Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal—through avowal—the other third-personal—no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions—is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own beliefs; this enable some instances of (...) Moore-paradoxical cases to be meaningful. In this paper we reflect on the consequences of this view for the acquisition of beliefs, and argue that, as in the moral case, excessive concentration on a thirdpersonal understanding of thought undermines the very idea of being directed to the world and of being capable to fully own our own beliefs. We suggest that maybe too much attention to epistemic virtues or tojustification is misdirected and could produce beliefs that are themself not first-personal enough. (shrink)

D. H. Mellor; VI*—Conscious Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement offers a subtle and tantalizing exploration of asymmetries that arise between first‐person and third‐person self‐knowledge. According to Moran's central claim, the distinction of first‐person self‐knowledge is to engage the responsibility of the person. I will focus my remarks on this issue. I wish to raise some questions about the nature of the third‐person perspective, and about how assuming it affects the responsibility of the person. In this connection, I examine in some detail Moran's main examples (...) of third‐person loss of responsibility. Moran's discussions are rich and provocative, and the questions I sketch out all too briefly here are primarily pleas for clarification. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that moral projectivism cannot be coherently fix the content of our moral responses. To this purpose, I develop a number of arguments against moral dispositionalism and, in this context, I challenge both David Lewis' dispositionalist account of colour and Chistine Korsgaard's procedural realism.

D. H. Mellor; VI*—Conscious Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

In this paper, I argue that moral projectivism cannot be coherently fix the content of our moral responses. To this purpose, I develop a number of arguments against moral dispositionalism and, in this context, I challenge both David Lewis' dispositionalist account of colour and Chistine Korsgaard's procedural realism.

In my opinion, Richard Moran’s account of the connections between self-knowledge and intentional ac-tion presents a certain unresolved tension. On the one hand, the epistemic privilege of the first person derives from the fact that forming an intention is a matter of the subject endorsing a course of action. An en-dorsing subject is not a mere observer of her intentions. On the other hand, the transparency of endorsement is assimilated to the putative fact that an agent forms her intentions by (...) reflecting on the reasons to make up her mind. The resulting picture is an extremely rationalistic account of intentional action. I will try to defend that this form of practical rationalism can be avoided without renouncing the basic intuitions behind Moran’s use of the notion of endorsement. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture.

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture. More specifically, I will point out why some crucial aspects of the phenomena that Moran describes in terms of the interplay between the theoretical and the deliberative attitude, should rather be interpreted as a process that takes place within the deliberative attitude (...) itself. The theoretical attitude will, as a result, constitute a rather marginal attitude towards one’s own psychological dispositions and experiences, the adoption of which only makes sense in rather peculiar, often pathological, situations. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture. More specifically, I will point out why some crucial aspects of the phenomena that Moran describes in terms of the interplay between the theoretical and the deliberative attitude, should rather be interpreted as a process that takes place within the deliberative attitude (...) itself. The theoretical attitude will, as a result, constitute a rather marginal attitude towards one’s own psychological dispositions and experiences, the adoption of which only makes sense in rather peculiar, often pathological, situations. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish and Fassin, The Will to Punish. It explores the way that these two books challenge conventional thinking about the relationship between crime and punishment.

First person authority, argues Moran, is not to be understood as a matter of having some especially good observational access to certain facts about oneself. We can imagine a person who can report accurately on her own psychological states, for example because she can perform, without conscious thought, extremely reliable psychoanalytic-style diagnoses of herself. But the ‘authority’ with which she produces her judgements resembles that which she could have about another person in that it can exist even when she does (...) not endorse or identify with the states she reports on. In imagining such a person we see that her speech about herself is very different from our more usual sort of psychological self-attributions and that something central to their authority, something we want to explain, has gone missing. Also the observational view does not illuminate why it is only psychological states to which one can have such privileged access, and only one’s own; nor does it explain why loss of such access is a serious matter. (shrink)

Stuart Hampshire's essay on human freedom offers an important analysis of concepts surrounding the central idea of intentional action. The author contrasts the powers of animals and of inanimate things; examines the relation between power and action; and distinguishes between two kinds of self-knowledge. Explaining human freedom by means of this distinction, he focuses his attention on self-knowledge gained by introspection. He writes: "...an individual who acquires more systematic knowledge of the causes of states of mind, emotion, and desires, insofar (...) as these are not the outcome of his decision, thereby becomes more free than he previously was to control and direct his own life:...there will in general be a closer correlation between that which he sets himself to do and that which he actually achieves in his life." In a postscript on determinism and psychological explanation, the author provides a detailed account of some of the ways in which explanation of states of mind differs from explanation of physical states. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducible deliberative relevance of a certain phenomenon, namely: the phenomenon of an agent morally coming across a particular situation. Following (...) on from Bbernard Williams, I talk of an agent’s character as a factor that contributes to fixing what situations an agent comes morally across. A crucial point, in the debate, will be how an agent confronts the normatively loaded features of his own character when he is engaged in first-person deliberation. (shrink)

Richard Moran has argued, convincingly, in favour of the idea that there must be more than one path to access our own mental contents. The existence of those routes, one first-personal —through avowal— the other third-personal —no different to the one used to ascribe mental states to other people and to interpret their actions— is intimately connected to our capacity to respond to norms. Moran’s account allows for conflicts between first personal and third personal authorities over my own beliefs; this (...) enable some instances of Moore-paradoxical cases to be meaningful. In this paper we reflect on the consequences of this view for the acquisition of beliefs, and argue that, as in the moral case, excessive concentration on a third-personal understanding of thought undermines the very idea of being directed to the world and of being capable to fully own our own beliefs. We suggest that maybe too much attention to epistemic virtues or to justification is misdirected and could produce beliefs that are themselves not first-personal enough. (shrink)