James Croll (1821–90) occupies a prominent position in the history of physical geology, and his pioneering work on the causes of long-term climate change has been widely discussed. During his life he benefited from the patronage of leading men of science; his participation in scientific debates was widely acknowledged, not least through his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876. For...

Humean supervenience is named in honor of the great denier of necessary connections. It is the doctrine that all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another . . .. We have geometry: a system of external relations of spatiotemporal distances between points . . .. And at those points we have local qualities: perfectly natural ...

What role does the notion of the divine play in Aristotle’s account of a good life? This is not an obvious question; god appears relatively infrequently, for example, in the Nicomachean Ethics. But it might interest us, if only because of the perplexing appearance of the divine in Book 10 of that treatise, as that which appears to underwrite the choice of a contemplative life. The cognate quest...

The concept of essence has played an important role in the history and development of philosophy; and in no branch of the discipline is its importance more manifest than in metaphysics. Its significance for metaphysics is perhaps attributable to two main sources. In the first place, the concept may be used to characterize what the subject, or at least part of it, is about. For one of the centra...

THE"1;MONIST '" .1(': ::, ' .. , An International QuarterlyJO,uf!i,al o{ General Philosophical Inq FOUNDED 1888 JJY EDWARo C. HEGELER Editorii'E~GE~E FREEMAN Editorial Board:~jt;:/ , <. "k~~~~ ·1 MONROE c. BEARDSLEy,;'-Swarthmore College LEWIS WHITE BECK)~f;;;.: University 0/ Rochester WILLIAM FRANKENA:~)f~f,University o{ Michigan RICHARD M. MARTIN>~,~,·;~ .. Un~vers~ty o{ Texas ]OSEPH OWENS",:...

This article connects two of Dewey’s generic traits of existence—stability and precariousness—to four elements specified in his preface to Democracy and Education (democracy, evolution, industrialization and the experimental method) and one element specified in his preface to How We Think (childhood). It argues that Dewey’s metaphysics of stability and precariousness is implicit in his philosop...

The following framework of theses, roughly hewn, shapes contemporary discussion of the problem of mental causation: (1) Non-Identity of the Mental and the Physical Mental properties and states cannot be identified with specific physical properties and states. (2) Causal Closure (Completeness) of the Physical The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and...

I take issue with Frank Leavitt's sketch of a pragmatic criterion for the relevance of metaphysics to medical ethics. I argue that appeal to the potential for confusion generated by metaphysical subtlety establishes a need for better communication rather than shows philosophical insight beside the point. I demonstrate that the proposed Criterion of Relevance has absurd consequences, and I claim...

In a recent article entitled ‘What has functional neuroimaging told us about the mind (so far)?’ Coltheart ( 2006 ) concludes that the answer to this question is: ‘nothing’. The essential reason for this gloomy assessment about the value of functional neuroimaging for cognitive psychology boils down to this essential argument, namely, that since psychological theories do not make predictions ab...