Michael Richard Ayers

Cover -- Half Title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Original Title Page -- Original Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Probability And Possibility For Choice -- 1 Introductory -- 2 A Theory About Personal Power -- 3 A Criticism Of Keynes -- 4 Some More Theories About Personal Power -- 5 An Analogy Between Two Kinds Of Possibility -- 3 Probability And Natural Powers -- 1 Introductory -- 2 The Relation Between Epistemic And Natural Possibility -- 3 A Criticism Of The Doctrine That 'Probable' Is Ambiguous -- 4 A Comparison Of Possibility With Probability -- 4 Some Unobservable Properties -- 1 Introductory -- 2 Certainty, Necessity And Hume -- 3 Epistemology And Determinism -- 4 An Analysis Proposed And Defended -- 5 Power And Law -- 5 Some Puzzles About Potentiality -- 1 Introductory -- 2 The idea of a 'circumstance' -- 3 The Distinction Between Intrinsic And Extrinsic Properties -- 4 The Refutation Of Actualism -- 5 The Refutation Of The Theory That 'All Power Is Conditional' -- 6 The Powers Of People Andthe Powers Of Things -- 1 Introductory -- 2 The Distinction Between Natural And Personal Power -- 3 The Refutation Of Ryle's Dispositionalist Account Of Human Capacities -- 7 IFS And Cans -- 1 Introductory -- 2 The Refutation Of The Theory That All Personal Power is Conditional -- 3 A Refutation Of The Orthodox Account Of 'I Can', As Equivalent To A Conditional Statement -- 4 A Contradiction In Dispositionalism -- 5 Further Objections To The Orthodox View -- 6 The Verification Of 'I Can': More About Trying -- 8 Deliberation, Freedom And Meaning -- 1 Introductory -- 2 More About Possibility And The Context Of Deliberation -- And About The Relation Between Power And Will -- 3 On Not Being Able To Help It: A: Discussion Of The Relationship Between Power And Responsibility -- 4 On The Meaning Of Words Like 'Can'

No doubt most philosophers who spend time on the history of philosophy are familiar with that question asked to embarrass (and liable to be asked by scientists in particular) why the history of the subject should be thought a significant part of the subject itself. Either there is progress in philosophy, it is said, or there is not. If there is progress, why the laborious backward glances? How can the past be so important? Why aren’t philosophers like psychologists, given perhaps a short historical orientation before being brought up to the nitty-gritty of the present? If, on the other hand, there is no progress, if we might as well be discussing Locke as Quine, doesn’t that imply that philosophy consists in a set of questions for which there is no way of establishing even that some answers are better than others? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to pursue questions to which at least provisional answers can be established, approximating to the truth? Wouldn’t it be better to be a scientist?

The author maintains that there is no special problem about the verification or analysis of counterfactual or unfulfilled conditional statements. there is no special problem about the verification or analysis of subjunctive conditionals. it exhausts the peculiar philosophical interest of these two classes of statement to explain why no philosopher ought to think them peculiarly interesting, and to explain why so many do. the author states that it should not be supposed that if he achieves his aim, all the difficulties and disputes which have occurred in discussions supposed to be about counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals will be settled in his article. this is because many of these difficulties have arisen, not out of features peculiar to either of these classes of statement, but out of features common to all conditional statements. (staff)

Minds, Ideas and Objects is a collection of conference papers on the topic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of ideas or “sensory experience, thought, knowledge and their objects.” At least half the twenty-three papers are by well-known historians of philosophy who seldom disappoint, and there is some equally thought-provoking work among the rest. Some papers say little that is surprising, and some, including good ones, fail to convince, but few are weak. It is perhaps to be expected that coverage of the period is uneven, but chance has played some odd tricks, giving us one paper each on Leibniz and Hume and none on Spinoza, whereas Berkeley excites the attention of six contributors, one more even than Kant. Most philosophers discussed are narrowly canonical, with just a page on Cudworth and only four even on Reid, but there are a couple of welcome articles on the vastly rewarding, until recently seldom studied Arnauld-Malebranche debate. Günter Zöller’s “The Austrian Way of Ideas,” summarizing the views on intentionality of Brentano and his pupils, Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reminds us of the close continuities between early-modern and twentieth-century concerns.

