I objected that the defeasibility theory of knowledge prohibits you from knowing that you know that p if your knowledge that p is a posteriori. Rodrigo Borges claims that Peter Klein has already satisfactorily answered a version of my objection. He attempts to defend Klein’s reply and argues that my objection fails because a principle on which it is based is false.I will show that my objection is not a version of the old one that Klein attempts (unsuccessfully) to address, (...) that Borges’ defence of Klein’s reply fails and that his argument against my new objection leaves it untouched. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Embedding ethics modules within computer science courses has become a popular response to the growing recognition that CS programs need to better equip their students to navigate the ethical dimensions of computing technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. However, the popularity of this approach has outpaced the evidence of its positive outcomes. To help close that gap, this empirical study reports positive results from Northeastern’s program that embeds values analysis modules into CS courses. The resulting data suggest (...) that such modules have a positive effect on students’ moral attitudes and that students leave the modules believing they are more prepared to navigate the ethical dimensions they’ll likely face in their eventual careers. Importantly, these gains were accomplished at an institution without a philosophy doctoral program, suggesting this strategy can be effectively employed by a wider range of institutions than many have thought. (shrink)

Many prominent ethicists, including Shelly Kagan, John Rawls, and Thomas Scanlon, accept a kind of epistemic modesty thesis concerning our capacity to carry out the project of ethical theorizing. But it is a thesis that has received surprisingly little explicit and focused attention, despite its widespread acceptance. After explaining why the thesis is true, I argue that it has several implications in metaethics, including, especially, implications that should lead us to rethink our understanding of Reductive Realism. In particular, the (...) thesis of epistemic modesty in ethics implies a kind of epistemic modesty about the metaphysical nature of ethics, if Reductive Realism about the metaphysical nature of ethics is true, and it implies that normative concepts are indispensable to practical deliberation in a way that answers an influential objection to Reductive Realism from Jonathan Dancy, David Enoch, William FitzPatrick, and Derek Parfit. (shrink)

Claims about what justice “requires” and the “requirements” of justice are pervasive in political philosophy. However, there is a highly significant ambiguity in such claims that appears to have gone unnoticed. Such claims may pick out either one of two categorically distinct and noncoextensive kinds of requirement that we call 1) requirements-as-necessary-conditions for justice and 2) requirements-as-demands of justice. This is an especially compelling instance of an ambiguity that John Broome has famously observed in the context of claims about (...) other requirements (notably the requirements of rationality and morality). But it appears to have been overlooked by political philosophers in the case of claims about the requirements of justice. The ambiguity is highly significant inasmuch as failing to notice it is liable to distort our normative thinking about politics and make us vulnerable to certain kinds of normatively consequential errors: both mistakenly drawing inferences about what justice demands of us from claims that certain states or societies are not just; and mistakenly drawing inferences about what states or societies are or would be just from claims that justice does not demand of states or societies that they do certain things. Paying greater attention to the distinction between these two different kinds of requirements and the ways in which they come apart is helpful, not merely in avoiding these distortions and errors, but also in resolving, or at least clarifying, a number of other notoriously murky meta-normative debates, especially various important debates about realism and idealism in political philosophy. (shrink)

Rationality appears to have some intimate relation with normativity: exactly what relation is in dispute. John Broome devotes a chapter of his recent book to rebutting the view that rationality has 'true' normativity, which he equates with the kind of normativity that I call directivity. In particular, he offers a number of arguments against derivative accounts of thenormativity of rationality. In this paper I defend my instrumentalist account from those arguments. In so doing I bring into view the grounds (...) of a live positive defence of rationality’s servanthood to directivity. (shrink)

How does it happen that our beliefs about what we ought to do cause us to intend to do what we believe we ought to do? This is what John Broome calls the "motivation question." Broome’s answer to the motivation question is that we can bring ourselves, by our own efforts, to intend to do what we believe we ought to do by exercising a special agential capacity: the capacity to engage in what he calls enkratic reasoning. My aim (...) is to evaluate this answer. In doing so, I shall focus on three core aspects of Broome’s overall account: his account of ought, his account of enkratic rationality, and his account of enkratic reasoning in particular. In each case I suggest there are problems. (shrink)

