James Mark Connelly

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief account of part of Collingwood’s philosophy of art, in particular that dealing with the relationship between art, craft and magic, in relation to the corruption of consciousness, and to consider some of the implications for the aesthetic evaluation of ‘works of art’ produced as moral or political propaganda. I shall try to do this by drawing on the work of Matthew Kieran in relation to art and morality. I will not so much analyse or criticise Collingwood’s conception of the corruption of consciousness as presuppose it as the conception which makes sense of Collingwood’s understanding of the relation between art and morality.

In this paper, I aim to shed light on the use of transcendental deductions, within demonstrations of aspects of Wittgenstein's early semantics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics. I focus on two crucial claims introduced by Wittgenstein within these transcendental deductions, each identified in conversation with Desmond Lee in 1930-31. Specifically, the claims are of the logical independence of elementary propositions, and that infinity is a number. I show how these two, crucial claims are both demonstrated and subsequently deployed by Wittgenstein within a series of transcendental deductions, a series which begins with extensionalism as a generalized condition of sense on propositions, and in the context of which are then derived various, further, significant and unobvious presuppositions generated by that generalized condition of sense. In addition to clearing up deductions of these two, aforementioned claims, I also elucidate deductions of the subsistence of objects, and of logical space as an infinite totality.

This volume is devoted to a critical discussion and re-appraisal of the work of Anglo-American Idealists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Idealism was the dominant philosophy in Britain and the entire English-speaking world during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The British Idealists made important contributions to logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. Their legacy awaits further exploration and reassessment, and this book is a contribution to this task. The essays in this collection display many aspects of contemporary concern with idealistic philosophy: they range from treatments of logic to consideration of the Absolute, personal idealism, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the work of the Anglo-American Idealists has once again been widely discussed and re-considered, and new pathways of research and investigation have been opened.

R G Collingwood is an important twentieth century historian, archaeologist and philosopher whose works are the subject of continued interest, analysis and study. There is an unquestionable need to support this research activity with the provision of a reference guide which is fully up-to-date, informed and authoritative. The Companion will therefore list all primary and secondary material relevant to the study of Collingwood in all his fields of expertise - historical theory, philosophy and archaeology. It will also provide a guide to archive material relevant to his life, together with sources and locations. The resulting volume will provide an essential companion to the understanding of the life and thought of R G Collingwood.

This book offers a critical analysis, both theoretical and practical, of ethics education in the military. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly important to ensure that the armed forces of Western and other democracies fight justly and behave ethically. The 'good soldier' has to be not only professionally skilled but morally intelligent. At a time of relentless media scrutiny, the publicising of incidents of morally and legally unacceptable behaviour, such as the gross mistreatment of prisoners and the torture of suspected terrorists, can do much to undermine the credibility of those who claim to hold the moral high ground in any particular conflict. Written by an international team of academic theorists and military practitioners, this volume provides inter-disciplinary insights into the present state, and the future, of ethics education in the militaries of Western democracies. The contributors critically address the central question of whether such education is sufficient to prepare members of the armed forces to face the peculiar challenges of conflict environments that are now primarily 'wars among the people', in which the opposing combatants may have little or no regard for human life and fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians when choosing their targets. Drawing lessons from recent examples of unethical conduct, this original book offers insightful and constructive advice, both theoretical and practical, as to how situations can be improved and on the means that could and should be employed towards this end. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, ethics and international relations."--Provided by publisher.

This chapter identifies some themes in British idealism, especially those which resonate in contemporary debates, through an examination of T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart. It focuses primarily on metaphysics and epistemology, supplemented by discussion of the ethics of Green and Bradley. In characterizing British idealism in more detail, it is important to start with T.H. Green, whose importance lay both in his philosophical thought, and also in his active engagement with Oxford local politics, educational standards and school reform, and issues of social justice, the common good and the recognition theory of rights. Green's major philosophical monograph, published posthumously in 1883, was Prolegomena to Ethics. This can be seen as a broadly Kantian account of the presuppositions of knowledge. The two main claims that concern us here are, first, that the real consists in relations and, secondly, that the related whole constitutes an “eternal consciousness”.

The extensive literature on the Learning Organisation proposes that a competitive advantage can be achieved through the systematised generation and application of knowledge. Consequently, much of the debate concerns the processes, routines and organisational features that a firm should adopt to learn more, and faster, than its competitors. Less attention is given to understanding the nature of the knowledge that is created by these Learning Organisations. We hold that the topic is more important than its current weight in the literature because the performance claims of the models proposed critically depend upon the newly acquired knowledge replacing ignorance or knowledge with less utility. In this paper we explore the nature of knowledge that Learning Organisation theory seeks to create by articulating implicit epistemological assumptions found within the literature. We show that the capacities of each epistemology to help an organisation reject falsehood and make greater use of its knowledge are critically undermined by these very routines. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of a sceptical epistemology and outlines a process that would strengthen doubting behaviour.

