In his commentary on Plato’sCratylus, Proclus interprets the dialogue not as a mere work on logic or linguistics, but as having a full psychological and theological import.Late ancient Platonists had already proposed a similar reading for another Platonic dialogue,i.e.theParmenides. In that case too they rejected the logical interpretation, and aimed to find in the text the description of the hierarchy of reality, particularly of the highest beings. As a result, theParmenideswas seen as the accomplished expression of Plato’s theology.Proclus too draws (...) a comparison between theCratylusand theParmenidesin order to stress their theological significance. He also contrasts Plato’s dialectic with Aristotle’s dialectic. Proclus’ interpretation of dialectic is best understood if it is compared to the doctrines of his master Syrianus and of one of his co-disciples,i.e.Hermeias, at the Platonic school of Athens in the 5th centuryad.Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, in this milieu Platonists were not always committed to the task of reconciling the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. As it happens, they could strongly disagree with and even attack Aristotle, and side with Plato. In particular, they greatly valued Plato’s dialectic, which they viewed as the correct form of reasoning and at the same time as a theory of the utmost theological significance. On the other hand, Aristotle’s dialectic was considered as “bare” logic,i.e.as a mere set of logical rules and arguments with no specific contents.On the basis of a problematicCratylus’passage Proclus defends a theory of truth according to which not only propositions, but also names can be true or false. This allows him to view names as substitutes of propositions. This is particularly the case in the application of the four dialectical methods of definition, division, demonstration and analysis. Proclus’ approach arguably provides a basis—to pagan as well as Christian tradition—for the study of divine names as a part of theology, for the name of a god is held to reveal its attributes. (shrink)

The most contentious issue in current debates about human enhancement is whether it properly belongs to human aspiration to outstrip our human ceiling in cognition and longevity so radically that the result would not be improved human beings but instead "posthumans." Transhumanists answer strongly in the affirmative and hence vigorously support our directing available and foreseeable technologies to that end. According to Nick Bostrom, transhumanism is "an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment." Our "ceasing to be human is [not] (...) in any way problematic" as long as we are "replaced by something better".Of the two main lines of technological approach that... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jason Brennan’s recent epistemic argument for epistocracy relies on the assumption that voter competence requires knowledge of economics and political science. He conjectures that people who would qualify as competent are mostly white, upper-middle- to upper-class, educated, employed men, who know better how to promote the interests of the disadvantaged than the disadvantaged themselves. My paper, first, shows that this account of voter competence is too narrow and, second, proposes a modified account of this concept. Brennan mistakenly reasons as (...) though it is obvious that socially disadvantaged and oppressed people, by virtue of lacking sufficient knowledge of political science and economics, do not belong on an epistocratic council. This is because there is another way of being competent: possessing first-personal experience and knowledge unique to disadvantaged or oppressed situatedness. Once voter competence is characterized accurately and more holistically, epistocracy’s problematic implications of privileging already dominant genders, races, and classes, which characterize Brennan’s account, no longer arise. (shrink)

Despite its enduring popularity, theatrical magic remains all but ignored by art critics, art historians, and philosophers. This is unfortunate, since magic offers a unique and distinctively intellectual aesthetic experience and raises a host of interesting philosophical questions. Thus, this article initiates a philosophical investigation of the experience of magic. Section I dispels two widespread misconceptions about the nature of magic and discusses the sort of depiction it requires. Section II asks, “What cognitive attitude is involved in the experience of (...) magic?” and criticizes three candidate replies; Section III then argues that Tamar Szabó Gendler's notion of “belief-discordant alief” holds the key to a correct answer. Finally, Section IV develops an account of the experience of magic and explores some of its consequences. The result is a philosophically rich view of the experience of magic that opens new avenues for inquiry and is relevant to core issues in contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

This essay presents a dialogical framework for treating philosophical disagreements as persuasion dialogues with analogical argumentation, with the aim of recasting philosophical disputes as disagreements over analogies. This has two benefits: it allows us to temporarily bypass conflicting metaphysical intuitions by focusing on paradigmatic examples, similarities, and the plausibility of conclusions for or against a given point of view; and it can reveal new avenues of argumentation regarding a given issue. This approach to philosophical disagreements is illustrated by studying the (...) role of argumentation by analogy in disputes over Lockean justifications of intellectual property rights, and disagreements over whether artificial agents should be treated as moral agents. Finally, a nonexhaustive list of possible global and local points of contention over analogical arguments is identified in order to highlight potential avenues of argumentation in disagreements over analogies. (shrink)