There is a common view that the utilitarian theory of John Stuart Mill is morally realist and involves a strong kind of practical obligation. This article argues for two negative theses and a positive thesis. The negative theses are that Mill is not a moral realist and that he does not believe in certain kinds of obligations, those involving external reasons and those I callrobustobligations, obligations with a particular, strong kind of practical authority. The positive thesis is that Mill's (...) metaethical position can be interpreted as a Humean constructivist view, a metaethical view that is constructivist about value and entails the existence of practical reasons, but not external reasons or robust obligations. I argue that a Humean constructivist reading of Mill's theory is reasonable, and strengthens Mill's argument from desire for the value of happiness, an important but notoriously weak aspect of his theory. (shrink)

I reply to critical discussion of my work by Copthorne Macdonald, Steve Fuller, John Stewart, Joseph Agassi, Margaret Boden, Donald Gillies, Mathew Iredale, David Hodgson, Karl Rogers, and Leemon McHenry.

How can what is of value associated with our human world exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? Or, as we may put it, how can the God-of-Cosmic-Value exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the God-of-Cosmic-Power? This, I argue, is our fundamental problem – fundamental in both intellectual and practical terms. Here, I tackle the practical aspect of the problem. I consider briefly five global problems – climate change, war, population growth, world (...) poverty, habitat destruction and extinction of species – and argue that, in order to solve them it is essential to bring about a revolution in universities round the world so that the basic aim becomes wisdom and not just knowledge. I conclude by indicating recent developments which suggest the revolution may already be underway. (shrink)

A prevalent assumption is that normativity is a unity. In this paper I argue against this assumption by demonstrating the problems it poses to a well known answer to a well known problem for taking rationality to be normative. John Broome's normative requirement relation does indeed avoid that problem, but insofar as the relation is supposed to offer a general characterisation of the normativity of rationality, it fails. It fails because it cannot capture an important aspect of the normativity (...) of rationality, that it is available to guide us. I show that if we distinguish two kinds of normativity it need not fail in this way. (shrink)

Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal under Elizabeth I. He left Cambridge in 1575, studied law, and entered Parliament in 1581. Though roughly contemporary with Kepler, Galileo, and Harvey, Bacon’s grand schemes for the advancement of knowledge were not driven by their discoveries: he resisted the Copernican hypothesis, and did not give mathematics a central place in his vision of natural philosophy. His active public life, under both Elizabeth and James (...) I, was taken up with political business and legal reform. Bacon achieved high office as Lord Chancellor in 1618, until disgraced by corruption charges. His final years saw a furious spate of writing on natural philosophy, politics, and history. (shrink)

