Certain facts about subjective successions support, I hold, a theory of mind?dependent sensory data. Suppose that no such theory is true and, furthermore, that as one experiences a visual subjective succession, that of which one is visually aware consists typically in a static physical array. Nevertheless one will, I hold, experience a certain change taking place within one's visual field; and under the imagined conditions, it is hard to fathom what this change could be. Various seemingly plausible and helpful suggestions (...) are examined and rejected. I conclude that neither a common?sense realism nor, in fact, any view which rejects mind?dependent sensory data can deal satisfactorily with subjective successions. (shrink)

We shall get to the crux of the issue if we ask, "What is it that reason is after, and hopes to achieve?" According to Blanshard, it is the grasp of necessity; it is the knowledge not simply of what is, but also and at the same time of what in the strictest sense must be. For reason seeks a final answer to the question, "Why?"; and only when one's knowledge is necessary is a further "Why?" found to be entirely (...) superfluous. Now perfect necessity may be grasped, thinks Blanshard, only in a context of total knowledge. The final goal of reason is thus a knowledge of the world which is perfectly necessary, and by virtue of this fact perfectly complete. (shrink)

What were seen widely in Hume's time as "the obvious dictates of reason" are rarely if ever seen as such today. One reads now that the table does not seem to diminish as one removes oneself from it; instead it appears roughly the same in size all the while. And, what if it did seem to diminish? This would not prove that the existent of which one is visually aware is diminishing, and is therefore but the image of the table (...) rather than the table itself. The appearance of an object is not another object; it is just the original object appearing. Quite simply, things may seem otherwise than they are. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that becoming, Or passage, Is not merely paradoxical, But positively contradictory. On the assumption that events become, We are entitled to say that at certain times, Certain events are earlier or later, As the case may be, Than such temporal events as the characterization of events by presentness. But since temporal relations are permanent, They cannot be said without contradiction to obtain at any one time as opposed to another.

Is the existence of God a reasonable metaphysical hypothesis? So asks A. C. Ewing in his important posthumous work, Value and Reality. Thus the topic of the book is theistic religion, not in its entirety, but rather merely in its intellectual part. That it does have such a part, and further that it makes claims ‘to objective truth in the field of metaphysics’, is defended on the grounds that a fictional ‘story’ about God has what religious or ethical impact it (...) may have because, or at least mainly because, it is taken precisely not as fictional, but as expressing an objective theological truth; and that a story, or an account, can constitute a good reason for one's acting in a certain way only if the account is, in fact, objectively true. Bearing on both points is Ewing's observation that ‘emotion, at least except in pathological cases, requires some objective belief about the real, true or false, to support it for long, and if it exists without knowledge or rationally founded belief with which it is in agreement, it is to be condemned as irrational or unfitting, as it would be unfitting to rejoice at something disastrous or be angry with an inanimate thing’. The claim is not, we are told, that religious statements are literal as distinguished from symbolic. The door would seem to be left open, in fact, to their all being symbolic. What is essential is that some of them symbolise distinctively metaphysical truths, or truths ‘going beyond the realm of science’ and ‘throwing some light on the general nature of the real’. We should indeed distinguish, Ewing notes, ‘belief in’ from ‘belief that’. Yet the former is not possible without the latter. ‘Unless I believe that God exists I cannot believe in God’. So in Ewing's opinion, statements of metaphysics—if not concerning God, then at least concerning certain general aspects of reality—are most important for religion as a whole, and are, in being true, conceptually necessary to its validity, or to its ‘fittingness’. (shrink)

Taxation and government policy related to it have only episodic appearance in classical Protestant ethical sources. Of the early sixteenth century reformers, Luther gave most attention to the subject, justifying taxation in general as necessary for the just service of government to the public good and calling the princes to spend tax monies for that good rather than their own luxury. Calvin made much the same claims but called more clearly for official church scrutiny of all government than did Luther. (...) Two centuries later John Wesley criticized English tax policy, appealing to standards of economic efficiency and compassion for the poor with little reference overtly to theology. The churches of colonial and post-revolutionary America developed no systematic, theologically rooted rationale for taxation ethics, either; but official Protestant denominational concern for such ethics has grown measurably in the most recent fifteen years. After a survey of these recent national church statements, and on the basis of them and the slender Protestant heritage on this issue, we end by posing four questions which we see as worthy of much serious thinking by contemporary American Protestant ethicists and church bodies. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 732-738, November 2019.

