show that standard systems of deontic logic (taken as attempts to codify normal deontic reasoning) run into a number of difficulties. It also presents a new system of deontic logic and argues that it is free from the shortcomings of standard systems.
Wholes, Sums and Unities
In this work, the author formulates a critique of widely accepted mereological assumptions, presents a new conception of wholes as ‘Unities’, and demonstrates the advantages of this new conception in treating a variety of metaphysical puzzles (such as that of Tibbles the cat). More generally he suggests that conceiving wholes as Unities offers us a new way of understanding the world in non-reductive terms.
Truth, Rationality, Cognition, and Music
A speech for the defence in a Paris murder trial, a road-safety slogan, Hobbes' political theory; each appeals to reason of a kind, but it remains an oblique and rhetoricalldnd. Each relies on comparisons rather than on direct statements, and none can override or supersede the conclusions of ethical reasoning proper. Nevertheless, just as slogans may do more for road safety than the mere recital of accident statistics, or of the evidence given at coroners' inquests, so the arguments of a Hobbes or a Bentham may be of greater practical effect than the assertion of genuinely ethical or political statements, however true and relevant these may be. Stephen Toulmin, Reason in Ethics, 1950. The In...
Language, Knowledge, and Representation
Every two years since 1989, an international colloquium on cognitive science is held in Donostia - San Sebastian, attracting the most important researchers in that field. This volume is a collection of the invited papers to the Sixth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science (ICCS-99), written from a multidisciplinary, cognitive perspective, and addressing various essential topics such as self-knowledge, intention, consciousness, language use, learning and discourse. This collection reflects not only the various interdisciplinary origins and standpoints of the participating researchers, but also the richness, fruitfulness, and exciting state of research in the field of cognitive science today. A must-read for anyone interested in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science, and in the perception of these topics from the perspective of cognitive science.
Moral Philosophy Through the Ages
Takes a middle ground between the topical and historical approaches to Western ethics. This book explains the historical development of the topic under consideration, and most chapters focus on a specific famous philosopher who championed a particular tradition, such as Aristotle, Locke, or Kant, and the chapters are chronologically ordered.
Thought-Contents
This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.
Moralities
This essay is the product of years of distaste for, and dissatisfaction with, the efforts of moral philosophers. It can be tiresome to attend to details, to spell out the obvious, but moral philosophy is such an abysmally difficult subject that faster than a creeping slug is breakneck reckless speed. One simply must content oneself with a slow slimy trail painfully drawn and cautiously constrained. Generally speaking, philosophy, and, in particular, moral philosophy, is too hard fot philosophers. Even though publishing is spitting in the ocean, and even though my sour sweet spittle will not alter the ocean's salinity, I am somehow inclined to publish this essay. Acknowledgments: I began this essay in 1956. During the years, I have discussed many of the topics in this volume with a great many philosophers. I am indebted to all of them, especially those with whom I disagreed and those who disagreed with me. One learns nothing from agreement, whereas disagreement provokes one to look more closely and more carefully at what is at issue: if a philosopher is to profit from discussion, someone must be disagreeable.
Cooperation
In Cooperation, A Philosophical Study, Tuomela offers the first comprehensive philosophical theory of cooperation. He builds on such notions a collective and joint goals, mutual beliefs, collective commitments, acting together and acting collectively. The book analyzes the varieties of cooperation, making use of the crucial distinction between group-mode and individual-mode cooperation. The former is based on collective goals and collective commitments, the latter on private goals and commitments. The book discusses the attitudes and the kinds of practical reasoning that cooperation requires and investigate some of the conditions under which cooperation is likely, rationally, to occur. It also shows some of the drawbacks of the standard game-theoretical treatments of cooperation and presents a survey of cooperation research in neighbouring fields. Readership: Essential reading for researchers and graduate students in philosophy. Also of interest to researchers int he social sciences and AI.