The practical problem of how to conduct oneself as a Christian and a Philosopher or Bioethicist in public debate an when asked to be engaged in government committees is difficult. One solution that has had some support has been to approach the issues on the grounds of our natural law tradition but understood anthropocentrically – the ultimate end is not communion with God by integral human development. This is often called New Natural Law (NNL). This separation of Philosophy and Theology (...) has had its critics and most notably the current Poe and his immediate predecessor. In their own writing addressed to people of goodwill, they took a different approach that was essentially Christocentric and involving s close partnership between Philosohy and Theology. In my own experience over thirty years of public involvement in Bioethics, I have discovered that the NNL approach has two overwhelming problems. What is offered to the secular dialogue, as an anthropocentric natural law, often sounds false to secular others because we propose something guided by our beliefs, but failing to acknowledge that contribution. However something that I have discovered latterly in that approach is in fact false by our own standards. By the strictures we impose on our contribution we in fact ignore the New Law instituted by Christ, the law of love. The New Natural Law (NNL) Project has proved to be a failure where it has been tried, and, I know realize, was doomed from the outset, because in being anthropocentric it was essentially lacking and the answers that it gave to problems were often unsatisfactory because lacking love and the particular demand of needing to be capable of being oriented towards God, the God of love. The NNL approach tended to produce a casuistry that was too liberal and too lacking in understanding of the essential role that affectivity plays in our lives, created as we are in the imago dei, in the image and likeness of the God of love. Such a morality demands much more than anthropocentricism can demand. In recognizing these difficulties I propose instead a more pragmatic approach that reflects a partnership between Philosophy and Theology as espoused by the Second Vatican Council, and by Pope’s Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, and which engages the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Servais Pinckaers. An approach that I have tried with some success in chairing government committees. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 55-81 [Access article in PDF] Self-Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche Lawrence Nolan John Whipple 1. Introduction Descartes's notorious claim that mind is better known than body has been the target of repeated criticisms, but none appears more challenging than that of his intellectual heir Nicolas Malebranche.1 Whereas other critics—especially twentieth-century philosophers eager to use Descartes as their whipping boy—have often (...) been uncharitable, Malebranche accepts many of the fundamental Cartesian doctrines, including mind-body dualism. But he argues that Descartes's position on knowledge of the mind is internally inconsistent. Malebranche agrees with Descartes that the existence of the mind is better known than that of body, but he vehemently denies that the nature of the mind is better known. This denial is based on his view that we lack a clear idea of the mind.2 [End Page 55]Malebranche's polemic has attracted much attention in recent scholarship.3 The growing consensus among commentators is that Malebranche develops a devastating internal critique of Descartes's theory of the mind. For example, Nicholas Jolley writes: "In his case for his negative thesis [concerning knowledge of the mind] Malebranche mounted a powerful, even annihilating, critique of Descartes. This critique embodies the remarkable insight that there is a serious muddle at the heart of Descartes's whole theory of knowledge."4 In a book-length defense of Malebranche's critique, Tad Schmaltz also emphasizes its internal character: "the interpretation here of Malebranche's theory presents it as fundamentally Cartesian, and thereby serves to reinforce his own view that he has provided an authoritative interpretation of the account of mind in the writings of Descartes and other Cartesians."5 Schmaltz also asserts: "Malebranche took his negative thesis concerning our knowledge of the soul to involve not so much a rejection of Cartesianism as an internal correction of it."6We think such remarks misstate the case. Indeed, we argue in this paper that Malebranche's polemic fails as an internal critique of Descartes's theory of the mind. Although we do not here aspire to defend Descartes's strong thesis—that mind is better known than body—we do think he can consistently maintain that we have a clear and distinct idea of the mind, and thus that our knowledge of the mind's nature is at least on a par with our knowledge of corporeal nature.7 While Malebranche's rhetoric would encourage us to think that the debate between him and his predecessor is being fought on common or neutral ground, the fact is that Malebranche often appeals to assumptions and aspects of his own theory of "Vision in God" that Descartes would reject. Once more, he interprets Descartes's theory of knowledge in ways that are misguided and sometimes even uncharitable. If Malebranche's critique succeeds at all, it succeeds only against a straw man—Malebranche's Descartes and not the historical figure.Ours is not the first effort to defend Descartes against this particular attack. When Malebranche first published his critique in Book Three of his first great work, The Search After Truth (1674),8 Descartes had been dead for over two decades, [End Page 56] but he was ably defended by the famous Cartesian Antoine Arnauld in On True and False Ideas (1683). In the ensuing debate Arnauld was clearly the superior dialectician, but while winning several tactical points, he appears not to fully appreciate the crux of Malebranche's argument, or at least that is the view of Jolley and Schmaltz.9 We have a somewhat higher opinion of Arnauld's side of the debate. Granted, some of his defenses are facile and can be easily dismissed; others however are quite compelling when properly developed. In at least one instance, we attempt to provide that development. At the same time we think it is a mistake to treat Arnauld as Descartes's surrogate or as if he had issued the final salvo from the camp of the orthodox Cartesians. Arnauld was a... (shrink)