From ancient times to the present, the discovery and presentation of new proofs of previously established theorems has been a salient feature of mathematical practice. Why? What purposes are served by such endeavors? And how do mathematicians judge whether two proofs of the same theorem are essentially different? Consideration of such questions illuminates the roles that proofs play in the validation and communication of mathematical knowledge and raises issues that have yet to be resolved by mathematical logicians. The Appendix, in (...) which several proofs of the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic are compared, provides a miniature case study. (shrink)

It is argued that statements about the ways in which objects appear entail the existence of appearances; in other words, ?A appears ?? ('appears? used phenomenologically) entails ?(Ex) ?x?. The argument turns on the proper analysis of comparative appearance statements, such as ?A feels warmer (to someone) than B?. Here A and B are not being compared directly with respect to the complex character of feeling warm. One is not, in other words, saying that A feels warm more than does (...) B ? an ambiguous statement. Instead, one is saying that A's feel or appearance, or way of feeling or appearing, is warmer than B's. And in making this statement one asserts the existence of appearances. This result is then extended to cover statements of the form ?A appears ??. It is maintained that this generalized result serves to reinstate most of the traditional problems of perception. (shrink)

Certain facts about subjective successions support, I hold, a theory of mind?dependent sensory data. Suppose that no such theory is true and, furthermore, that as one experiences a visual subjective succession, that of which one is visually aware consists typically in a static physical array. Nevertheless one will, I hold, experience a certain change taking place within one's visual field; and under the imagined conditions, it is hard to fathom what this change could be. Various seemingly plausible and helpful suggestions (...) are examined and rejected. I conclude that neither a common?sense realism nor, in fact, any view which rejects mind?dependent sensory data can deal satisfactorily with subjective successions. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

The symposium »Does the Concept of ›Truth‹ Have Value in the Pursuit of Cross-Cultural Philosophy?« hones on a methodological question which has deep implications on doing philosophy cross-culturally. Drawing on early Confucian writers, the anchor, Henry Rosemont, Jr., attempts to explain why he is skeptical of pat, affirmative answers to this question. His co-symposiasts James Maffie, John Maraldo, and Sonam Thakchoe follow his trail in working out multi-faceted views on truth from Mexican, Japanese Confucian, and Tibetan Buddhist perspectives respectively. (...) As these positions substantiate, the aforementioned non-Anglo-European traditions seem to draw on an integrated view of thinking, feeling, and living a human life. For their practitioners, truth is less of a correspondence with a given external reality. In fact, it enables human beings to strike the right path in living good, social lives. (shrink)

Religious considerations in medical decision-making have enjoyed newfound attention in recent years, challenging the assumption that the domains of biological and spiritual flourishing can be cleanly separated in clinical practice. A surprising majority of patients desire their physicians to engage their religious and spiritual concerns, yet most never receive such attention, particularly in cases near the end of life where such attention seems most warranted.1–3 As physicians Aparna Sajja and Christina Puchalski recently wrote in the AMA Journal of Ethics theme (...) issue on ‘Religion and Spirituality in Healthcare Practice’, modern medical training is ‘falling short of preparing physicians to help patients with the metaphysical needs of their illness’.4 It would seem then that both patients and physicians might challenge the conclusions proffered by philosophers Jake Greenblum and Ryan Hubbard in ‘Responding to Religious Patients: Why Physicians Have No Business Doing Theology’, in which they claim that physicians ought not to engage religious reasoning for medical decisions. Their conclusion relies on two core arguments: a ‘public reason’ argument and a ‘fiduciary argument’, both of which contend that theology and religious considerations have no place in medical reasoning. We find that two central errors undergird these arguments. First is the fraught notion of an epistemically and ethically normative public reason, and second is a fundamental mischaracterisation of the fiduciary nature of the patient–physician relationship and the nature of medicine itself. In response, we argue that all physicians essentially ‘do theology’ and that, rather than divorcing theology from medical practice, clinicians should make it their business to do theology well. To support the exclusion of religious reasoning from medical decision-making, the authors open with a ‘public reason argument’, suggesting that physicians serve in roles closely resembling those of public officials. As such, the physician as public official ought to limit himself …. (shrink)

Now language is very important for philosophizing, and, as we shall see, especially important for metaphysics. Metaphysics is reflection on the world as intellectually experienced, and this means, on the world as known and formulated and expressed in language or discourse. As Frederick Woodbridge puts it, "Telling the truth about man's intellectual experience of the world, and trying to discover what that truth implies, is the business of philosophy." Naturally, this attempt leads beyond that intellectual experience of the world, that (...) formulation in discourse, to the world itself. It leads to the context in which the world is experienced reflectively, to the "immediately" or "directly" experienced world—to the world encountered in our many other ways of experiencing it than reflective, intellectual, or linguistic. For "intellectual experience" is a way of experiencing the world, and "linguistic formulation" is a way of expressing and articulating subject-matter encountered and experienced in many other ways. (shrink)