In comparison to Aristotle, Plato's general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle find strong expression in Plato's work. More than any thinker until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge from democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms (...) and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture of rampant litigation. He rejects the alienation of individuals, from each other and from their communities, that is so easily bred within highly complex political and legal systems. An understanding of his approach to some of the classic questions of legal theory provides insight not only into some central ideas of his own thought, but also into the roots of critical and communitarian critiques of law. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The spirited part, thumos, plays a complex and often disputed role in Plato's account of the soul. The doctrine of the soul as specifically tri‐partitioned seems to depend on a substantial conception of thumos as fundamental and non‐reducible. Building on John Cooper's contribution in the discussion of the topic, this article aims to show that the role of thumos is characterised by an indispensable, deep‐rooted urge for dignified self‐preservation. The view is supported by Plato's own examples, and discussed with regards (...) to Myles Burnyeat's account of thumos as an essentially social phenomenon. The main claim is that in order to preserve the Platonist idea of thumos as fundamental one should discard Burnyeat's characterisation of thumos as unequivocally social, and instead advocate a view of thumos as concerned with a particular form of self‐preservation, which Cooper's account suggests, but does not fully elaborate. (shrink)

How do we think about the word politeia when this involves a reaching back to the past? The response, pursued in this paper, is that in the classical understanding of politeia there is a significant connection between the question of the ‘good’ and the constitution; a connection which has become occluded or obscured by modern constitutional thought. In support of this understanding of politeia it must be acknowledged that what is meant, in this paper, by ‘good’ is very different from (...) that conventionally found in contemporary constitutional, legal or political theory. In an effort to disclose how politeia unravels this novel sense of ‘the good’ the paper will closely consider the philosophical work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on Plato. The paper claims that this largely neglected work is of importance to contemporary constitutional philosophy, particularly in so far as it focuses, as in this paper, on classical traditions or origins within constitutional thought. (shrink)

In Self-Constitution, I argue that the principles governing action are “constitutive standards” of agency, standards that arise from the nature of agency itself. To be an agent is to be autonomousl...

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: (i) the costs to the (...) individual of being wrong are negligible, (ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and (iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way. (shrink)

Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Ft aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified self-confidence (...) regarding moral norms. In this paper, I offer a coherentist model for doing so, thereby addressing the justification gap. (shrink)

In the essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze discusses the differences between nineteenth-century capitalism and contemporary capitalism, characterising the former as the spaces of enclosure and the latter as the open circuits of the bank. In contemporary capitalism, ‘[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’. Deleuze claims that under financial capitalism, where the primary use of money is self-generation, economic relations are thought in terms of an asymmetrical power relationship between debtor and creditor, rather than (...) an exchange between commodities. Taking up Deleuze's claim, this paper analyses how time functions in the formation of subjectivity under financial capitalism, by focusing on the temporal structure of debt. The indebted are expected to bind themselves to the past, not only in the moment they make a promise to pay back, but from that moment onwards; in this process, a subject finds himself passively subjected to the temporality determined by the condition of indebtedness, and yet he also actively reproduces and imposes the fact of indebtedness on himself by the feeling of guilt. Guilt, arising from the irreversibility of what has been done and resulting in the inability to proceed into the future, is central both to the indebted and the melancholic. Thus a melancholic subject emerges: a subject conditioned by the dominance of the past and the impossibility of the future. (shrink)

This paper investigates how Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutics can be considered as a better alternative to both, German rationalist aesthetics as pioneered by Christian Wolff, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, to the extent of overcoming the problematics of rule-following. A general account of the necessity of a universal hermeneutics and its meaning from historical practices of exegeses is given. This is then followed by the account of rule-following in the tradition of both German rationalist aesthetics and Kant’s transcendental idealism with latter as (...) expounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The investigation is comparative and descriptive. The purpose of this study is to discuss the hermeneutic possibilities in research methodologies for human sciences. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of co-parenthood according to which co-parents are parent and child to one another. The paper begins by reviewing extant theories of the value of being a parent, to see whether the value of co-parenthood is reducible to this. Finding that it is not, I briefly elaborate a theory of parenthood on which parents are those who create persons. Using Aristotle’s four causes as a helpful prism, I outline how parents are the cause of their child, (...) and how in causing a child together co-parents become parent and child to one another. For instance, since parents create children by offering themselves as models to be copied, co-parents should enjoy the best type of friendship with one another, each treating the other’s flourishing as a human person as their end. I suggest that co-parenthood contains parenthood virtually, that the co-parents’ love of their child is a manifestation of their love for one another, that the teleological fulfilled state of the friendship between parent and child exists in the friendship of co-parents. (shrink)