The recent trend among many philosophers of religion has been to interpret divine eternity as an everlasting temporality in which an omnitemporal God exists in and throughout the whole of time. This is in contrast to the classical account of divine eternity as atemporal, immutable existence. In this paper, Aquinas' use of Boethius's definition of eternity as “the whole, perfect, and simultaneous possession of endless life” is analyzed and explained in contradistinction to Aristotle's definition of time. This analysis is then (...) used to respond to Nicholas Wolterstroff's argument in "God Everlasting" that God's knowledge of temporal events infects God with temporality and mutability. The argument concludes by introducing an important distinction between absolute simultaneity and temporal simultaneity, which allows us to hold God is omniscient because he is absolutely simultaneous with all events but is not temporally simultaneous with any event. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 219-220 [Access article in PDF] Jack Zupko. John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 446. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $40.00. What does the name "John Buridan" call to mind? For many, including medievalists, not much at all—at best, perhaps, a set of apparently unrelated ideas: nominalism; an impetus (...) theory of projectile motion; and a peculiar account of the will (although "Buridan's ass," the indecisive donkey caught between two equally appetizing bales of hay, is not found in Buridan's writing). In correcting this ignorance—an injustice to arguably the most famous and influential philosopher of the early-to-mid-fourteenth century—the temptation might have been to articulate Buridan's "positions" on "the big questions," allowing readers to fit Buridan into received categories. Thankfully, the present work, the first book-length study of Buridan in any language, resists this temptation. The John Buridan that emerges from Jack Zupko's skillful "exercise in philosophical portraiture" doesn't serve to simply fill gaps in our awareness of the historical record, but to enlighten and challenge our understanding of the practice of philosophy and the study of its history.Zupko emphasizes throughout that Buridan was a teacher, a master of arts in Paris. Buridan's pedagogical concerns help make sense of his central work in logic. As the basis for his arts lectures, Buridan chose Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales, but in commenting on Peter, Buridan moves beyond creative exegisis to comprehensive renovation. Buridan (c. 1300-c. 1361) naturally wanted to accommodate terminist or via moderna supposition theory; but more importantly, he wanted a logic text that would set out a general plan of philosophical inquiry, "a compendium of methods, a 'how-to' book for the philosopher" (135). Buridan thus designed his own Summulae de Dialectica as a new authoritative logic text, and Zupko persuasively argues that its "nominalism" should be understood as less a set of doctrines in theoretical logic, than a program of logical practice, an education in logic as the ars artium, the universal intellectual tool.Zupko's portrait of "Buridan's vision of the philosophical enterprise" is thus appropriately divided into two parts. The first summarizes Buridan's method as described in the individual treatises of his Summulae. The second displays the method in practice, rehearsing and evaluating some of Buridan's arguments on various subjects. Many scholars will gravitate first to the latter part, where Zupko offers important interpretations and clarifications of Buridan's views. In these chapters, Zupko helps us to appreciate, among other things: how the problem of universals served to help Buridan define the scope of philosophy (ch. 10); the philosophical modesty of Buridan's account of the intellectual soul's presence in the body (ch. 11); the relationship between Buridan's epistemology and the skepticism of his Parisian contemporary Nicholas of Autrecourt (ch. 12); the sense in which Buridan is an "empiricist," viz an epistemic naturalist and reliabilist (ch. 13); how Buridan regarded moral psychology as applied physics, treating virtue as a kind of impetus (ch. 14); how Buridan's account of freedom can be regarded as a "perfection" of Thomistic intellectualism (ch. 15).Throughout these discussions, Zupko always keeps in sight his larger purpose of illustrating Buridan's conception of philosophical inquiry. Zupko makes much of the fact that [End Page 219] Buridan never wrote as a theologian, remaining his entire career in the arts faculty, where he wanted logic to organize secular inquiry. As Zupko notes, in this way Buridan's scholastic project seems to prefigure the "modern." But Buridan seems modern in another way as well. As Zupko points out in his "Introduction," though a cleric, Buridan never joined a religious order, so that his ideas developed independently of the Franciscan and Dominican traditions. He was, then, a teacher without a tradition—at least without deliberate allegiance to tradition, although he was in many ways the product of traditional scholastic intellectual discipline.Perhaps this... (shrink)

