In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Receiving the Gift of Life: My Kidney Transplant StoryJudith W. RyanAs one of three siblings who all inherited an unfortunate gene from our mother, I was born with polycystic kidney disease (PKD). None of us knew of this, however, until later middle age, and my mother not until she was 76. I was the last sibling diagnosed at the age of 56. My brothers had been diagnosed some years (...) before and jokingly started to look at me as a universal donor. Since I had a 50-50 chance of having PKD and with a mother who was one of eight children with none of her siblings known to have the disease, I had not felt an urgency to be tested. Besides, I had no signs or symptoms. But now there was a reason. I made an appointment for a renal ultrasound and while having the procedure, I tipped the screen so that I could see the results. Although the technician was not happy with this, I was repaid with the view of my kidneys looking full of bubbles. Yes, our family was three for three in the genetic game of roulette.I knew immediately how I was going to navigate this health issue. As an adult nurse practitioner I had a very good understanding of what was to come. I knew my blood type “O” was the most common and would mean the longest wait for a deceased donor transplant, at least five years if I were lucky and only after enduring several years of progressing renal failure. In addition, I had cared for dialysis patients and watched my mother endure with difficulty both peritoneal and hemodialysis prior to her death a year before my diagnosis. Knowing I would not choose dialysis left me hoping for a miracle of a living donor or, more realistically, managing my disease as best I could until I died.The next step was managing PKD symptoms and issues as my kidneys continued to fail. One of the errors in my thinking during this time turned out to be that because I had two brothers who had the same disease and were ahead of me in their disease progression, I could follow their lead. It turned out that we manifested our disease very differently. My younger brother, who was diagnosed first, had to deal with significant pain from persistent cyst ruptures, monthly, biweekly then weekly. This continued even after his transplant until he had his native kidneys removed. The other two of us did not have to deal with cyst ruptures. Additionally, anemia was no problem for my younger brother but was for us older siblings. Significant fatigue and weariness were a problem for both of my brothers but not for me.And so it went, as we compared our blood test results, that the idea of a living donor entered the conversation. I knew this would be a problem for me because how do you ask people to consider being a donor? I had difficulty asking friends for a ride to the airport. This is where the grace and kindness of others and divine intervention enter [End Page 107] our story—word about our medical dilemma spread through the visibility of my younger brother, a minister in New England.Fortunately for me, my much beloved younger brother had dozens of people who wanted to be his donor. About 12 of these potential donors were actually tested before finding a match. One of his unmatched donors became the donor for my older brother (our first family transplant). Two years later, my other brother received his transplant. Three years later, after being told he was not a good match for my brother, this dear man came forward to be a possible donor for me. Hence, I got my transplant from an unused donor from my younger brother’s group. Overall, we had living donors from three different churches located within an hour of each other in New England. I even lucked out and acquired the minister of one of the churches as my donor. All three of us received kidneys over five years from living donors who did not know my older brother... (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and (...) class='Hi'>Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

The time of vegetal life itself—denoted as plant-time in this article, following the work of Michael Marder—is essential to human-plant relations. Conceptualized as a multi-dimensional plexity, vegetal temporality embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns. The contemporary poet Judith Wright invoked a time-space continuum throughout her writing as a means to convey the primordial character of Australian plants while resisting the imposition of a colonialist schema of time. Wright’s bold textualization (...) of vegetal temporality embodies her commitment to fostering botanical ethics and locally-grounded activism on behalf of Aboriginal people and the Australian environment. (shrink)

The time of vegetal life itself—denoted as plant-time in this article, following the work of Michael Marder—is essential to human-plant relations. Conceptualized as a multi-dimensional plexity, vegetal temporality embodies the endemic land-based seasons, rhythms, cycles, and timescales of flora in conjunction with human patterns. The contemporary poet Judith Wright invoked a time-space continuum throughout her writing as a means to convey the primordial character of Australian plants while resisting the imposition of a colonialist schema of time. Wright’s bold textualization (...) of vegetal temporality embodies her commitment to fostering botanical ethics and locally-grounded activism on behalf of Aboriginal people and the Australian environment. (shrink)

