Reviews David Stove's collection 'On Enlightenment", attacking Enlightenment shallowness, especially its attack on "superstition" when it had no alternative to offer.

Book review of Tsilipakos, Leonidas: Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory: Taking Concepts Seriously. Farnham : Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015.

A review of Albert Casullo's "A Priori Justification" (Oxford University Press).

A book review of 'Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind' by Douglas Robinson.

Pre-publication certification through peer review stands in need of philosophical examination. In this paper, philosopher-psychologist Steven James Bartlett recalls the arguments marshalled four hundred years ago by English poet John Milton against restraint of publication by the "gatekeepers of publication," AKA today's peer reviewers.

Review of Balzer, Wolfgang, Moulines, C. Ulises e Joseph Sneed,Una arquitectónica para la ciencia. El programa estructuralista, Quilmes:Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2012, 498 pp. Translation by Pablo Lorenzanoof Balzer, Wolfgang; Moulines, C. Ulises e Joseph Sneed, An Architectonicfor Science. The Structuralist Program, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987, 440 pp.

Contemporary reasoning about health is infused with the work products of experts, and expert reasoning about health itself is an active site for invention and design. Building on Toulmin’s largely undeveloped ideas on field-dependence, we argue that expert fields can develop new inference rules that, together with the backing they require, become accepted ways of drawing and defending conclusions. The new inference rules themselves function as warrants, and we introduce the term “warranting device” to refer to an assembly of the (...) rule plus whatever material, procedural, and institutional resources are required to assure its dependability. We present a case study on the Cochrane Review, a new method for synthesizing evidence across large numbers of scientific studies. After reviewing the evolution and current structure of the device, we discuss the distinctive kinds of critical questions that may be raised around Cochrane Reviews, both within the expert field and beyond. Although Toulmin’s theory of field-dependence is often criticized for its relativism, we find that, as a matter of practical fact, field-specific warrants do not enjoy immunity from external critique. On the contrary, they can be opened to evaluation and critique from any interested perspective. (shrink)

The peer review is an opportunity to perform an unlawful censorship which ensures that no apostate notion ever get published in mainstream journals. Or such peer review censorship is an opportunity to steal any content and to claim afterward the priority of the first publication. And last but not least, the peer review is an academic tool to promote the mainstream pseudoscience.

Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H reviews Dr Andrew R. Gallimore's book, Alien Information Theory. -/- This was published on PsyPressUK on 13 June 2019.

Review of Geometric Possibility (2011), by Gordon Belot. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. x + 219 pp.

I attempt to adjudicate the disagreement between those who seek to reconceptualize disability as mere difference and their opponents. I do so by reviewing a central conviction motivating the resistance, concerning the relationship between disability and well-being. I argue that the conviction depends on further considerations about the costs and extent of change involved in accommodating individuals with a particular disability trait. I conclude by considering three pay-offs of this clarification.

Critical Review of Searle's Minds, Brains and Science.

In this superb book, Williams sets a very ambitious goal for himself: to sketch biconditionals that define representational conditions in nonrepresentational terms. Representation is not a spooky, primitive capacity of the mind; it is built from more basic ingredients. At the center is his radical interpretation theory of belief and desire, inspired by the work of David Lewis.

This book has been ably reviewed by others. I am taking a second look at it now on the occasion of the publication of its sequel, a review of which I also provide in this volume. I have had the distinct pleasure of being a student and colleague of Vasilis Politis (VP) since the initiation of the project that led to these monographs, and the great privilege of witnessing the development of the project for more than a decade. VP’s (...) Plato is in a way the only one I have known. When I hear the terms ‘aporia’, ‘whether-or-not’, and ‘ti esti’, they ring in my ears like bells. In this double review, I hope to impress upon the reader the unique importance of this interpretation of Plato, both for the history of philosophy and philosophy more broadly, and thereby to give a sense of its melody and resonance. (shrink)

This is a critical review of Terence Irwin's The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study. Volume III: From Kant to Rawls. Among other things, the review remarks on the book's treatment of utilitarianism and on its lack of discussion of work in feminist ethics in the twentieth century.