In Part 1 of this short book, Rescher provides an overview of the nature and source of Leibniz’s interest in the theory and practice of cryptanalysis, including his unsuccessful bid to secure an apprentice for John Wallis (1616-1703) with a view to perpetuating the Englishman’s remarkable deciphering abilities. In Part 2, perhaps the most interesting part of the book, Rescher offers his account of the inner workings of Leibniz’s cipher machine. Part 3 provides a brief pictorial history of such (...) machines and related technologies. Finally, in Part 4 Rescher analyzes some of Leibniz’s own relatively scant attempts at decryption. Though there is little of direct philosophical interest in this work, its account of Leibniz’s forays into the field of encryption and in particular its reconstruction of his remarkable machine are fascinating and should hold considerable appeal for those interested in Leibniz’s pursuits more broadly and in the histories of cryptography and machine design. (shrink)

John Schlitpacher (†1482), who was prior of Melk in the 15th century, encouraged both the circulation of manuscripts at his Abbey and their transcription, even in abbreviated form to the benefit of the Abbey School students. This article looks at the sources and diffusion of texts to and from Melk Abbey in that period, examining the case of a codex purchased by Nicholas of Cusa, registered in his Library as no. 58, and subsequently loaned to the monks in (...) Melk to be copied. It contained the Scala Paradisi by John Climacus and the De spiritualibus deliciis by John of Dambach. In the article, I underline that both of these works, copied in codex 58, were in accordance with John Gerson’s theological approach, which was prevalent in Melk at that time. Moreover, I confirm that there are doctrinal similarities between the two works mentioned above and two, hitherto, unedited writings by Schlitpacher from the same period – the treatise De ascensionibus cordis, which is a summary of the De spiritualibus ascensionibus by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, and another entitled De felicitate beatorum (or De gaudiis electorum). (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist (...) antirepresentationalism in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

The urgent importance of dealing with the climate crisis has led some influential theorists to argue that at least some demands for justice must give way to pragmatic and strategic considerations. These theorists (Cass Sunstein, Eric Posner, and David Weisbach, all academic lawyers, and John Broome, an academic philosopher) contend that the failures of international negotiations and other efforts to change economic policies and practices have shown that moral exhortations are worse than ineffective. Although Broome's position is similar in (...) these respects to that of Sunstein, Posner and Weisbach, it differs in other important respects, including his understanding of the idea of justice, his disagreement with the policy approach (which he calls "efficiency with sacrifice") favored by the economists Nicholas Stern and William Nordhaus, and his proposal for establishing a new international financial institution, a World Climate Bank, in addition to putting a price on carbon. Elsewhere I offer a critical analysis of the position taken by Posner and Weisbach in their book, Climate Change Justice. Their arguments against allowing principles of distributive justice (narrowly understood) to constrain treaty negotiations fail to rule out the principles of John Rawls' Law of Peoples (which is a conception of the moral basis of a just international order, including states' obligations to secure basic human rights for all). Therefore their arguments against shaping climate treaties to reflect any principles of justice do not succeed in supporting their position. Here I offer a critical analysis of Broome's position. I raise and discuss objections to Broome's proposal for a WCB, and I argue that the continued relevance of these objections is contingent on how the proposal for a WCB may get developed. (shrink)

[Please note, this paper has been for the most part superseded by 'Unifying the Requirements of Rationality'] In the last decade, it has become commonplace among people who work on reasons (although not uncontroversially so) to distinguish between normativity and rationality. Work by John Broome, Niko Kolodny, Derek Parfit, and Nicholas Shackel has helped to establish the view that rationality is conceptually distinct from reasons. The distinction allows us to make sense of the questions recently addressed by Broome, (...) Kolodny, Reisner, and Shackel: is rationality normative, and if so, in what way? Kolodny’s ‘Why be Rational?’ answered the first of these questions by claiming that there is no reason to be rational. In order to argue for this conclusion, Kolodny argues for a process account of rationality. Kolodny’s view is that rational requirements govern mental processes. His view is set in direct contrast to Broome’s, who holds that rational requirements are primarily, and perhaps exclusively, concerned with relations among mental states at a time. (shrink)

