scholarly journals Demarcating Contextualism and Contrastivism

Philosophy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Jon Bebb

Abstract In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism.

Legal Theory ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 267-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Ferrante

I offer in this paper an argument in support of the orthodox view that resultant luck should not affect judgments of blameworthiness—and so, for example, that we should not blame the successful assassin more than the attempted assassin who equally tries but fails. This view, though widely held among moral philosophers and legal scholars, has been severely challenged as implying either the implausible rejection of moral luck or an equally implausible theory of wrongness according to which actual consequences may play no wrong-making role. The argument I offer, however, assumes both challenges to be true and shows that the orthodox view is consistent with holding them. Indeed, I argue that all other things being equal, successful offenders are no more to blame than their unsuccessful counterparts, even though agents are responsible for what they actually do (and therefore are subject to moral luck), and successful offenders do more wrong than their unsuccessful counterparts do (and therefore consequences do play a wrong-making role). The reason is that the difference in the amount of wrong done by one and the other offender, I show, is counterbalanced by a difference in the degree to which the successful offense and the unsuccessful one are attributable to their respective agents—blameworthiness being a function of both amount of wrong done and degree of attributability.


1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-525
Author(s):  
A. A. bake

FROM the Western point of view the process by which the Goddess gradually established herself in the official Hindu Pantheon is of great interest. As it took place in historical times and in a culture which has known no violent breaks or radical changes of religion, it gives us a fairly continuous series of glimpses which illustrate the ways and means by which this prominence was reached. On the one hand we find accounts of the violent means—wars and massacres—employed by Devi in order to achieve recognition, as for instance in the Bengali folk-epics of Candi and Manasa-Devi. On the other hand, we find a series of philosophical-metaphysical speculations which increasingly stress the importance of the female principle in the workings of the Universe, and finally establish the Goddess in the very centre of things. Like her Lord Siva, Devi has many aspects, but—at least in the official and orthodox view—all these often conflicting aspects converge in the concept ‘The Goddess’, whatever their individual autonomy may have been or still is among the village worshippers. There is no doubt that, however young both Siva and the Goddess may be in official religion, they can claim a non-canonized existence prior perhaps to that of Brahma himself.


1939 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
H. B. Mayor

It has been assumed for many years that the Strategi, though elected earlier in the year, did not enter office till the first day of Hecatombaeon (July or August), at the same time as the other yearly magistrates. There was considerable controversy about this in the nineteenth century, but the question was thought to be finally settled then, and it may seem presumptuous to reopen it so long after. But two important discoveries have been made since the ‘orthodox’ theory was generally adopted; and together they involve certain difficulties, which suggest that the whole question should be reconsidered. These are, first, the recovery of the Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία, which fixes the date of the election in the Seventh Prytany (44 § 4); and, second, Merritt's work on the Attic Calendar, which supersedes Keil's system of chronology, and fixes the beginning of the Seventh Prytany in the second week of February.Both these authorities were unknown to Beloch, whose arguments in favour of the ‘orthodox’ view (Attische Politik seit Perikles) have been generally accepted as the last word on the subject. Beloch's name deservedly carries weight, but his conclusions have perhaps been adopted over-readily by many who have, not studied the evidence on which they are based. It will suffice here to say that most of his arguments are devoted to showing that the election took place in April—a date now disproved by the Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία—while his arguments with regard to the time of entering on office are slight and unconvincing.


1938 ◽  
Vol 75 (7) ◽  
pp. 296-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Sherbon Hills

The occurrence of andalusite and sillimanite in unaltered igneous rocks is, according to the orthodox view expressed in most standard textbooks (see, e.g., Tyrrell, 1934, pp. 50, 164; Shand, 1927, pp. 62, 146; Grout, 1932, p. 230), always to be ascribed to contamination of magmas by highly aluminous sedimentary or metamorphic rocks. Having been given cause to doubt the correctness of this view by the recognition at Pyramid Hill, Victoria, of andalusite-bearing granites and aplites in which evidence of assimilation is lacking, I was then very interested to discover that the opinion has often been expressed, and evidence adduced in support of it, that both andalusite and sillimanite may be normal pyrogenetic constituents of igneous rocks.1 That is, they may under certain conditions crystallize from uncontaminated magmas. Some authors, while admitting that andalusite and sillimanite may crystallize from magmas, regard such pyrogenetic occurrences of these minerals as caused by the development of local excess of alumina, due to the assimilation of shales (e.g. Wells, 1931; Shand, 1927, p. 62). Others do not make their position clear, merely classing andalusite and sillimanite as assimilation minerals (sic), but Tyrrell goes so far as to state that they are “never of pyrogenetic oiigin” (1934, p. 50). Because of the reliance that is placed upon accessory minerals in igneous rocks as indicators of consanguinity of magmas and of the role of assimilation and other processes in pedogenesis, it is important that the status of each mineral should be thoroughly understood. In most classifications of accessory minerals andalusite and sillimanite are either classed as “contamination accessories” (Wells, 1931) or grouped with minerals that are commonly due to contamination (Wright, 1932), and Wright regards them as “of little value for correlation purposes”. Chatterjee, however, was able to use andalusite as an indicator, on the one hand, of relationship between the Falmouth and Bodmin Moor granites, both of these containing a purple variety in fair amount, and, on the other, of the distinction of these granites from those of Dartmoor and St. Austell, in which andalusite is colourless and rare. The rare, sporadically developed andalusite in the Dartmoor granite is considered by Brammall and Harwood (1923) to be a contamination mineral, but Teall suggested (1887) that the andalusite in the Cheesewring granite is probably an “original constituent” (i.e. not mechanically incorporated with the granite, as strew from xenoliths or wall rocks), and the relative abundance and uniformity of distribution of andalusite in the normal type of the Bodmin Moor granite, as exhibited at the Cheesewring (see Ghosh, 1927), lend support to this suggestion.