In his postapocalyptic novel, Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf (2016) makes an important observation about the effect crises can have on human psychology by noting that "hard times create strong [humans]" (loc. 200). While the catastrophic effects of the recent COVID-19 outbreak are incontestable, there are arguments to be made that the situation itself could be materia prima of a more grounded, and authentic generation of humanity, at least in theory. In this article I draw on Heidegger's early, implicit (...) ethic of finitude as well as his later work surrounding the nature of technology, and place them into dialogue with a global milieu contextualized by worldwide pandemic. I approach this discussion from two different angles: in the first part, I explicate the ethic of finitude, and use it as a framework to describe the observable behavior of communities worldwide in order to better understand how global crises impact the psychical welfare of individual human beings. In the second part, I apply lessons given to us by the later Heidegger, specifically those oriented around the movement away from calculative thinking, in an effort to define a loose, albeit fundamentally ennobling prescriptive aimed at easing the existential strain of the situation we have found ourselves in. *This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Arenas. The final authenticated version is available at DOI: 10.1007/s42087-020-00142-6. (shrink)

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. In The Reasonable Robot, Ryan Abbott argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle that will ultimately improve human (...) well-being. This work should be read by anyone interested in the rapidly evolving relationship between AI and the law. (shrink)

Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on (...) diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. (shrink)

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition (...) that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

A variety of non-human females do not select male partners independently. Instead they favor males having previous associations with other females, a phenomenon known as mate copying. This paper investigates whether humans also exhibit mate copying and whether consistent positive information about a man’s mate value, and a woman’s age and self-perceived mate value (SPMV), influence her tendency to copy the mate choices of others. Female university students (N = 123) rated the desirability of photographed men pictured alone or with (...) one, two, or five women represented by silhouettes. In accordance with the visual arrays, men were described as currently in a romantic relationship; having previously been in one, two, or five relationships; or not having had a romantic relationship in the past 4 years. Women generally rated men pictured with one or two previous partners as more desirable than those with none. Men depicted with five previous partners, however, were found to be less desirable. Younger, presumably less experienced women had a greater tendency to mate copy compared with older women, but high SPMV did not predict greater levels of mate copying. The findings reaffirmed and expanded those suggesting that women do not make mate choices independently. (shrink)

This mixed methods study examines how college students’ perceptions and experiences affect their understanding of academic integrity. Using qualitative and quantitative responses from the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory, both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while campuses may see a reduction in overall levels of cheating when punitive academic integrity policies are present, students may develop higher levels of personal and academic integrity through the use of more holistic and community-focused practices.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Schopenhauer's philosophy of religion. It develops a contextual account of Schopenhauer's relation to the religions of India by placing his interpretation of their main doctrines within the perspective of his diagnosis of the religious situation in nineteenth-century Europe, and his revised conception of the proper content and methods of metaphysical philosophy in the wake of Kant. It shows that Schopenhauer's encounter with the religions of India was the stimulus for his formulation of (...) a novel theory of a revitalised modern Christianity. The possibility of an oriental renaissance prompted Schopenhauer to argue that Christianity's immanent or ethical teachings needed to be severed from its supernatural or metaphysical doctrines, so that European culture could continue to satisfy the human need for a metaphysical interpretation of the world and life. This book will be of interest to philosophers, theologians, students of religion and modern intellectual history. (shrink)

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

This book explores the constraints which justice imposes on immigration policy. Like liberal nationalists, Ryan Pevnick argues that citizens have special claims to the institutions of their states. However, the source of these special claims is located in the citizenry's ownership of state institutions rather than in a shared national identity. Citizens contribute to the construction and maintenance of institutions, and as a result they have special claims to these institutions and a limited right to exclude outsiders. Pevnick shows (...) that the resulting view justifies a set of policies - including support for certain types of guest worker programs - which is distinct from those supported by either liberal nationalists or advocates of open borders. His book provides a framework for considering a number of connected topics including issues related to self-determination, the scope of distributive justice and the significance of shared national identity. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection, and show that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the “adjacent properties” response); and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the “equivocation of motivation required” response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; and also clarify where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral-aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

