As is widely known, the onset of the First World War in 1914 produced a wide range of reactions from the intelligentsia of the countries at war, not only in Germany, but also, particularly, in France and England as well. Nevertheless, in Germany it was especially the philosophers who felt called upon to explain the meaning of the war in their own domain, i.e., philosophically. In this paper I w...

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...

A framework is presented for the provision of a structural realist ontology as dictated by the implications of simultaneously accepting both inter-formulation and classical-quantum species of ‘metaphysical’ underdetermination. The example of non-relativistic particle mechanics is considered, and it is argued that, modulo certain mathematical ambiguities, a viable and consistent candidate struct...

This paper follows up on a recent pre-print (Durham [2005]) by first deriving a set theoretic relationship between the generalized uncertainty relations and the Clauser-Horne inequalities. The physical, metaphysical, and metamathematical implications and problems are then explored. The discussion builds on previous work by Pitowsky [1994] and suggests that there is a fundamental problem in quan...

despite the often false impression that the analytic philosophy as an anti-metaphysical movement has nothing to do with metaphysics, there can be found good reasons to grant the metaphysical dispositions of analytic philosophers, and thereby, to minimize the anti-metaphysical nature of analytic philosophy in its all phases. since analytic philosophy is a historical movement the main nature of w...

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...

Proponents of the “Belief in Ability Thesis” (BAT) maintain that one deliberates about whether to perform a given action only if one believes that one can perform the action in question. In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen endorsed BAT and deployed it in an argument for the incompatibility of deliberation and consistent belief in the nonexistence of free will. Van Inwagen’s argument att...

In a previous publication I showed that counterfactuals grounded in decision making can be given interpretation in terms “imaging” – a process of “mass-shifting” among possible worlds. This paper elaborates on this interpretation and shows the converse: imaging can be given an interpretation in terms of a stochastic decision policy in which agents choose actions with certain probabilities. This...

One type of deflationism about metaphysical modality suggests that it can be analysed strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content and that there is nothing particularly metaphysical about modality. Scott Soames is explicitly opposed to this trend. However, a detailed study of Soames’s own account of modality reveals that it has striking similarities with the deflationary account. In t...