Social robotics has a high disruptive potential, for it expands the field of application of intelligent technology to practical contexts of a relational nature. Due to their capacity to “intersubjectively” interact with people, social robots can take over new roles in our daily activities, multiplying the ethical implications of intelligent robotics. In this paper, we offer some preliminary considerations for the ethical reflection on social robotics, so that to clarify how to correctly orient the critical-normative thinking in this arduous task. (...) We defend the ‘being perspective’ and its linked categories of ‘teleology’ and ‘interest’ as the ones from which to articulate the reflection. We argue that attending primarily to the ‘being’, before the ‘doing’, of robots allow us to correctly approach the core phenomenon of all ethical concerns on social robotics, avoiding the reductionisms in the ethical gaze to which the latter may lead. (shrink)

There is long standing agreement both among philosophers and linguists that the term ‘counterfactual conditional’ is misleading if not a misnomer. Speakers of both non-past subjunctive (or ‘would’) conditionals and past subjunctive (or ‘would have’) conditionals need not convey counterfactuality. The relationship between the conditionals in question and the counterfactuality of their antecedents is thus not one of presupposing. It is one of conversationally implicating. This paper provides a thorough examination of the arguments against the presupposition view as applied to (...) past subjunctive conditionals and finds none of them conclusive. All the relevant linguistic data, it is shown, are compatible with the assumption that past subjunctive conditionals presuppose the falsity of their antecedents. This finding is not only interesting on its own. It is of vital importance both to whether we should consider antecedent counterfactuality to be part of the conventional meaning of the conditionals in question and to whether there is a deep difference between indicative and subjective conditionals. (shrink)

Kierkegaard the Christian thinker is introduced, beginning with his cultural background, his basic assumptions about the structure of the Christian universe, and the development of his vocation as religious writer. The author shows why he is different from others in his treatment of Christianity, then follows his presentations of Christian ideality and the tension and opposition in his authorship between Christianity as godly enjoyment of the world and Christianity as renunciation and total self-denial. Distributed in the US by Books International. (...) Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought. Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing (...) examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness. Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness. (shrink)

Realizar un estudio reflexivo del concepto de relato y cómo desde éste, podemos apreciar al ser humano en su diario vivir, el cual se ofrece en la posibilidad de crecimiento social y emocional al permitir ser reconocido y compartir nuestra vida con los demás; Sin embargo, la crítica de la filosofía posmoderna a los macrorelatos derivó en una proliferación de microrrelatos, afectando los procesos de verdad y de identidad personal. Por ello, busco analizar desde las aportaciones de Lyotard cómo, desde (...) el acto humano de sacrificarse, se rescata a la narrativa dentro de la multiplicidad de pequeños relatos, presupuesto que configura el reconocimiento de la persona en el otro, además de reconstruir los procesos de certezas y generando colectivos narrativos en los espacios empresariales y ciudadanos. (shrink)

As figurational sociologists and sociolinguists, we need to know that we currently find support from other fields in our efforts to construct a sociocultural science focused on interdependencies and processes, creating a multidimensional picture of human beings, one in which the brain and its mental and emotional processes are properly recognized. The paradigmatic revolutions in 20th-century physics, the contributions made by biology to our understanding of living beings, the conceptual constructions built around the theories of systems, self-organization and complexity, all (...) these implore that we reflect on social sciences paradigms in the light of the great changes in these other disciplines. The application of metaphors or theoretical images of complexity and figurational sociology in understanding language and socio-communication phenomena is of great use, since language is not an ‘object’, but a ‘complex’; it exists simultaneously in and among different domains. ‘Languaging’ and interaction are co-phenomena. The former exists within the latter, and the latter within the former. By visualizing, for instance, the different levels of linguistic structure not as separate entities but rather as united and integrated within the same theoretical frame, by seeing their functional interdependencies, by situating them in a greater multidimensionality that includes what for a long time was considered ‘external’ – the individual and his or her mind-brain, the sociocultural system, the physical world, etc. – and expanding in this way our classical view, we should be able to make important, if not essential, theoretical and practical advances. (shrink)

During the turbulent last years of the fifth century BC, Athens twice suffered the overthrow of democracy and the subsequent establishment of oligarchic regimes. In an in-depth treatment of both political revolutions, Julia Shear examines how the Athenians responded to these events, at the level both of the individual and of the corporate group. Interdisciplinary in approach, this account brings epigraphical and archaeological evidence to bear on a discussion which until now has largely been based on texts. Dr Shear particularly (...) focuses on the recreation of democracy and the city, both ritually and physically, in the aftermath of the coups and demonstrates that, whilst reconciliation after civil strife is difficult and contentious, it is also crucial for rebuilding a united society. Theories of remembering and forgetting are applied and offer a new way of understanding the dynamics in Athens at this time. (shrink)

The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to accounts (...) of virtue which hold that moral virtue must involve practical wisdom. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. Driver argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences. (shrink)