We theoretically discuss and empirically show how CEO power based on environmental expertise and formal influence over executives and directors, in the absence and presence of shareholder activism, spurs firms toward greener strategies. Our results support the idea that CEOs with informal power, grounded in expertise, reduce corporate environmental impact and this relationship is amplified when the CEO also enjoys formal power over the board of directors. Additionally, we found that any source of CEO power, whether informal or formal, is (...) a good catalyst for transforming shareholder activism into corporate greening. However, in the absence of such activism, only CEOs’ informal environmental expert power acts as a determinant of firm environmental performance. (shrink)

Strike action in healthcare has been a common global phenomenon. As such action is designed to be disruptive, it creates substantial ethical tension, the most cited of which relates to patient harm, that is, a strike may not only disrupt an employer, but it could also have serious implications for the delivery of care. This article systematically reviewed the literature on strike action in healthcare with the aim of providing an overview of the major justifications for strike action, identifying relative (...) strengths and shortcomings of this literature and providing direction for future discussions, and theoretical and empirical research. Three major themes emerged related to (1) the relationship between healthcare workers, patients and society; (2) the consequences of strike action; and (3) the conduct of strike action. Those who argue against strike action generally cite the harms of such action, particularly as it relates to patients. Many also argue that healthcare workers, because of their skills and position in society, have a special obligation to their patients and society more generally. Those who see this action as not only permissible but also, in some cases, necessary have advanced several points in response, arguing that healthcare workers do not necessarily have any special obligation to their patients or society, and even if so, this obligation is not absolute. Overwhelmingly, when talking about the potential risks of strike action, authors have focused on patient welfare and the impact that a strike could have. Several directions for future work are identified, including greater explorations into how structural and systemic issues impact strike action, the need for greater consideration about the contextual factors that influence the risks and characteristics of strike action and finally the need to tie this literature to existing empirical evidence. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper aims to correct both of (...) these mistakes, and thus clarify the debate over persistence. (shrink)

Chronic pain is a common disorder with enormous sociomedical importance. A major part of primary and secondary costs of illness is caused by the various pain syndromes. Nociception – the sensory perception of a painful stimulus – is a complex process relying on an intricate system of anatomical, neurophysiological and biochemical networks. This applies even more so to pain – the state of experiencing a nociceptive event, of interpreting it in terms of meaning for the affected individual and of suffering (...) a range of emotions it elicits. This intricacy renders it obvious, that the empirical medical sciences alone cannot explain all aspects of pain. Hence, it has also become a focus of phenomenological research. One aspect of these investigations is the interaction of pain and the perception of the lived body’s spatiality. The focus of this article will build on these concepts to develop a construct of the alteration of temporality caused by chronic pain and the effects this spells out for the affected subject. To this end, I will primarily draw on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the lived body as well as on theories of enactivism and embodiment. I will also point out parallels to neuroscientific data, thereby demonstrating the proximity of phenomenology and neuroscience. A possible partial solution to the pain dilemma may be derived from psychology: techniques relying on cognitive behavioural intervention, awareness training, and existential analysis may provide alleviation to patients suffering from chronic pain. (shrink)

Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, (...) but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models' robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes. (shrink)

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there has been an increasing interest in the social aspects of belief acquisition. In particular, there has been a focus on the division of cognitive labor in science. This essay explores several different models of the division of cognitive labor, with particular focus on Kitcher, Strevens, Weisberg and Muldoon, and Zollman. The essay then shows how many of the benefits of the division of cognitive labor flow from leveraging agent diversity. The essay concludes (...) by examining the benefits and burdens of diversity, particularly in the evaluative diversity that can be found in interdisicplinary science. (shrink)

In this article I will introduce and outline the concept of resistance as it relates to health and healthcare. Starting with a number of examples of action, I will then turn to the broader literature to discuss some conventional definitions and related concepts, outlining debates, controversies and limitations related to conceptualizing resistance. I conceptualize resistance broadly, as any act, performed by any individual (or collective) acting as or explicitly identifying as a healthcare professional, that is a response to power, most (...) often in opposition to contentious, harmful or unjust rules, practices, policies or structures. Practically this could account for any public action, marches, sit‐ins and civil disobedience, but also forms of ‘everyday resistance’, such as working slowly, feigning sickness, or even providing care for marginalized groups that would otherwise not have access. Such action could go unrecognized by those in power and perhaps more contentiously, those resisting needn’t even recognize their actions as resistance. I will then apply this conceptualization to explain action that has been undertaken by healthcare professionals, identifying its key features. I will briefly discuss future directions for inquiry that appear particularly pressing. These including ongoing conceptual development, identifying the functions of resistance in health and healthcare along with what makes it distinct from healthcare as usual and other forms of resistance and finally, the range of normative questions resistance raises. (shrink)

In The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraint, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose ethical standards for the use of chemical restraints, which they consider normatively distinct from physica...