This paper argues against the realization principle, which reifies the realization relation between lower-level and higher-level properties. It begins with a review of some principles of naturalistic metaphysics. Then it criticizes some likely reasons for embracing the realization principle, and finally it argues against the principle directly. The most likely reasons for embracing the principle depend on the dubious assumption that special science theories cannot be true unless special science predicates designate properties. The principle itself turns out to be false (...) because the realization relation fails the naturalistic test for reality: it makes no causal difference to the world.Footnote11This paper resulted from work done at John Heil's 2006 Mind and Metaphysics NEH Summer Seminar at Washington University in St. Louis. An early version of it was presented in a special symposium on realization at the 2007 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. I owe thanks to all the participants in both events for helpful discussions, and I owe particular thanks to Ken Aizawa, Torin Alter, Jason Ford, Carl Gillett, John Heil, Nicholas Helms, Pete Mandik, John Post, Gene Witmer, Michelle Wrenn, Tad Zawidzki, and two anonymous referees for the AJP. (shrink)

O presente texto tem o objetivo de apresentar a caracterização e crítica de Alasdair MacIntyre ao emotivismo moral, como também as posteriores controvérsias entre Waller-Unwin e John Lemos. Busca-se apresentar a leitura de MacIntyre sobre o emotivismo moral presente no último capítulo de A Short History of Ethics, suas críticas a essa concepção ética nos capítulos dois e três de After Virtue, os argumentos de Bruce Waller e Nicholas Unwin em defesa de uma reformulação do emotivismo moral e (...) as críticas de John Lemos a essa sugestão. Espera-se que o texto contribua na apresentação dos principais argumentos do debate entre MacIntyre e o emotivismo moral, a fim de servir de orientação para outras discussões na área da metaética. (shrink)

In the last decades, several attempts were made to exploit the relatedness between the early analytic philosophers and Hegel. Some 30 years ago, Peter Hylton and Nicholas Griffin investigated the apprenticeship of Bertrand Russell with neo-Hegelians. 25 years later, the direction of interest changed. Paul Redding and Angelica Nuzzo sought a connection between Hegel and analytic philosophy following hints made by Robert Brandom and John McDowell. According to these authors, Hegel can be seen as a theorist of concepts. (...) Moreover, they found that Hegel’s understanding of concepts is close to that of the early analytic philosophy. The approach we are following in this paper is different. We shall concentrate on the relatedness between the method of the early analytic philosophers and aspects of Hegel’s method. This is an unexplored venue and we hope that our study will open a new perspective both in the history of the early analytic philosophy and in Hegel Studies. To be more explicit, we are not going to specifically investigate the genealogical connection between these two methods. We shall be mainly concerned with their kinship. (shrink)

This Handbook contains forty essays by an international team of experts on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, but actually written about 500 AD. The first section contains discussions of the genesis of the corpus, its Christian antecedents, and its Neoplatonic influences. In the second section, studies on the Syriac reception, the relation of the Syriac to the original Greek, and (...) the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis are followed by contributions on the use of the corpus in such Byzantine authors as Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Niketas Stethatos, Gregory Palamas, and Gemistus Pletho. In the third section attention turns to the Western tradition, represented first by the translators John Scotus Eriugena, John Sarracenus, and Robert Grosseteste and then by such readers as the Victorines, the early Franciscans, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, the English mystics, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino. The contributors to the final section survey the effect on Western readers of Lorenzo Valla's proof of the inauthenticity of the corpus and the subsequent exposure of its dependence on Proclus by Koch and Stiglmayr. The authors studied in this section include Erasmus, Luther and his followers, Vladimir Lossky, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jacques Derrida, as well as modern thinkers of the Greek Church. Essays on Dionysius as a mystic and a political theologian conclude the volume. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's original presentation of Hermeneutical Injustice left open theoretical choice points leading to criticisms and subsequent clarifications with the resulting dialectic appearing largely verbal. The absence of perspicuous exposition of hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice might suggest scenarios exhibiting some – but not all – such hallmarks are within its purview when they are not. The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative practices – (...) adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task. In what follows, after briefly defending necessary and sufficient conditions for what I take to be the best candidate interpretation of Hermeneutical Injustice, I build on recent work on moral responsibility to construct and defend a rigorous explication of Hermeneutical Justice. (shrink)

