Despite the growth of interest in the ethics of Aquinas and the proliferation of publications devoted to the topic, there remains a paucity of studies of an introductory nature. Thus the publication of a revised version of Ralph McInerny’s Ethica Thomistica is a welcome event indeed. In a remarkably brief exposition, McInerny covers the basic topics of Thomas’s moral philosophy.

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of (...) epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code"--Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

One way of discerning what sort of control we have over our mental lives is to look at cases where that control is not exercised. This is one reason why philosophers have taken an interest in the phenomenon of akrasia, in an agent's ability to do, freely and deliberately, something that they judge they ought not to do. Akrasia constitutes a failure of control but not an absence of control. The akratic agent is not a compulsive; an akratic agent has (...) the ability to control their action, to make it conform to their judgement, but they fail to exercise that ability. They freely and deliberately give in to temptation. (shrink)

A detailed account of certain traits of intellectual character—the epistemic virtues—and of their relation to the responsibility for one's beliefs.

Book reviewed in this article: Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–1945 and the American Cover‐Up. By Sheldon H. Harris.

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS STUDY of contemporary epistemology, Alvin Plantinga asserts that the “ahistoricism” of analytic philosophy has proven an impediment to progress in epistemology; what we need, he urges, is “history and hermeneutics.” In its turning to history, epistemology is beginning to resemble recent ethical theory, which has readily availed itself of the history of philosophy as a means of enriching its discourse and circumventing seemingly insoluble debates. There are other similarities between contemporary epistemology and recent ethical theory. (...) The standard division in contemporary epistemology pits internalism against externalism. The former demands that individuals have cognitive access to the justifying conditions of their belief and that the belief be formed in accord with appropriate rules. The latter drops the requirement of internal access but demands that a belief be formed by a process, reliably aimed at the production of truth. Internalism’s accentuation of epistemic rights and duties calls to mind ethical deontology, while the externalist emphasis on the production of true beliefs is akin to moral consequentialism. Lately, virtue epistemology has emerged to counter the two dominant theories of knowledge, just as virtue ethics arose as an alternative to deontology and utilitarianism. (shrink)