The “language-communication-society” triangle defies traditional scientific approaches. Rather, it is a phenomenon that calls for an integration of complex, transdisciplinary perspectives, if we are to make any progress in understanding how it works. The highly diverse agents in play are not merely cognitive and/or cultural, but also emotional and behavioural in their specificity. Indeed, the effort may require building a theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that can effectively convey the characteristic properties of phenomena in human terms. New complexity approaches (...) allow us to rethink our limited and mechanistic images of human societies and create more appropriate emo-cognitive dynamic and holistic models. We have to enter into dialogue with the complexity views coming out of other more ‘material’ sciences, but we also need to take steps in the linguistic and psycho-sociological fields towards creating perspectives and concepts better fitted to human characteristics. Our understanding of complexity is different – but not opposed – to the one that is more commonly found in texts written by people working in physics or computer science, for example. The goal of this book is to extend the knowledge of these other more ‘human’ or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society. (shrink)

Throughout most of the 20th century, analytical and reductionist approaches have dominated in biological, social, and humanistic sciences, including linguistics and communication. We generally believed we could account for fundamental phenomena in invoking basic elemental units. Although the amount of knowledge generated was certainly impressive, we have also seen limitations of this approach. Discovering the sound formants of human languages, for example, has allowed us to know vital aspects of the ‘material’ plane of verbal codes, but it tells us little (...) about significant aspects of their social functions. I firmly believe, therefore, that alongside a linguistics that looks ‘inward’ there should also be a linguistics that looks ‘outward’, or one even that is constructed ‘from the outside’, a linguistics that I refer to elsewhere as ‘holistic’ though it could be identified by a different name. My current vision is to promote simultaneously the perspective that goes from the part to the whole and that which goes from the whole to the parts, i.e., both from the top down and from the bottom up. This goal is shared with other disciplines which recognize that many phenomena related to life are interwoven, self-organising, emergent and processual. Thus, we need to re-examine how we have conceived of reality, both the way we have looked at it and the images we have used to talk about it. Several approaches now grouped under the label of complexity have been elaborated towards this objective of finding new concepts and ways of thinking that better fit the complex organisation of facts and events. (shrink)

La publicación de los primeros Cuadernos negros invita a una relectura de la trayectoria de Heidegger en algunos aspectos fundamentales de su obra previa a 1931. En una primera parte del artículo nos centramos en aspectos fundamentales del recorrido vital y filosófico de Heidegger, muy especialmente en la amplitud y el significado de su ruptura con el catolicismo como elemento que condiciona su sentimiento de indigencia y la necesidad de un preguntar fundamental. En la segunda parte, centramos nuestra atención en (...) textos de los Cuadernos negros correspondientes a los años de 1931 a 1933 para comprobar en qué sentido Heidegger vive en momentos cruciales de su vida bajo la influencia de lo que él llama seísmos subterráneos. El sentimiento de soledad en incomprensión que vive Heidegger se muestra en el hecho que, según él, nadie ha entendido Ser y tiempo. (shrink)

El presente estudio hace referencia a los efectos emocionales ocasionados por el COVID-19. La humanidad vivió una situación sin igual en el año 2020, conllevándola a la concentración mundial y al despliegue de acciones que pudieran mitigar a todos los efectos sanitarios ocasionados por un virus de concentración mundial, como fue el llevar al confinamiento a la mayoría de la población humana, pero descuidándose los efectos emocionales del mismo, es por ello que adelantaremos un análisis sobre el concepto del miedo, (...) desde los postulados del pensador griego Aristóteles, como punto de partida para apreciar el actual entorno pandémico y su capacidad para generar situaciones de concentración y distractoras en relación a la verdad, teniendo en cuenta que el temor puede llegar a servir como un instrumento distractor de las certezas. (shrink)

Romantic Philosophy characterizes the way of being Catalan with two main words: seny, common sense, and rauxa, or rapture. Looking for the roots of this characterization, we find two Franciscan thinkers, blessed Ramon Llull and Brother Francesc Eiximenis, representing these tendencies. Through his life and writings, we try to collect what can be said about it.

Die Herausbildung von transnationalen Räumen ist aufs Engste mit Geschlechterverhältnissen verwoben. Durch die Zunahme transnationaler politischer, sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Verflechtungsbeziehungen müssen die Geschlechterordnungen auf nationaler und lokaler Ebene grundlegend neu vermessen werden. Ziel des Bandes ist es, die vielfältigen Verflechtungen von Transnationalisierungsprozessen mit Geschlecht aus feministischer Perspektive auf politischer, sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Makro-, Meso- und Mikroebene zu beleuchten.

