In 1905 Bertrand Russell took on the problem of definite descriptions, and his analysis became the standard up until 1950 when Peter Strawson criticised Russell’s solution as inadequate. Since then many opponents as well as proponents of the Russellian solution have been involved in a long-term debate on definite descriptions. In this paper I show that both sides of the contention are partly ri...

This paper attempts to examine the underlying structure of analogical reasoning in decision making. The immediate (but not exclusive) context is the form of reasoning commonly seen as prevalent in common-law judicial decision making. Following Wittgenstein and Strawson the paper identifies the problem of the contingency of transitivity of analogical relations as a serious impediment to analogic...

Talk of dthe willT has something of an anachronistic air about it today. Many people believe that the concept of the will is a holdover from an earlier, prescientific view of the human being: Before we began to unravel the connections between external stimuli, brain impulses, and action, we needed to invoke the will to explain human behavior, but reference to this mysterious entity is no longer...

This paper attempts to examine the underlying structure of analogical reasoning in decision making. The immediate (but not exclusive) context is the form of reasoning commonly seen as prevalent in common-law judicial decision making. Following Wittgenstein and Strawson the paper identifies the problem of the contingency of transitivity of analogical relations as a serious impediment to analogic...

On one view, an adequate account of causal understanding may focus exclusively on what is involved in mastering general causal concepts (concepts such as ‘x causes y’ or ‘p causally explains q’). An alternative view is that causal understanding is, partly but irreducibly, a matter of grasping what Anscombe called special causal concepts, concepts such as ‘push’, ‘flatten’, or ‘knock over’. We c...

Linguistic encoding is seen as playing a necessary but not solely sufficient role in speaker meaning by philosophers of Ordinary Language, such as Grice and Strawson. Despite wellrehearsed problems with some of Grice's and Strawson's specific theories, this general model has much to recommend it to present day linguistics. Recent accounts have tended either overfly to deny the existence of a co...

Although Great Britain is the country of some of the earliest contributors to aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline, from Lord Shaftesbury to Edmund Burke, and the country of John Ruskin, who was probably the greatest and most influential art critic of the 19 century, the subject attracted little interest in philosophical circles towards the turn of the twentieth century. Of cou...

1 For example, A. R. Lacey, "Quantifier Words", in A. R. Lacey.vi Dictionary of Philosophy (Charles Scribner's Sons, N. Y.: 1976); Alex Orenstein, Existence and the Particular Quantifier (Temple U. Press, Philadelphia: 1978), pp. 105-07; Baruch Brody, "Glossary of Logical Terms", Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5 (Macmillan, N. Y.: 1967), p. 64; Antony Flew, "Existential Import", in Antony Fle...

This paper is a discussion of a recent attempt by Crispin Wright (Wright 1991; page references to this work unless stated) to force at least some varieties of external world scepticism to succumb to a "head-on, rational response", contrary to well-known expressions of pessimism by, for example, Sir Peter Strawson and Barry Stroud. The varieties of scepticism in question are those that involve p...