Twentieth-century developments in logic and mathematics have led many people to view Euclid’s proofs as inherently informal, especially due to the use of diagrams in proofs. In _Euclid and His Twentieth-Century Rivals_, Nathaniel Miller discusses the history of diagrams in Euclidean Geometry, develops a formal system for working with them, and concludes that they can indeed be used rigorously. Miller also introduces a diagrammatic computer proof system, based on this formal system. This volume will be of interest (...) to mathematicians, computer scientists, and anyone interested in the use of diagrams in geometry. (shrink)

In an article in the Journal of Philosophical Logic in 1996, "Towards a Model Theory of Venn Diagrams," (Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 463-482), Hammer and Danner proved the full completeness of Shin's formal system for reasoning with Venn Diagrams. Their proof is eight pages long. This note gives a brief five line proof of this same result, using connections between diagrammatic and sentential representations.

In an article in the Journal of Philosophical Logic in 1996, "Towards a Model Theory of Venn Diagrams,", Hammer and Danner proved the full completeness of Shin's formal system for reasoning with Venn Diagrams. Their proof is eight pages long. This note gives a brief five line proof of this same result, using connections between diagrammatic and sentential representations.

In several articles, Mumma has presented a formal diagrammatic system Eu meant to give an account of one way in which Euclid's use of diagrams in the Elements could be formalized. However, largely because of the way in which it tries to limit case analysis, this system ends up being inconsistent, as shown here. Eu also suffers from several other problems: it is unable to prove several wide classes of correct geometric claims and contains a construction rule that is probably (...) computationally intractable and that may not even be decidable. (shrink)

It is commonplace to view the rigor of the mathematics in Euclid's Elements in the way an experienced teacher views the work of an earnest beginner: respectable relative to an early stage of development, but ultimately flawed. Given the close connection in content between Euclid's Elements and high-school geometry classes, this is understandable. Euclid, it seems, never realized what everyone who moves beyond elementary geometry into more advanced mathematics is now customarily taught: a fully rigorous proof cannot rely on geometric (...) intuition. In his arguments he seems to call illicitly upon our understanding of how objects like triangles and circles behave rather than grounding everything rigorously in axioms.Though widespread, the attitude is in a historical sense puzzling. For over two millenia, mathematicians of all levels studied the arguments in Elements and found nothing substantial missing. The book, on the contrary, represented the limit of mathematical explicitness. It served as the paradigm for careful and exact reasoning. How it could enjoy this reputation for so long is mysterious if careful and exact reasoning demands that all inferences be grounded in a modern axiomatic theory in the way Hilbert did in his famous Foundations of Geometry. By these standards, Euclid's work is deeply flawed. The holes in his arguments are not minor and excusable, but massive and cryptic.With his book Euclid and His Twentieth Century Rivals, Nathaniel Miller makes substantial progress in clearing this mystery up. The book is an explication of FG , a formal system of proof developed by Miller which reconstructs Euclid's deductions as essentially diagrammatic. The holes in Euclid's arguments are taken to appear precisely at those steps which are unintelligible without an accompanying geometric diagram. Interpreting the reasoning in the Elements in terms of a modern axiomatization , …. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider (...) the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

In line with Ken Manders’s seminal account of Euclid’s diagrammatic method in the “The Euclidean Diagram,” two proof systems with a diagrammatic syntax have been advanced as formalizations of the method FG and Eu. In a paper examining Eu, Nathaniel Miller, the creator of FG, has identified a variety of technical problems with the formal details of Eu. This response shows how the problems are remedied.

A popular principle about grounding, “Internality”, says that if A grounds B, then necessarily, if A and B obtain, then A grounds B. I argue that Internality is false. Its falsity reveals a distinctive, new kind of explanation, which I call “ennobling”. Its falsity also entails that every previously proposed theory of what grounds grounding facts is false. I construct a new theory.