Does Anne Conway (1631–79) hold that the created world consists of a single underlying substance? Some have argued that she does; others have argued that she is a priority monist and so holds that there are many created substances, but the whole created world is ontologically prior to each particular creature. Against both of these proposals, this article makes the case for a substance pluralist interpretation of Conway: individual creatures are distinct substances, and the whole created world is not ontologically (...) prior to the individual creatures that compose it. The basic argument for such a view draws on Conway's claims about the freedom and moral responsibility of individual creatures. The pluralist reading is straightforwardly compatible with these claims, while the monistic readings are not. (shrink)

Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise 'De opificio hominis' was one of the only Greek anthropological texts translated into latin during the early Middle Ages, by Dionysius Exiguus between the late 5th and early 6th centuries and by John Scotus Eriugena in the 9th century. Nicholas of Cusa certainly became acquainted with this work indirectly through the extensive citations in Eriugena’s 'Periphyseon' and through their partial reproduction in the 'Clavis physicae' of Honorius Augustodunensis. Our paper will analyse these and other (...) possible ways of reception –both direct and indirect– of Gregory's text by Cusanus, as well as the influence of certain philosophical themes of Nyssen’s anthropology in his thought, such as the conception of the 'imago Dei', of its ‘living’ character and its simplicity, the incomprehensibility of human intellect or mind (noûs) and theories regarding human free will and man as microcosm. (shrink)

Some central epistemological notions are expressed by sentential operators O that entail the possibility of knowledge in the sense that 'Op' entails 'It is possible to know that p'. We call these modal-epistemological notions. Using apriority and being in a position to know as case studies, we argue that the logics of modal epistemological notions are extremely weak. In particular, their logics are not normal and do not include any closure principles.

Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

Two options are incommensurate in value if neither is better than the other, and if a small improvement or worsening of one does not necessarily make it determinately better or worse than the other. If a person faces a sequence of choices between incommensurate options, she may end up with a worse options than she could have had, even though none of her choices are irrational. Yet it seems that rationality should save her from this bad outcome. This is the (...) practical problem posed by incommensurability of values, and it may be solved by a new account of practical reasoning. (shrink)

Skeptics argue that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible given the standing possibility of error. We present the limiting convergence strategy for responding to skepticism and discuss the relationship between conceivable error and an agent’s knowledge in the limit. We argue that the skeptic must demonstrate that agents are operating with a bad method or are in an epistemically cursed world. Such demonstration involves a significant step beyond conceivability and commits the skeptic to potentially convergent inquiry.

Certain passages in Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator ‘always’ would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan’s intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such (...) an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd consequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber. (shrink)

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called the riddle of transcendence can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)

The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. The unity of our universe originates from its creation from the same nothingness under the zero energy universe theory. However, (...) nothingness cannot actually cause a universe to exist on its own under superdeterminism due to the absence of cause and effect in physics. Moreover, nothingness is the absence of anything real and cannot logically be the reality underlying our universe. Consequently, our universe must exist from the reality of the logic or Logos underlying our physical reality resulting from the origination of our universe from the same nothingness or common creation. (shrink)

The title of Hare’s book refers to the gap between the demand that morality places on us and our natural capacity to live by it. Such a gap is paradoxical if we accept the “‘ought’ implies ‘can”’ principle. The solution, Hare argues, is that the gap is filled by the Christian God. So we ought to be moral and can do so—with divine assistance. Hare’s statement and defense of the existence of the gap combines a rigorously Kantian notion of the (...) moral demand with a rigorously Calvinist notion of human depravity. As such, many readers will find the gap exaggerated, but most people will admit that there is some sort of gap here to be faced, and any gap at all is a problem. (shrink)

The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. A prominent theory in cosmology is that our universe originated from a random quantum fluctuation. However, some object that such (...) a large universe creating quantum fluctuation is much less likely to occur than Boltzmann Brains or even a small universe creating quantum fluctuation. But, any quantum event can be predetermined to occur at any time by the Creator of our universe. Consequently, a large universe creating quantum fluctuation occurring at the beginning of time can be predetermined to occur before any appearance of Boltzmann Brains or small universe creating quantum fluctuations. The philosophy of superdeterminism regards our universe from quantum fluctuation to be a predetermined miraculous quantum event by a Creator God. (shrink)

