Peter Bol,Neo-Confucianism in History

In the past two or three decades,there has been renewed interest in returning to the teachings of Confucius.I say that it is renewed because during the transition period between the Tang and Song dynasties,from the eighth to the eleventh century,some thinkers had already called attention to the project of recovering various aspects of Confucian philosophy and political culture that were present in ancient times.This new interest seems to arise from the questions that Chinese and non-Chinese are now facing concerning the moral and intellectual foundation of contemporary China.     

Satan,Saint Peter and Saint Petersburg

We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (a paradigm of rationality) apparently gives rise to a situation closely analogous to having intransitive preferences (a paradigm of irrationality). Indeed, the agents in these examples are vulnerable to a money pump set-up despite having preferences that exhibit no obvious defect of rationality. We explore several putative solutions to such problems, particularly those that appeal to binding and to deliberative dynamics. We consider the prospects for these solutions, concluding that if they fail, the examples show that money pump arguments are invalid.     

Peter Martyr Vermigli,history, and the Anabaptist menace

Abstract

This article demonstrates Peter Martyr Vermigli’s use of historical perspective in his exegesis in his opposition to Anabaptists, taking as a test case the subject of prophecy. By contrasting the material on prophecy found in Vermigli’s Loci communeswith his handling of a number of key Pauline passages, the essay also seeks to make a point about our understanding of the man and his genius, namely, that one fails to obtain a full sense of the latter if one restricts oneself to the Loci communes. For while Vermigli’s loci on prophecy contain mostly standard medieval fare, his expositions of Paul exhibit originality and ingenuity.     

Quine: Peter HyltonReference, Ontological Relativity, and Realism

Section I of this essay discusses Quine's views about reference,, contrasting them with those of Russell. For the latter, our language and thought succeed in being about the world because of our acquaintance with objects; the relation of reference—roughly, the relation between a name and its bearer—is thus fundamental. For Quine, by contrast, the fundamental relation by which our language comes to be about the world, and to have empirical content, is that between a sentence and stimulations of our sensory surfaces; reference, while important, is a derivative notion. Section II shows how this view of reference as derivative makes possible the notorious Quinean doctrine of ontological relativity. Section III raises the issue of realism. It argues that somewhat different notions of realism are in play for Quine and for Russell—for Russell, objects, and our knowledge of objects, play the fundamental role, while for quine objectivity and truth are fundamental, with ontology being derivative.     

Rationality,Relativism, and Religion: A Reinterpretation of Peter Winch

Many point to Peter Winch’s discussion of rationality, relativism, and religion as a paradigmatic example of cultural relativism. In this paper, I argue that Winch’s relationship to relativism is widely misinterpreted in that, despite his pluralistic understanding of rationality, Winch does allow for universal features of culture in virtue of which cross-cultural understanding and even critique is possible. Nevertheless, I also argue that given the kind of cultural universals that Winch produces, he fails to avoid relativism. This is because in order to provide the standards without which relativism ensues, one requires a certain kind of criteria of rationality, namely, what I here call substantive universals, a kind of criteria which Winch rejects.