This article surveys the exponential increase in Rand references in scholarly and popular sources to illustrate her cultural ascendancy as an iconic figure. Special attention is paid to Rand's impact on popular literature, television, cartoons, and illustrated media, including comics. Rand's own involvement in illustrated presentations of her ideas is explored, as is her influence on such comic artists as Steve Ditko, Frank Miller, and others. Nathaniel Branden's insights on the role of comics in projecting heroic values are (...) also addressed. (shrink)

Why do we so often care about the outcomes of games when nothing is at stake? There is a paradox here, much like the paradox of fiction, which concerns why we care about the fates and threats of merely fictional beings. I argue that the paradox threatens to overturn a great deal of what philosophers have thought about caring, severing its connection to value and undermining its moral weight. I defend a solution to the paradox that draws on Kendall Walton's (...) solution to the paradox of fiction, developing his idea that it be extended to games. The solution takes games to involve make‐believe: in particular, players and spectators make‐believe that the outcome of the game matters. I also explore how the phenomenon extends beyond games. And I explore some moral implications: in particular, my view preserves the idea that we have reason not to impede others in their pursuit of what they care about. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I (...) conclude with implications for agent‐causal theories of free will. (shrink)

We argue that supererogation cannot be understood just in terms of reasons for action. In addition to reasons, a theory of supererogation must include prerogatives, which can make an action permissible without counting in favor of doing it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Incoherence of Determining Death by Neurological Criteria: A Commentary on Controversies in the Determination of Death, A White Paper by the President’s Council on Bioethics*Franklin G. Miller** (bio) and Robert D. Truog (bio)Traditionally the cessation of breathing and heart beat has marked the passage from life to death. Shortly after death was determined, the body became a cold corpse, suitable for burial or cremation. Two technological changes (...) in the second half of the twentieth century prompted calls for a new, or at least expanded, definition of death: the development of intensive care medicine, especially the use of mechanical ventilators, and the advent of successful transplantation of vital organs. Patients with profound neurological damage, leaving them incapable of breathing on their own and in an irreversible coma, could be maintained for some period of time with the aid of mechanical ventilation. The situation of these patients posed two ethical questions. Is it appropriate to stop life-sustaining treatment? If so, is it acceptable to retrieve vital organs for transplantation to save the lives of others before stopping treatment?In 1968, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proposed that death could be determined on the basis of neurological criteria, thus providing a positive answer to these two questions (Ad Hoc Committee 1968). According to the position of this committee, patients diagnosed with the cessation of brain function are dead, despite the fact that they breathe and circulate blood with the aid of mechanical ventilation. [End Page 185] Because they are dead, it is appropriate, indeed imperative, to stop mechanical ventilation. And because they are dead, it becomes ethical to procure vital organs for transplantation before stopping what otherwise would be life-sustaining treatment. Remarkably, this innovative neurological determination of death became, with little debate or controversy, the established position in medical ethics and the law throughout the United States.The Harvard Committee articulated the diagnosis of “irreversible coma,” but merely asserted that this condition constituted death. No explanatory rationale was provided. It fell to the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research to provide an authoritative rationale in its 1981 report, Defining Death. The second paragraph of the report set the stage as follows: “The question addressed here is not inherently difficult or complicated. Simply, it is whether the law ought to recognize new means for establishing that the death of a human being has occurred” (President’s Commission 1981, p. 3). The Commission claimed that “death is a unitary phenomenon” (p. 7) and that the determination of death by neurological criteria, in terms of the absence of all brain function, is consistent with the traditional conception of death as the cessation of vital functioning of the organism as a whole. The key issue is the integrative functioning of the human organism, which ceases to exist, according to the Commission, when the whole brain, including higher cortical areas and the brain stem, fails to function. Although “brain-dead” patients do not appear to be dead—i.e., the reality of their death is “masked” by the activity of mechanical ventilation—the patient’s body has irreversibly lost all capacity for integrative functioning. In the words of the Commission: “When artificial means of support mask this loss of integration as measured by the old methods [cessation of respiration and heart beat], brain-oriented criteria and tests provide a new window on the same phenomenon” (p. 33). The President’s Commission was instrumental in developing and establishing “The Uniform Definition of Death Act”: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead” (p. 2).Although the question posed by the President’s Commission was easy to articulate, the answer, over time, has proved complicated and controversial. The coherence and cogency of determining death by neurological criteria has been challenged. Various experts have demonstrated that “brain-dead” patients maintained on mechanical ventilation display a range of vital, integrative, functioning, which conflicts with the judgment that they are dead (Truog and... (shrink)