Résumé En général, la plupart des objections aux écrits d'Henry Thoreau se penchent sur ses provocations « inamicales ». Dans cet article, je propose que nous examinions son style par rapport à la pratique de la parrhésie, c'est-à-dire l'expression de la vérité d'après la tradition socratique de la philosophie. La parrhésie est la pratique consistant à dire la vérité dans le but de prendre conscience de l'importance de changer sa propre vie. La transformation envisagée par Thoreau dépend de l'acquisition d'un (...) savoir-faire à l’égard de la culture des sens, et ce, à travers ce qu'il appelle « l'excursion ». Voilà ce qui constitue sa contribution fondamentale à ladite tradition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education appears to bear responsibility on the one hand to do justice to society’s need for reproduction and continuation, and on the other to do justice to the individual’s capacity for and need to express resistance, critique and political action. How we navigate this problem is tied to how we understand justice. ‘Plastic justice’ is the suggestion that questions concerning justice and education might find a materialist expression instead of the usual transcendental ideals of justice. In this perspective, ‘justice’ (...) appears not as an achievable ideal but as a philosophical void that allows us to identify and react to injustice. An example of this is the void that allows for social selection – in the form of admissions or exams – that must be kept open if we wish to avoid encouraging social conformism and reproduction. (shrink)

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that pe...

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals also tend to be the most partisan, and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This paper (...) examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than many would like. (shrink)

T h i s article examines the ethical implications of the desirefor disembodiment situated in the texts and technologies of cyberspace. The article is divided into 2 parts. The first traces the conceptual history of dualism, demonstrating its exclusive cultural politics and investigating the socio-political consequences of encoding this metaphysical information in contemporary media technology. The second part examines the material conditions of new communication technology, arguing that the issue of access reduplicates in practice the exclusivity of dualism. The article (...) concludes by investigating the ethical implications of employing dualistic metaphysics as a legitimizing narrative of media technology and cyberculture. (shrink)

The first aim of this paper is to remind the reader of a very original theory of meaning which in many aspects has not been surpassed by subsequent theories. The theory in question is Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning. In the first section I present a version of this theory which, I trust, retains the gist of the original but loses its outdated language. In the second section I analyze some problematic consequences of the directival theory and show how (...) they can be addressed. The second aim of this paper is exploiting some of the similarities between the directival theory and later theories of meaning. In the third section I argue that using the directival theory as an interpretative tool enables us to create explications of some of the notoriously vague notions which contemporary theories of meaning employ. (shrink)

Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves together virtue ethics and existential phenomenology: the influence of Heidegger and Levinas, in particular, is clear throughout. This paper provides a summary of McMullin’s elegantly argued position and raises a number of possible concerns, particularly regarding the interaction of Aristotelian and Phenomenological assumptions. I focus specifically on the role of the 2nd-person perspective, on the links between exemplars and socialisation, and on the problem of those who, as Nietzsche put it, “are (...) both evil and happy – a species on which the moralists are silent”. (shrink)

Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper explores the moral and epistemic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions. I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I propose to address what I see as a lacuna in (...) her account. I believe that the arrogant speaker can put those he silences in the morally outrageous position in which their own silence contributes to their oppression. While nothing in Tanesini’s account would predict or explain this, the wrinkle I propose will aim to do so in a way that is in the spirit of her account. To do so, I will need to expand the focus of discussion: instead of concentrating on silencing, I will consider the phenomenon of silence. When one is silent in the face of a mutually observed assertion, one’s silence will be interpreted by others. I argue that under certain widespread conditions, a hearer’s silence in the face of the arrogant speaker’s assertions is likely to be falsely interpreted as indicating her assent to the assertion, and such an interpretation of the hearer’s silence will bring new harms in its wake—in particular, harms to the hearer who was silenced, and also harms to the community at large. When we combine these new harms with the ones Tanesini identified in her paper, we reach the further conclusion that the harms of silencing are potentially far worse than many have imagined. (shrink)

Deaths of Despair (DoD), or mortality resulting from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease, have been rising steadily in the United States over the last several decades. In 2020, a record 186,763 annual despair-related deaths were documented, contributing to the longest sustained decline in US life expectancy since 1915–1918. This forum feature considers how health humanities disciplines might fruitfully engage with this era-defining public health catastrophe and help society better understand and respond to the crisis.

