William Uzgalis

This volume addresses a wide variety of moral concerns regarding slavery as an institutionalized social practice. By considering the slave's critical appropriation of the natural rights doctrine, the ambiguous implications of various notions of consent and liberty are examined. The authors assume that, although slavery is undoubtedly an evil social practice, its moral assessment stands in need of a more nuanced treatment. They address the question of what is wrong with slavery by critically examining, and in some cases endorsing, certain principles derived from communitarianism, paternalism, utilitarianism, and jurisprudence

In this dissertation I argue for three main philosophical points and three points of interpretation. The first philosophical point is that empiricism requires an anti-essentialist account of classification, and particularly the classification of natural kind. This has long been recognized. My second philosophical point is that the anti-essentialist attitude of the empiricist requires the rejection of the notion of real individuals. By the notion of real individuals I mean the claim that individuals exist independently and prior to our efforts to classify them. My third philosophical point is that the anti-essentialist empiricist needs to replace the theory of real individuals with a theory of nominal individuals. A proponent of such a theory holds that both individuals and necessity are relative to sorts and language. And because of the sortal relativity of individuals it follows that we need a theory of both sorts and individuals, a combined theory of classification and individuation. But this means that we cannot suppose individuals prior to sorts or vice versa, nor can we use one to explain the other or vice versa. ;My first interpretative point is that British empiricists of the second half of the 17th century, and John Locke in particular, were largely though not completely aware of my first philosophical point. Locke developed a theory of necessity which treats necessity as a relation among ideas. And he developed a strategy for anti-essentialist arguments, show that there are many possible ways a complex idea can be put together and that we choose among these possibilities on the basis of our interests and purposes. My second point of interpretation is that Locke was not aware of my second philosophical point, though his theories of identity and personal identity accord with a theory of nominal individuals. My third point of interpretation is that Robert Boyle, in his work Of the Origin of Forms and Qualities came closer to explicitly stating a theory of nominal individuals than Locke did in the Essay. Still, there are many elements in Locke's philosophy which could easily combine with a theory of nominal individuals

In this essay we consider some of the characteristics of adaptive biological systems and how these might work as models in designing a robot intended for the exploration of complex environments. Trying to design a robot that has such properties forces one to think hard about the nature of those properties. Here we have one intersection between philosophy and computing. We consider the nature of adaptability and some properties of complex biological systems that are relevant to designing adaptive robots, including direct perception, animacy, affordances, redundant degress of freedom, collective decisions, and emergent properties. We explain how these concepts were used in the development of a robotic arm.

An important work in the debate between materialists and dualists, the public correspondence between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke provided the framework for arguments over consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century Britain. In Clarke’s view, mind and consciousness are so unified that they cannot be compounded into wholes or divided into parts, so mind and consciousness must be distinct from matter. Collins, by contrast, was a perceptive advocate of a materialist account of mind, who defended the possibility that thinking and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. Appendices include philosophical writings that influenced, and responded to, the correspondence.

The correspondence between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins of 1706–8, while not well known, is a spectacularly good debate between a dualist and a materialist over the possibility of giving a materialist account of consciousness and personal identity. This article puts the Clarke Collins Correspondence in a broader context in which it can be better appreciated, noting that it is really a debate between John Locke and Anthony Collins on one hand, and Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler on the other. Anthony Collins argues on behalf of John Locke's claim that it would be as easy for God to superadd the power of thinking to matter as for him to connect a soul to a body. Locke did not believe that matter could naturally produce thought or consciousness, but it was in God's power to make matter think. To defend Locke's claim Collins must defend the claim that there are emergent properties in the world – properties of a whole that are not possessed by the parts. Collins also defends a materialist version of Locke's account of personal identity against a variety of charges. Because the topics of debate in the correspondence are of such great interest to us, it deserves to be rescued from the neglect into which it fell and from which intellectual historians and philosophers have only recently and partially removed it.

Ian Leask’s new edition of John Toland’s Letters to Serena, last published in 1704, has all the marks of a fine new edition of an early eighteenth-century book—it has an index, timeline, all of Toland’s notes, along with editor’s notes explaining many of the obscure names to be found in the letters; and it has a first-rate introduction in which Leask nicely explains the letters and what he takes Toland to be doing. John Toland’s intentions and influences are a matter of a very high degree of scholarly debate. The story that Leask weaves around the Letters to Serena is really quite fascinating and, while he published a detailed version of this account in “Unholy Force: Toland’s Leibnizian ‘Consummation’ of...