Special moral, regulatory, and scientific questions surround the inclusion of children in health-related research. These questions arise from a fundamental moral tension between the obligation to expose children to research participation to ensure that they share in the benefits that arise from it and the obligation to protect them from the harms associated with their inappropriate involvement in research. This tension is felt in the development of moral and regulatory frameworks for the protection of child research subjects and in the (...) implementation and interpretation of these frameworks by institutional review boards. (shrink)

Comics can be ordered in a range of ways, most overtly by issue number for works within a series, and by page number for pages within works. The internal elements of a comic can also be ordered by formal details found within pages. We identify four kinds of formal details specific to comics pages or two-page spreads: how their elements are arranged, how they are viewed, what events they represent, and when information about those events is presented.

Arthur Miller is one of the most important and enduring playwrights of the last fifty years. This new edition of The Theater Essays has been expanded by nearly fifty percent to include his most significant articles and interviews since the book's initial publication in 1978. Within these pages Miller discusses the roots of modern drama, the nature of tragedy, and the state of contemporary theater; offers illuminating observations on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Williams; probes the different approaches (...) and attitudes toward theater in Russia, China, and at home; and, of course, provides valuable insights into his own vast dramatic corpus. For this edition the literary chronology and cast and production information have been updated, and an extensive new bibliography has been added. The Theater Essays confirms Arthur Miller's standing as a brilliant, eloquent commentator on drama and culture. No one interested in theater should be without this definitive collection. (shrink)

Language serves many purposes in our individual lives and our varied interpersonal interactions. Daniel Everett's claim that language primarily emerges from an “interactional instinct“ and not a classic “language instinct“ gives proper weight to the importance of coordinated communication in meeting our adaptive needs. Yet the argument that language is a “cultural tool“, motivated by an underlying “instinct“, does not adequately explain the complex, yet complementary nature of both linguistic regularities and variations in everyday speech. Our alternative suggestion is that (...) language use, and coordinated communication more generally, is an emergent product of human self-organization processes. Both broad regularities and specific variations in linguistic structure and behavior can be accounted for by self-organizational processes that operate without explicit internal rules, blueprints, or mental representations. A major implication of this view is that both linguistic patterns and behaviors, within and across speakers, emerge from the dynamical interactions of brain, body, and world, which gives rise to highly context-sensitive and varied linguistic performances. (shrink)

Language serves many purposes in our individual lives and our varied interpersonal interactions. Daniel Everett’s claim that language primarily emerges from an “interactional instinct” and not a classic “language instinct” gives proper weight to the importance of coordinated communication in meeting our adaptive needs. Yet the argument that language is a “cultural tool”, motivated by an underlying “instinct”, does not adequately explain the complex, yet complementary nature of both linguistic regularities and variations in everyday speech. Our alternative suggestion is that (...) language use, and coordinated communication more generally, is an emergent product of human self-organization processes. Both broad regularities and specific variations in linguistic structure and behavior can be accounted for by self-organizational processes that operate without explicit internal rules, blueprints, or mental representations. A major implication of this view is that both linguistic patterns and behaviors, within and across speakers, emerge from the dynamical interactions of brain, body, and world, which gives rise to highly context-sensitive and varied linguistic performances. (shrink)

Research reported by Posner & Raichle may be usefully applied to the rehabilitation of persons with brain damage. Their findings are related to the “dual premotorsystems hypothesis” that reciprocally interactive medial and lateral brain systems are involved in attention and learning. Recent studies show that “brain healing” occurs through dynamic reorganization involving attentional networks postulated by Posner & Raichle.