This essay examines Friedman's recent approach to the analysis of physical theories. Friedman argues against Quine that the identification of certain principles as ‘constitutive’ is essential to a satisfactory methodological analysis of physics. I explicate Friedman's characterization of a constitutive principle, and I evaluate his account of the constitutive principles that Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation presuppose for their formulation. I argue that something close to Friedman's thesis is defensible.

This paper develops a novel problem for representationalism (also known as "intentionalism"), a popular contemporary account of perception. We argue that representationalism is incompatible with supervaluationism, the leading contemporary account of vagueness. The problem generalizes to naive realism and related views, which are also incompatible with supervaluationism.

In recent years the doctrine of divine simplicity has become a topic of interest in the philosophical theological community. In particular, the modal collapse argument against divine simplicity has garnered various responses from proponents of divine simplicity. Some even claiming that the modal collapse argument is invalid. It is our contention that these responses have either misunderstood or misstated the argument, and have thus missed the force of the objection. Our main aim is to clarify what the modal collapse argument (...) in fact says, and explain why the recent responses do not succeed. In order to argue our case, we will proceed in several steps. First, we aim to systematically articulate the doctrine of divine simplicity. Second, articulate the Christian conviction that God is free to create any feasible world or no world at all. Third, argue that divine simplicity suffers a modal collapse and thus undermines God's freedom. Fourth, respond to potential objections to modal collapse. Fifth, we offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Aristotle wrote that "the ultimate purpose in studying ethics is not as it is in other inquiries, the attainment of theoretical knowledge; we are not conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, else there would be no advantage in studying it." Ethics for Life is a multicultural and interdisciplinary introductory ethics textbook that provides students with an ethics curriculum that has been shown to significantly improve students' ability to make real-life moral (...) decisions. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue that consensus models offer us a (...) solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

The problem : commerce and corruption -- Smith's defense of commercial society -- What is corruption? : political and psychological perspectives -- Smith on corruption : from the citizen to the human being -- The solution : moral philosophy -- Liberal individualism and virtue ethics -- Social science vs. moral philosophy -- Types of moral philosophy : natural jurisprudence vs. ethics -- Types of ethics : utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics -- Virtue ethics : modern, ancient, and Smithean -- Interlude (...) : the what and the how of TMS VI -- The what : Sith's "practical system of morality" -- The how : rhetoric, audience, and the methods of practical ethics -- The how : the ascent of self-love in three stages -- Prudence or commercial virtue -- The challenge : from praise to prudence -- Educating the vain : fathers and sons -- Self-interest rightly understood -- The advantages and disadvantages of prudence -- Magnanimity or classical virtue -- The problems of prudence and the therapy of magnanimity -- Up from individualism : desert, praiseworthiness, conscience -- Modernity, antiquity, and magnanimity -- The dangers of magnanimity -- Beneficence or christian virtue -- Between care and caritas -- Benevolence and beneficence and the human telos -- The character and purposes of the wise and virtuous man -- Wisdom and virtue and Adam Smith's apology -- Epilogue: The "economy of greatness". (shrink)

Bilateral proof systems, which provide rules for both affirming and denying sentences, have been prominent in the development of proof-theoretic semantics for classical logic in recent years. However, such systems provide a substantial amount of freedom in the formulation of the rules, and, as a result, a number of different sets of rules have been put forward as definitive of the meanings of the classical connectives. In this paper, I argue that a single general schema for bilateral proof rules has (...) a reasonable claim to inferentially articulating the core meaning of all of the classical connectives. I propose this schema in the context of a bilateral sequent calculus in which each connective is given exactly two rules: a rule for affirmation and a rule for denial. Positive and negative rules for all of the classical connectives are given by a single rule schema, harmony between these positive and negative rules is established at the schematic level by a pair of elimination theorems, and the truth-conditions for all of the classical connectives are read off at once from the schema itself. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, (...) including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation. (shrink)