The philosophy of superdeterminism is based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. In 2020, accomplished Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in physics. Although spiritual experiences do occur, they are better explained by the science of superdeterminism then by a spiritual realm. In (...) order for a spiritual realm to interact with our universe, it would have to be part of our universe and hence cannot be a spiritual realm. The afterlife, divine communication and mysterious phenomena, like consciousness, can all be explained by the known science of superdeterminism without resort to an unknown spiritual realm. (shrink)

If a person requires an organ or tissue donation to survive, many philosophers argue that whatever moral responsibility a biological relative may have to donate to the person in need will be grounded at least partially, if not entirely, in biological relations the potential donor bears to the recipient. We contend that such views ignore the role that a potential donor's unique ability to help the person in need plays in underwriting such judgments. If, for example, a sperm donor is (...) judged to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue to a child conceived with his sperm, we think this will not be due to the fact that the donor stands in a close biological relationship to the recipient. Rather, we think such judgments will largely be grounded in the presumed unique ability of the sperm donor to help the child due to the compatibility of his tissues and organs with those of the recipient. In this paper, we report the results of two studies designed to investigate the comparative roles that biological relatedness and unique ability play in generating judgments of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases. We found that biologically related individuals are deemed to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue only when they are one of a small number of people who have the capacity to help. (shrink)

The Projectability Challenge states that a metaethical view must explain how ordinary agents can, on the basis of moral experience and reflection, accurately and justifiably apply moral concepts to novel situations. In this paper, we argue for two primary claims. First, paradigm nonnaturalism can satisfactorily answer the projectability challenge. Second, it is unclear whether there is a version of moral naturalism that can satisfactorily answer the challenge. The conclusion we draw is that there is an important respect in which nonnaturalism (...) holds an advantage over its most prominent naturalist rivals. The conclusion is interesting if only because it is widely assumed that naturalism has an easier time handling thorny problems in moral epistemology. We argue that there is at least one such problem of which this assumption is not true. (shrink)

It is proposed that conscious qualia arise when and only when the 'running' of physical processes takes a special, complex form. Running in general is the unified unfolding of processes through time, and is claimed to be an additional quality of physical processes beyond their state trajectories. The type of running needed for conscious qualia is reflexive in physically affecting and responding to itself. Intuitively, running is essentially the flow of causation, and the self-affecting/responding is a matter of causation bearing (...) a causal relationship to itself: that is, causation can itself be reflexive. The proposal potentially makes temporal qualia the most fundamental qualia, with others derivatively arising. The proposal is neutral about whether a conscious process occurs in a natural organism, in a physically implemented computational system, or in some other physical substrate, as long as the substrate involves the special reflexive runningness. (shrink)

Estimates of the burden of disease assess the mortality and morbidity that affect a population by producing summary measures of health such as quality-adjusted life years and disability-adjusted life years. These measures typically do not include stillbirths among the negative health outcomes they count. Priority-setting decisions that rely on these measures are therefore likely to place little value on preventing the more than three million stillbirths that occur annually worldwide. In contrast, neonatal deaths, which occur in comparable numbers, have a (...) substantial impact on burden of disease estimates and are commonly seen as a pressing health concern. In this article we argue in favor of incorporating unintended fetal deaths that occur late in pregnancy into estimates of the burden of disease. Our argument is based on the similarity between late-term fetuses and newborn infants and the assumption that protecting newborns is important. We respond to four objections to counting stillbirths: that fetuses are not yet part of the population and so their deaths should not be included in measures of population health; that valuing the prevention of stillbirths will undermine women's reproductive rights; that including stillbirths implies that miscarriages should also be included; and that birth itself is in fact ethically significant. We conclude that our proposal is ethically preferable to current practice and, if adopted, is likely to lead to improved decisions about health spending. (shrink)