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

"Let a Kantian view of empirical truth be any view according to which the truth of empirical claim depends on the truth of non-empirical claims, because subjects (consciously or not) constitute the empirical when applying the non-empirical to experience. Historically the most important such view is Immanuel Kant’s. It is not the only. Rudolf Carnap, Thomas Kuhn, and Donald Davidson held such views. Conversely, Willard van Orman Quine’s view was contrastingly instructive. My aim is to briefly sort all this out (...) in search of lessons about the nature of empirical truth generally. Keywords: anthropocentric; ethnocentric; idiocentric; Kant; Immanuel; logocentric; truth. ". (shrink)

A new reading of a crucial chapter in the history of social and political thought – the transition from the late Enlightenment to early liberalism.

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs (...) but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

A revised version of Nathaniel Chipman's Sketches of the Principles of Government (1793), this early treatise on the underlying principles of American government addresses civil laws and obligations, the social state, rights of property, sovereignty and political power. An important early contribution to American constitutional law, it is also interesting for its Federalist perspective on the evolutions of political institutions from Washington to Jackson.Nathaniel Chipman [1752-1843] was a leading Vermont Federalist who was instrumental in that state's admission to (...) the Union. He became Vermont's chief Justice and went on to represent Vermont in the U.S. Senate. He was also one of America's first significant legal writers.One of his books, the Reports and Dissertations (1793) is included in Warren's list of "the four general works on the Common Law... [of] permanent value in American Legal Literature.": Warren, A History of the American Bar 335-336. See Cohen, Bibliography of Early American Law 5752, Sabin, A Dictionary of Books Relating to America 12824, Dictionary of American Biography II:73-74. (shrink)

The mesostriatal dopamine system is prominently implicated in model-free reinforcement learning, with fMRI BOLD signals in ventral striatum notably covarying with model-free prediction errors. However, latent learning and devaluation studies show that behavior also shows hallmarks of model-based planning, and the interaction between model-based and model-free values, prediction errors, and preferences is underexplored. We designed a multistep decision task in which model-based and model-free influences on human choice behavior could be distinguished. By showing that choices reflected both influences we could (...) then test the purity of the ventral striatal BOLD signal as a model-free report. Contrary to expectations, the signal reflected both model-free and model-based predictions in proportions matching those that best explained choice behavior. These results challenge the notion of a separate model-free learner and suggest a more integrated computational architecture for high-level human decision-making. (shrink)

This paper traces the development of enactive concepts of value and normativity from their roots in the canonical work of Varela et al. through more recent works of Ezequiel Di Paolo and others. It aims to show the central importance of these concepts for enactive theory while exposing a potentially troublesome ambiguity in their definition. Most definitions of enactive normativity are purely proscriptive, but it seems that enactive theories of cognitive agency and experience demand something more. On the other hand, (...) it is not clear that anything other than proscriptive normativity can be made compatible with the enactive tenet of autonomy and the rejection of representations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...) essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, a... (shrink)