This chapter considers and evaluates the philosophical relationship between Alexander and R.G. Collingwood, focusing particularly on metaphysics and the philosophy of history. Their relationship was founded not on their agreement but to a considerable extent on their differences and their willingness to offer and accept critical commentary on each other’s writings. Following the publication of his An Essay on Philosophical Method in 1933, Collingwood sought to develop his own positive metaphysical system, which consists of a developmental and historical view of reality. It is argued that Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity played a central part in Collingwood’s construction of his system, supplemented by the work of Whitehead and other process and emergence philosophers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviews 85 RUSSELL’S CONTRIBUTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE James Connelly Philosophy, Trent U. Peterborough, on k9l 1z6, Canada [email protected] Graham Stevens. The Theory of Descriptions: Russell and the Philosophy of Language. Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xiii, 197. isbn: 978-0230 -20116-3. £50; us$85. ver the past decade, Graham Stevens has built his reputation as a lucid, durable, and oftentimes ground-breaking historian of analytic philosophy. His latest book, entitled TheTheory of Descriptions: Russell and the Philosophy of Language, will only add to that burgeoning scholarly legacy. If it has not been established already, this book will doubtless cement Stevens’ place amongst the leading Russell scholars in the world today. It may very well herald Stevens ’ arrival on the scene as a noteworthy contributor to contemporary philosophy of language as well. The central goal of the book is “to bring the historical and purely philosophical analyses of [Russell’s] work into closer alignment” (p. 3). Stevens hopes to overcome a “striking disparity” (p. 2) in the ways that Russell’s contributions to the philosophy of language have been conceived by expositors of his philosophy, on the one hand, versus philosophers of language, on the other. In particular, though contemporary philosophers of language would tend to view Russell’s enormous contribution to that subject as being “undeniable” (p. 1), and to be “bewildered” (p. 94) by any suggestion to the contrary, expositors of Russell’s philosophy have nevertheless been at pains to emphasize that Russell “was not engaged in the philosophical study of language” (p. 2). As Stevens notes, this situation is especially puzzling since “these two groups [of scholars] overlap to a considerable extent” (p. 2). Stevens’ strategy for overcoming this disparity is two-pronged. First he aims to tackle, head on, the fallacious arguments of Monk,1 Dummett,2 and others, to the effect that Russell was not engaged in the philosophy of language. According to Stevens, such arguments have principally appealed to either (1) ______ 1 Ray Monk, “What Is Analytical Philosophy?”. 2 Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. l= 86 Reviews Russell’s dismissal of ordinary language philosophy, (2) his early, non-linguistic, conception of the nature of propositions, or (3) his view that natural language was inherently defective for philosophical purposes, and so called for replacement by a “logically perfect language”. In regards to (1), Stevens argues in a word that “[o]rdinary language philosophy has had its day” (p. 176). Over the past several decades, in other words, leading philosophers of language have come to agree with Russell in viewing ordinary language philosophy as “an outdated, and rather eccentric, relic of mid-twentieth century British philosophy” (ibid.).The classic Russell– Strawson debate over the question whether ordinary language lacks an exact logic3 has been settled decisively in Russell’s favour, as philosophers of language have transformed “the attempt to systematically specify the semantics of large regions of natural language” (ibid.) into a “central project” (ibid.). In regards to (2), moreover, Stevens notes that by this line of reasoning, absurdly, David Kaplan would not qualify as a philosopher of language since he “explicitly invokes the Russellian non-linguistic conception of a proposition as the conception appropriate for providing the content of properly context-situated indexical sentences” (p. 170). And, of course, Kaplan is not at all unique amongst contemporary philosophers of language in appealing to a Russellian conception of propositional content, as the examples of Nathan Salmon,4 Scott Soames,5 and many others show. In regards to (3), finally, Stevens argues that Russell’s dim view of natural language was grounded in his conception of logical form as non-linguistic, and that that conception, in turn, derives simply from the poverty of syntactic theory available to Russell, prior to the Chomskyian revolution in linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century. In light of the conceptual and analytic resources made available by this revolution, however, there exists “no insurmountable obstacle to assimilating Russell ’s notion of logical form to something akin to the modern notion of lf” (p. 172), where lf is conceived as one of four levels of syntactic representation within Chomsky’s Government and Binding Theory...

Connelly discusses the development of Collingwood’s conception of philosophical methodology and how his early reflections on the role and character of philosophical analysis gradually gave rise to his mature metaphilosophical views. He shows that concerns with second-order questions concerning the nature of philosophy were present from the very beginning and that Collingwood’s later metaphilosophical view gradually evolve from, rather than break away with, his earlier metaphilosophical reflections. The chapter provides a much-needed guide to understanding how Collingwood developed his mature metaphilosophical views concerning the nature of philosophy through his engagement with Oxford realism and logical positivism.