In this paper, I propose a solution to a challenge formulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson: We have to explain why the moral asymmetry between doing and allowing harm is a deep feature of our moral thinking. In a nutshell, my solution is this: It could not be otherwise. Accepting the asymmetry is indispensable for the construction and maintenance of stable moral communities. -/- My argument centrally involves mental resource management. Moral communities depend on their members’ commitment to moral norms. And, (...) I argue, community members can only be committed to these norms in the required ways without overextending their mental resources if morality contains the doing/allowing asymmetry. -/- This has two noteworthy implications. Firstly, we can and should stop discussing the asymmetry in normative ethics and, instead, regard it as “moral axiom” we cannot but accept. Secondly, even consequentialists have to accept the asymmetry but, by doing so, their view loses part of its intuitive appeal. Lastly, I turn to an objection. One might think that my indispensability argument confuses issues in moral psychology with issues in normative ethics. I reject the objection on broadly pragmatist grounds. (shrink)

Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. ca. 925), a well-known physician and Muslim philosopher, has not yet been widely considered for his philosophical reflections on animals. An inspection of al-Rāzī’s works demonstrates his endeavor, based on his cosmology, to come up with a way of the perfection of the soul and becoming liberated from the terrestrial world. As this paper maintains, his investigation of animals is aimed at developing his theory of the perfection of the soul. After a brief clarification of the (...) theory, which entails a discussion of the interaction of the two theoretical and practical aspects of human reason, this paper will discuss seven cases in which al-Rāzī uses the discussion of animals to develop his theory of the perfection of the soul. (shrink)

I argue that there is a prima facie tension between solutions to the problem of fake news and solutions to the problem presented by various cognitive biases that dispose us to dismiss evidence against our prior beliefs (what might seem to be the driving force behind echo chambers). We can guard against fake news by strengthening belief. But we can exit echo chambers by becoming more sensitive to counterevidence, which seems to require weakening our beliefs. I resolve the tension by (...) arguing against an injunction to weaken belief in the required ways. In particular, there is no injunction to be open-minded in all circumstances toward various counterarguments, even those whose premises seem compelling and in which we can’t expose a flaw. On the contrary, there are circumstances in which you should, in the relevant sense, be closed-minded toward such counterarguments. (shrink)

Socrates is famous for claiming that ‘I know one thing: That I know nothing’. There is one subject that Socrates repeatedly claims to have expertise in, however: ta erôtika. Socrates also refers to this expertise as his erôtikê technê, which may be translated as ‘erotic expertise’. I argue that the purposes this expertise serve are, to a significant extent, educational in nature: Socrates has certain erotic educational methods that participate in his expertise on erôs. In addition, I suggest that Socrates (...) uses two kinds of psychological techniques while practicing his erotic expertise through these erotic educational methods. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role played by Immanuel Kant's defense of the death penalty, in the first and the second years of Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, delivered from 1999 to 2001. Regarding the first year, the initial part of this article charts how Derrida introduces Kant's writings that purport to elaborate the categorical imperative of the death penalty, not by Kant's primary arguments but rather precisely through Kant's concession of an exception to this categorical imperative, concerning the impunity of (...) a mother's infanticide. Derrida's lectures juxtapose Kant's philosophy of the death penalty with Victor Hugo's claim for the inviolability of life, and in doing so, the sessions introduce other examples of the applicability of the death penalty to mothers who have killed their children. What is at stake is the status of philosophy relative to the death penalty. Concerning the second year, the latter part of this article isolates the logic of Kant's categorical imperative, as deconstructed by Derrida, through recourse to the additions that Kant was obliged to append to his initial argument—those involving precisely sex crimes. The article follows how Derrida thoroughly takes apart both the simplicity of Kant's categorical imperative of the death penalty by means of the complications that are its abyssal foundation and the phallogocentrism of Freud's sexual oppositions through the extraction of insights into another thinking of sexual difference that Freud's categories foreclosed. (shrink)