A review of Futch's book on Leibniz' natural philosophy of time and space.

A critical review of a book on rape by Joan McGregor.

A review of two books on the writings of Madhvācārya, the first thinker of Dvaitavedānta, by the late Roque Mesquita. One is a richly annotated translation with commentary of one of Madhva’s main works, the Viṣṇutattvanirṇaya; the other deals with the centuries-old question of the ‘fictive’ quotations from apparently non-existent texts which Madhva uses in support of his innovative ideas.

Review of Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2015), 646 pp., $37.99 (paper).

A critical review of Fred Feldman's What is This Thing Called Happiness? which includes a partial defence of the life satisfaction theory of happiness.

Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of studies and discussions claiming that Neanderthals engaged in a range of “symbolic” behaviors, including personal ornament use (Radovčić et al., 2015), funerary practices (Balzeau et al., 2020), visual arts (Hoffmann et al., 2018), body aesthetics (Roebroeks et al., 2012), etc. In Paleolithic archaeology, it has become mainstream to axiomatically infer from these putative behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in symbol use and that Neanderthals thus possessed some form of language. Rudolf Botha's bombastic title "Neanderthal (...) Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins" provides a detailed and very critical overview of the archaeological hypotheses and speculations about Neanderthal language. (shrink)

This is a critical review of J. B. Schneewind's Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy.

Critical review of Glenn McGee, ed., Pragmatic Bioethics.

A review of Tad Schmaltz' book on Descartes on causation.

A critical review of Robert Myers Self-Governance and Cooperation.

This is a critical review of David Phillips's Sidgwickian Ethics. The book deserves high praise.

Book Review Mathematics of casino carnival games by Mark Bollman, New York: CRC Press 2021, 318 pp., GBP 48.99 (hardback), ISBN 9780367348656.

This is a critical review of Roger Crisp's The Cosmos of Duty. The review praises the book but, among other things, takes issue with some of Crisp's criticisms of Sidgwick's view that resolution of the free will problem is of limited significance to ethics and with Crisp's claim that in Methods III.xiii Sidgwick defends an axiom of prudence that undergirds rational egoism.

Review Essay of G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000).

Book Review for Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002. Edited by David Malament. This volume includes thirteen original essays by Howard Stein, spanning a range of topics that Stein has written about with characteristic passion and insight. This review focuses on the essays devoted to history and philosophy of physics.

This is a book review/critical review of Jackson and Depew's _Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century_.

ABSTRACT This is a review of David Bronstein's book "Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning: The Posterior Analytics".

A brief review of Øystein Linnebo's Thin Objects. The review ends with a brief discussion of cardinal number and metaphysical ground.

A critical review of Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe.

This is a critical review of In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy. It argues that this book does not adequately represent the public face of Canadian philosophy, though it contains some first-rate contributions.

This book has three principle aims: to show that neither vision nor mental imagery involves the creation or inspection of picture-like mental representations; to defend the claim that our visual processes are, in significant part, cognitively impenetrable; and to develop a theory of “visual indexes”. In what follows, I assess Pylyshyn’s success in realising each of these aims in turn. I focus primarily on his arguments against “picture theories” of vision and mental imagery, to which approximately half the book is (...) devoted. I argue that Pylyshyn adopts an unnecessarily restricted interpretation of what it would be for mental representations to be picture-like, and that this leads him prematurely to reject the possibility of explaining the introspective evidence concerning the nature of mental imagery. (shrink)

Review of Agnes Callard's Aspiration. Forthcoming in a symposium on the book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Review of the 26 chapters in the collection Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, Routledge, 2021.

A book review of Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, by Cheryl Misak (OUP, 2020).