Rationalism, Platonism and God comprises three main papers on Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, with extensive responses. It provides a significant contribution to the exploration of the common ground of the great early-modern Rationalist theories, and an examination of the ways in which the mainstream Platonic tradition permeates these theories. John Cottingham identifies characteristically Platonic themes in Descartes's cosmology and metaphysics, finding them associated with two distinct, even opposed attitudes to nature and the human condition, one ancient and 'contemplative', the other modern and 'controlling'. He finds the same tension in Descartes's moral theory, and believes that it remains unresolved in present-day ethics. Was Spinoza a Neoplatonist theist, critical Cartesian, or naturalistic materialist? Michael Ayers argues that he was all of these. Analysis of his system reveals how Spinoza employed Neoplatonist monism against Descartes's Platonist pluralism. Yet the terminology - like the physics - is Cartesian. And within this Platonic-Cartesian shell Spinoza developed a rigorously naturalistic metaphysics and even, Ayers claims, an effectually empiricist epistemology. Robert Merrihew Adams focuses on the Rationalists' arguments for the Platonist, anti-Empiricist principle of 'the priority of the perfect', i.e. the principle that finite attributes are to be understood through corresponding perfections of God, rather than the reverse. He finds the given arguments unsatisfactory but stimulating, and offers a development of one of Leibniz's for consideration. These papers receive informed and constructive criticism and development at the hands of, respectively, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton and Maria Rosa Antognazza.

‘Empiricism’ has become for many a dirty word, and many writers have in mind the kind of neo-Humean Positivism that is the target of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, or Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception. But examination of the Empiricist tradition before Hume uncovers views that do not involve anything like the much-abused “Myth of the Given” or twentieth-century sensedatum theory. This paper identifiesthe particular line of seventeenth-century thought that eventually gave rise to sense-datum theory, and discusses other notions of experience that avoid it. The aim of this history lesson is to point to the possibility of an essentially empiricist approach today, an approach that avoids the neo-idealism or conceptualism of popular modern alternatives to sensedatum theory.

The Cambridge History of 17th Century Philosophy offers a uniquely comprehensive and authoritative overview of early-modern philosophy written by an international team of specialists. As with previous Cambridge histories of philosophy the subject is treated by topic and theme, and since history does not come packaged in neat bundles, the subject is also treated with great temporal flexibility, incorporating frequent reference to medieval and Renaissance ideas. The basic structure of the volumes corresponds to the way an educated seventeenth - century European might have organized the domain of philosophy. Thus, the history of science, religious doctrine, and politics feature very prominently. The narrative that unfolds begins with an intellectual world dominated by a synthesis of Aristotelianism and scholastic philosophy, but by the end of the period the mechanistic or "corpuscularian" philosophy has emerged and exerted its full impact on traditional metaphysics, ethics, theology, logic, and epistemology

Consideration of the counting and reidentification of particulars leads naturally enough to the orthodox doctrine that, “on pain of indefiniteness,” an identity statement in some way involves or presupposes a general term or “covering concept”: i.e., that the principium individuationis or criterion of identity implied depends upon the kind of thing in question. Thus it is said that an auditor understands the question whether A is the same as B only in so far as he knows, however informally or implicitly, the answer to the supplementary question, “The same what?”

Philosophers debate whether all, some or none of the represcntational content of our sensory experience is conccptual, but the technical term "concept" has different uses. It is commonly linked more or less closely with the notions of judgdment and reasoning, but that leaves open the possibility that these terms share a systematic ambiguity or indeterminacy. Donald Davidson, however, holds an unequivocal and consistent, if paradoxical view that there are strictly speaking no psychological states with representational or intentional content except the propositional attitudes of language users, since thc source or fundamental bearer of intentionality is the employed sentence. Accordingly he claims that what has content in ordinary sense experience is not sensation, but propositional belief caused, but not justified, by sensation. John McDowell, sharing some ofDavidson's premises,holds a less paradoxical, but (l will argue) equivocal and incoherent view that post-infantile human sensory expcrience must have content in so far as it is what grounds perceptual belief but that this content is itself conceptual or propositional, dependent on language and culture. Reasons are givcn in the present article for rejecting both views, and their common premises. It is argued that perceptual or sensory states have intentional content which is no more conceptual or propositional than the world is. Recognition that perceptual content and conceptual content are, in a certain unsurprising way incommensurable allows for a more realistic understanding of the relationship between Language and the world as we experience it.