1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-303
Author(s):  
L.Stafford Betty

At a time when mysticism is at last emerging as a respectable field of study for philosophers and religious phenomenologists, we find this new field in considerable disarray. We see, for example, Eliot Deutsch defending as philosophically intelligible and as significant śankara's non-dualistic interpretation of the mystic's experience.1 There is R. C. Zaehner, on the other hand, labelling śankara's mysticism ‘profane’ and sharply distinguishing it from the fuller, or ‘sacred’, mysticism of the theist.2 A third modern-day interpreter, W. T. Stace, finds both the ‘monism’ of śankara and the dualism of the theist inadequate and proposes ‘pantheism’ as the most plausible interpretation of the mystic's experience.3 Still another interpreter, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, rejects, as did Bertrand Russell much earlier,4 every metaphysical claim put forward by the mystic; any such claim, be it monist, pantheist, or dualist, is but an ‘ontological fairy tale’.5


PMLA ◽  
1907 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wm. E. Bohn

From the very first Dryden's critical essays have called forth widely divergent opinions. Written, as many of them were, in the heat of literary conflict, they served during their author's life, on the one hand, as a statement of faith to be expounded and defended, on the other, as a series of vulnerable points of attack. And even since they have held an assured place among English critical works—at first as authoritative judgments and later as historical documents of the very first importance—there has been no orthodox view as to their nature or value. Some historians have always been led by Dryden's popular, rambling style to deny them solid worth; others have found in them a vitality, a genuine insight, worth more than logic. According to Dean Swift they were “merely writ at first for filling, to raise the author's price a shilling;” Doctor Johnson, on the contrary, speaks of them as “the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction.”


1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (03) ◽  
pp. 411-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin W. Stearn

Stromatoporoids are the principal framebuilding organisms in the patch reef that is part of the reservoir of the Normandville field. The reef is 10 m thick and 1.5 km2in area and demonstrates that stromatoporoids retained their ability to build reefal edifices into Famennian time despite the biotic crisis at the close of Frasnian time. The fauna is dominated by labechiids but includes three non-labechiid species. The most abundant species isStylostroma sinense(Dong) butLabechia palliseriStearn is also common. Both these species are highly variable and are described in terms of multiple phases that occur in a single skeleton. The other species described areClathrostromacf.C. jukkenseYavorsky,Gerronostromasp. (a columnar species), andStromatoporasp. The fauna belongs in Famennian/Strunian assemblage 2 as defined by Stearn et al. (1988).


1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 207-244
Author(s):  
R. P. Kraft

(Ed. note:Encouraged by the success of the more informal approach in Christy's presentation, we tried an even more extreme experiment in this session, I-D. In essence, Kraft held the floor continuously all morning, and for the hour and a half afternoon session, serving as a combined Summary-Introductory speaker and a marathon-moderator of a running discussion on the line spectrum of cepheids. There was almost continuous interruption of his presentation; and most points raised from the floor were followed through in detail, no matter how digressive to the main presentation. This approach turned out to be much too extreme. It is wearing on the speaker, and the other members of the symposium feel more like an audience and less like participants in a dissective discussion. Because Kraft presented a compendious collection of empirical information, and, based on it, an exceedingly novel series of suggestions on the cepheid problem, these defects were probably aggravated by the first and alleviated by the second. I am much indebted to Kraft for working with me on a preliminary editing, to try to delete the side-excursions and to retain coherence about the main points. As usual, however, all responsibility for defects in final editing is wholly my own.)


1967 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
J. B. Oke ◽  
C. A. Whitney

Pecker:The topic to be considered today is the continuous spectrum of certain stars, whose variability we attribute to a pulsation of some part of their structure. Obviously, this continuous spectrum provides a test of the pulsation theory to the extent that the continuum is completely and accurately observed and that we can analyse it to infer the structure of the star producing it. The continuum is one of the two possible spectral observations; the other is the line spectrum. It is obvious that from studies of the continuum alone, we obtain no direct information on the velocity fields in the star. We obtain information only on the thermodynamic structure of the photospheric layers of these stars–the photospheric layers being defined as those from which the observed continuum directly arises. So the problems arising in a study of the continuum are of two general kinds: completeness of observation, and adequacy of diagnostic interpretation. I will make a few comments on these, then turn the meeting over to Oke and Whitney.


1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 337
Author(s):  
W. Iwanowska

A new 24-inch/36-inch//3 Schmidt telescope, made by C. Zeiss, Jena, has been installed since 30 August 1962, at the N. Copernicus University Observatory in Toruń. It is equipped with two objective prisms, used separately, one of crown the other of flint glass, each of 5° refracting angle, giving dispersions of 560Å/mm and 250Å/ mm respectively.


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