Warne's original study provides an insightful analysis of the role of contemplation and creation in the thought of Josef Pieper, illustrating the importance of this practice to earthly happiness and human flourishing. What is the relationship between creation, contemplation, human flourishing, and moral development? Nathaniel Warne's Josef Pieper on the Spiritual Life offers a sophisticated answer to this question through a systematic analysis of philosopher Josef Pieper's (1904-1997) thought. Warne's examination centers on the role of contemplation and creation in (...) Pieper's thinking, arguing that contemplation of the created order is a key feature of earthly happiness. By emphasizing the importance of contemplation, Pieper illustrates the deep interconnections between ethics, creation, and spirituality. For Warne, to posit a binary between the contemplative life and active life creates a false dichotomy. Following Pieper, Warne claims that theology and spirituality cannot be bracketed from ethics and social action--indeed, our lived experience in the world blurs the lines between these practices. Contemplation and action are closer together than are typically assumed, and both have important implications for both our spiritual development and our engagement with the world around us. Ultimately, Warne's emphasis on creation and contemplation represents an attempt to resist a view of ethics and the spiritual life that is divorced from our environment. In response to this view, Warne argues that we need a renewed sense that creation and place are important for self-understanding. Contemplation of creation is, at bottom, a form of communion with God--we thus need a more robust sense of how ethics and politics are rooted in God's creative action. Taking Pieper as a guide, Warne's study helps to deepen our thinking about these connections. (shrink)

Recent anthologizing of Davidson’s articles from the 1980s and 1990s encourages us to reconsider arguments contained in them. One such argument is Davidson’s omniscient-interpreter argument (“OIA”) in “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” first published 20 years ago. The OIA allegedly establishes that it is necessary that most beliefs are true. Thus the omniscient interpreter, now 20 years old, was born to answer the skeptic. In §1 of this paper, I consider charges that the OIA establishes only that it (...) is possible that most beliefs are true; if correct, then it is also possibly the case that most beliefs are false—the skeptic’s very position. Next, I consider two responses on Davidson’s behalf, showing that each fails. In §2, I show that the OIA establishes neither that it is necessarily nor possibly but actually the case that most beliefs are true. I then conclude that this is enough to answer the skeptic. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging inquiry Richard W. Miller provides new resources for coping with the most troubling types of moral conflict: disagreements in moral conviction, conflicting interests, and the tension between conscience and desires. Drawing on most fields in philosophy and the social sciences, including his previous work in the philosophy of science, he presents an account of our access to moral truth, and, within this framework, develops a theory of justice and an assessment of the role of morality in (...) rational choice. In Miller's view, we are often in a position to claim that our moral judgments are true descriptions of moral facts. But others, relying on contrary ways of moral learning, would reject truths that we are in a position to assert, in dissent that does not depend on irrationality or ignorance of relevant evidence or arguments. With this mixed verdict on moral realism, Miller challenges many received views of rationality, scientific method, and the relation between moral belief and moral choice. In his discussion of justice, Miller defends the adequacy, for modern political choices, of a widely shared demand that institutions be freely and rationally acceptable to all. Drawing on social research and economic theories, he argues that this demand has dramatically egalitarian consequences, even though it is a premise of liberals and conservatives alike. In the final chapters, Miller investigates the role and limits of morality in the choice of conduct, arguing for new perspectives on reason and impartiality. (shrink)

Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1485-1546) is well-known for his philosophical contributions to natural rights and international law. However, his extensive work on the conflict between civil authority and the authority of the Catholic Church has been largely neglected by political theorists and intellectual historians. While scholars have recently recognized the significant role played by natural law in the history of political secularism, they have focused almost exclusively on the “modern” natural law theories of Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, as opposed to (...) the “scholastic” natural law of early modern Thomists like Vitoria. This essay undertakes an analysis of Vitoria’s use of natural law theory in his approach to civil-ecclesiastical conflict. Contrary to critiques from the “modern” natural lawyers, it argues that Vitoria’s idea of natural law spearheads a forceful defence of the autonomy of civil power from ecclesiastical power. Based on his sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural spheres of human life, Vitoria argues for a “dualist” position in which civil and ecclesiastical powers are independent and equally binding on human consciences. The essay acknowledges that Vitoria’s dualism ultimately gives way to his endorsement of papal supremacy over all Christian princes. However, this papalist conclusion does not follow from Vitoria’s natural law theory but rather from an opposing political principle: the notion of the universal Christian commonwealth. (shrink)