Rhetoric and Corpuscularism in Berkeley's Siris

Berkeley's Siris may be an unduly neglected treatise. Yet it reveals and confirms its author's philosophical ambitions and achievements. The greatest of them is his theory of causality. Berkeley tries to show that agents can influence the world by using ethereal corpuscles as their instruments. These particles are both material but also in some sense immaterial or occult because they both follow and do not follow the laws of nature. Siris is a rhetorical text which uses analogy, metaphor, paradox, and ambiguity to illuminate the reader. I argue that the universe in Siris is ambiguous with respect to its material and immaterial essence. The world is at the same time scientific and material and metaphysical and immaterial. Berkeley fights against scientific mechanistic materialism when he subordinates science to God's will. I try to clarify how ambiguity works for Berkeley the metaphysician in establishing the superiority of minds or agents over matter and mechamisms.     

The history and philosophy of social science

Carlo Ginzburg is best known as the author of a popular and widely commented work of microstoria Il formaggio e i vermi, published in 1976. Rather than focusing on Ginzburg's contributions to the genre of microstoria, or on the development of his long and very productive scholarly career, my aim in this article is to reflect on a set of themes that recur, with impressive persistence, in his work, from his earliest publications in the mid-1960s, to his most recent works. Above all, I suggest that two elements recur in his work, and that these, jointly, impart upon it its defining character. They are the concern with epistemological issues of knowing, and the ethical conception of the historian's work, which Ginzburg expressess and defends with urelenting rigour.     

Scientific whaling and how philosophy of science can help break the international deadlock

Despite widespread public interest on the topic of whaling, there is at present relatively little work on how philosophy might contribute to analysis of the status of whaling in international law. When philosophers have looked at the topic of whaling, they have confined their attention to a fairly narrow set of ethical questions, such as whether international law should permit certain forms of traditional indigenous whaling or extend legal rights to whales themselves. However, there is another important issue which has so far been largely neglected by philosophy, even though it is at the forefront of current international legal disputes over the status of whaling: the issue of so-called ‘scientific whaling’. This article considers the international legal dispute between Australia, New Zealand and Japan over the latter’s lethal harvesting of whales in the Southern Ocean, and the recent attempt at resolution by the International Court of Justice. On its face, this required that the Court demarcate ‘scientific’ from ‘unscientific’ activity; however, it effectively baulked at this task. The authors argue that this approach of the Court was unfortunate, and that demarcating science from commerce is not only achievable in philosophy, but might also inform international legal practice. Resolving this issue is important for genuine progress to be made in the current international stand-off over Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.     

Middle-range theory,behavioral archaeology,and postempiricist philosophy of science in archaeology

This paper examines middle-range theory (MRT) within processual and postprocessual archaeology. An analysis of the Binford-Schiffer dispute serves as a means of clarifying what MRT in processual archaeology is or is intended to be. Postprocessualists, despite their vigorous criticisms of MRT-based approaches, are found to rely on the same resources and types of reasoning to make their inferences. In their practice they tacitly turn to processualist middle-range principles, and so the justification of postprocessual interpretations is equivalent to that of MRT-based processualist models. If the middle range is functionally defined — a space within a research program occupied by varying theories that are taken from the body of general theory to which the program is committed and that function as background knowledge in the verification of theories — MRT bridges the epistemological gap between processual and postprocessual approaches.