Albert Lautman (b. 1908–1944) was a philosopher of mathematics whose views on mathematical reality and on the philosophy of mathematics parted with the dominant tendencies of mathematical epistemology of the time. Lautman considered the role of philosophy, and of the philosopher, in relation to mathematics to be quite specific. He writes that: ‘in the development of mathematics, a reality is asserted that mathematical philosophy has as a function to recognize and describe’ (Lautman 2011, 87). He goes on to characterize this (...) reality as an ‘ideal reality’ that ‘governs’ the development of mathematics. The relation between mathematical problems as they arise in the historical development of mathematics and the solutions that are provided to these problems by mathematicians, in the form of new mathematical theories, definitions or axioms, are governed by a what Lautman characterises as a dialectics of mathematics. The aim of this paper is to give an account of this Lautmanian dialectic and of how it can be understood to govern the development of solutions to mathematical problems. (shrink)

Leading philosophical models of curiosity represent it as a desiderative attitude whose content is a question, and which is satisfied by knowledge of the answer to that question. I argue that these models do not capture the distinctive character of a form of curiosity that I call 'erotic curiosity'. Erotic curiosity addresses itself not to a question but to an object whose significance for the inquirer is affective as well as epistemic. This form of curiosity is best understood by analogy (...) to erotic love as theorized by Plato in the Symposium. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between the critique of civilization, anti-imperialism, gender and representative government in the political thought of the neglected communist, environmentalist, and gay liberationist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). In recent years, there has been a dramatic growth in the historical literatures on anti-imperialism and representative government, yet these two topics are rarely connected. Meanwhile, a voluminous literature on the concept of civilization and its role in British imperialism has largely ignored its role in justifying social and political domination (...) in Britain itself. Carpenter's writings on these topics are important because he offers a defense of the value of representative government that is grounded in his anti-imperialism. Furthermore, his critique of civilization led him to connect problems of social domination in India to the struggles of women, homosexuals, and the working class. These groups ought in turn to be enfranchised and given roles in the functioning of the state. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer two novel solutions to two perennial problems of categorial ontology, namely, the problem of the categorial structure: how are the categories related to one another? And the problem of categorial completeness: how is the completeness of a proposed list of categories justified? First, I argue that a system of categories should have a structure such that there is a most basic category that is a bearer of all other categories and that has (...) what I shall call “combinatorial conditions”. To do so, I compare this approach to categorial structure with the approaches given by substantialist, mereological, factualist, and geo ontologies. Second, I argue that the problem of categorial completeness is only a problem for certain ontologies. In this connection, I explore views on categorial completeness proposed by substantialists and geo-ontologists. Lastly, I conclude that factualism does a better job of accounting for categorial structure and categorial completeness than other categorial ontologies. (shrink)

Categories play a major role in contemporary metaphysics. They have not only been invoked in a number of philosophical theories but are themselves objects of epistemological and metaphysical scrutiny. In this article, we will discuss the following questions: How do we know when something belongs to a certain category? Is there a fundamental category of the world? Can we give a satisfactory account of the number of categories and the completeness of systems of categories? Are categories the genuine subjects of (...) ontology? (shrink)

Interest-relative invariantism is the view that practical interests encroach upon knowledge. In other words, the more that is at stake for S, the harder it is for her true belief to be an instance of knowledge. Russell and Doris argue that IRI theorists are committed to indifference being knowledge-making feature of IRI, where knowledge comes easier for subjects the less they care. In this paper, I explain why indifference cases are problematic and which assumptions about IRI generate them. I then (...) argue IRI theorists can immunize themselves from indifference problems by grounding practical interests in either Aristotelianism or a restricted form of Humeanism, both of which link practical interests to some conception of well-being. I then argue that besides solving indifference problems, these approaches present a reasonable conception of practical interests, while also saving IRI theorists from abandoning plausible theses about knowledge. (shrink)

Thomas Reid draws a distinction between the social and solitary operations of mind—acts of mind that require other intelligent beings versus those that may performed on one’s own. Yet his distinction obscures the irreducibly social character of the solitary operations. This paper preserves Reid’s distinction while accommodating the social character of the solitary operations. According to Reid, the solitary operations presuppose the social operations, expressed in what he calls the ‘natural language’ of mankind—a language that communicates the intentions that give (...) rise to the agreements by which the conventions of artificial languages are developed. Using artificial languages, we begin to sort the world into kinds and to anticipate the regular events that make a practical difference in our lives, providing the general conceptions that give our trains of thought the order and regularity required to form the solitary operations. By using artificial languages, we adapt social operations to solitary ends, to think alone and in silence. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of (...) them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that human beings do or pursue only what we see as good. These “guise-of-the-good” views face powerful challenges and counterexamples, such as akratic action, in which we do what we ourselves believe we ought not do. I propose a new way for guise-of-the-good views to address this central counterexample by appealing to conflicting beliefs. I then answer concerns that this appeal is insufficiently explanatory, attributes too much conflict, leaves out an essential asymmetry in action against one’s (...) “better” judgment, attributes systematic error about one’s own beliefs, and is too implausible. (shrink)

This paper has two main objectives. The first is to revitalize the notion of postmodern Confucianism after an interval of two decades by reviewing the early encounters between postmodern philosophy...

While the modern revival of virtue ethics largely looks back to Aristotle, most, if not all, versions of this trend continue to be much indebted to and/or based upon specific mid‐twentieth‐century neo‐naturalist and descriptivist critiques of prevailing antinaturalist trends of that time: specifically, upon Anscombe's critique of the ethics of duty and utility and of the so‐called modern moral ought, and Geach's robust defence of the descriptive character of moral and other goodness. However, in the wake of further critical attention (...) to these neo‐naturalist claims, this paper argues that there can ultimately be no reliable or secure logical or empirical grounding of the virtues of inherently normative human moral life and conduct in the goods or virtues of effective or even beneficial natural function. (shrink)

Many contributors to military ethics from diverse locations and philosophical perspectives maintain that virtues are central to martial theory and practice. Yet several contemporary philosophers and psychologists have recently challenged the empirical adequacy of this perspective. Their challenge is known as the situationist critique, a version of which asserts that: situational features rather than character traits such as virtues cause and explain human behavior, and ethical theories and development programs are empirically inadequate to the extent that they incorporate virtues. In (...) this paper, I assess the merit of this critique and consider some implications of my assessment for military practitioners and theorists. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Johann Georg Hamann has tended to focus on his relation to modernity, specifically the Enlightenment. His critique of rationalism, the obscurity of his style, and his pronounced influence on later figures are just several reasons for reconsidering his historical and literary significance. However, his writings also contain rich and relevant philosophical and theological ideas. This article demonstrates the centrality of Hamann’s concept of creation for both his critique of rationalism as well as his ideas regarding aesthetics. Hamann (...) understands nature as the book of creation. Human sensuousness, as an emergent feature of nature, indicates an intrinsic relationality underlying nature. By way of the senses, human beings discover themselves to be entangled with God through nature. Reason rejects this relationality when it seeks to purify itself from nature or the senses. In contrast, reason that is oriented to this fundamental relationality recognizes the beauty and friendliness that permeates nature. This recognition is an invitation whereby one is called to perpetuate these aesthetic ideals in the world. (shrink)

Does it make sense to think of eternal life not as an unending continuation of life subsequent to death but as fully actualized in one’s present mortal and finite life? After outlining conceptual and moral reasons for being troubled by the notion of an endless life, this article draws upon the thought of major Christian theologians and philosophers of religion to expound the idea of eternal life as a possession exclusively of the life one is presently living. Supplementing the claims (...) of religious thinkers with notions of four-dimensionalism and eternalism from theoretical physics and the philosophy of time, and considering important objections to the conception of eternal life in question, I argue for both the conception’s intelligibility and its ethical and spiritual profundity. (shrink)

This article presents an interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of difference-in-itself. I argue that this is best understood as an adption of Duns Scotus’s concept of ultimate difference. After suggesting that the influence of Scotus on Deleuze extends beyond their shared commitment to the univocity of being, I turn to briefly review Deleuze’s notion of absolute difference. I proceed from there to explain Scotus’s accounts of univocity and ultimate difference, throughout noting the many stark parallels with Deleuze. On the basis of (...) this Scotistic reading of Deleuzian difference, I then show how Deleuze’s synthesis of univocal being and difference-in-itself can be uniquely situated within the fourteenth-century Scotistic disputations on the predicability of univocal being to ultimate difference. I conclude with some suggestions on possible further connections between Deleuze and medieval metaphysics which are opened up through this association of Deleuze with Scotus and the Scotistic tradition. (shrink)