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical (...) approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics. Finally, it explores applications for discourse analysis, semantics and cognition. (shrink)

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues as multiple presentations (...) of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings. (shrink)

Consequentialism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions depend solely on their consequences. It is one of the most influential, and controversial, of all ethical theories. In this book, Julia Driver introduces and critically assesses consequentialism in all its forms. After a brief historical introduction to the problem, Driver examines utilitarianism, and the arguments of its most famous exponents, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and explains the fundamental questions underlying utilitarian theory: what value is to be (...) specified and how it is to be maximized. Driver also discusses indirect forms of consequentialism, the important theories of motive consequentialism and virtue consequentialism, and explains why the distinction between subjective and objective consequentialism is so important. Including helpful features such as a glossary, chapter summaries, and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Consequentialism is ideal for students seeking an authoritative and clearly explained survey of this important problem. (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...) the attitude of rational acceptance. This view has important ramifications well beyond debates in philosophy of language and linguistics. It affects not only our view of which speech act sequences are fine and which are off; it bears on whether presuppositions can function as testimony, whether they can be lies, and whether they are ontologically committal, thus addressing central topics in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Many people follow Grice in thinking that all conversational implicatures are cancellable. And often enough, they use this insight as a test for conversational implicatures. If you want to find out whether something is a conversational implicature, the test has it, you should ask yourself whether the thing in question is cancellable; if you find that it is not cancellable, you can infer that it is not a conversational implicature. If you find that it is cancellable, you can infer that (...) it might well be a conversational implicature and that you should now do further testing. Various philosophers and linguists have questioned the test however. Some have held that Grice's cancellability claim is subject to counterexamples and that the test is not reliable. Others have argued that even though Grice's claim can be defended against the examples in question, the test is not as informative as people have hoped. This article provides an overview of the recent discussion on the cancellability test and suggests a way forward. (shrink)

In this book I look at the tradition of eudaimonistic ethics which stems from Aristotle's treatment of ethics, and which takes distinct, though related forms in Epicurus, the Stoics and the Sceptics. I look at this tradition from different points of view: how is it related to human nature, how does it account for other-related virtue and action, and how much does it require in terms of revising previously held priorities. I discuss the methodology of discussing ancient texts in ways (...) that relate them to contemporary concerns, particularly the importance of respecting the texts and avoiding anachronism. (shrink)

People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...) become relativists about truth to understand faultless disagreements. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a more standard semantics with a novel pragmatic theory to develop a superior approach. The book discusses both classic and recent literature in philosophy and linguistics. It provides a general introduction to the debate about the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions, as well as an original contribution to the contemporary discussion. (shrink)

Julia Markovits develops a desire-based, internalist account of what normative reasons are--an account which is compatible with the idea that moral reasons can apply to all of us, regardless of our desires. She builds on Kant's formula of humanity to defend universal moral reasons, and addresses the age-old question of why we should be moral.

Metaphysics of Science is the philosophical study of key concepts that figure prominently in science and that, prima facie, stand in need of clarification. It is also concerned with the phenomena that correspond to these concepts. Exemplary topics within Metaphysics of Science include laws of nature, causation, dispositions, natural kinds, possibility and necessity, explanation, reduction, emergence, grounding, and space and time. Metaphysics of Science is a subfield of both metaphysics and the philosophy of science—that is, it can be allocated to (...) either, but it exhausts neither. Unlike metaphysics simpliciter, Metaphysics of Science is not primarily concerned with metaphysical questions that may already arise from everyday phenomena such as what makes a thing (a chair, a desk) the very thing it is, what its identity criteria are, out of which parts is it composed, whether it remains the same if we exchange a couple of its parts, and so forth. Nor is it concerned with the concrete entities (superstrings, molecules, genes, and so forth) postulated by specific sciences; these issues are the subject matter of the special philosophies of science (for example, of physics, of chemistry, of biology). Metaphysics of Science is concerned with more abstract and general concepts that inform all of these sciences. Many of these concepts are interwoven with each other. For example, metaphysicians of science inquire whether dispositionality, lawhood, and causation can be accounted for in nonmodal terms; whether laws of nature presuppose the existence of natural kinds; and whether the properties of macrolevel objects supervene on dispositional or nondispositional properties. This article surveys the scope (section 1), historical origin (section 2), exemplary subject matters (section 4), and methodology (section 5) of Metaphysics of Science, as well as the motivation that drives it (section 3). (shrink)

How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? Julia Staffel breaks new ground in the study of rationality by answering this question and many others. She also explains how it is better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate and better at guiding our actions.

Vilfredo Pareto's Manual of Political Economy is a 'classic' study in the history of economic thought. It is not only one of the leading works in the Lausanne tradition of economics, which centres on the theory of general equilibrium, it is one of the most important books in the history of neoclassical economics. This 'critical edition' of Pareto's Manual of Political Economy is a very significant work for two main reasons. First, it is the only variorum translation of (...) the 1906 Italian language Manuale di Economia Politica and the 1909 French language Manuel d'Économie Politique. Second, it includes extensive contributions by the editors, all of whom are authorities on the work of Pareto. It total, the editorial contribution are around two hundred pages and range from brief annotations, to extended editors' notes and detailed notes on the 1909 mathematical appendix. (shrink)

‘Complexics’ denotes the meta-transdisciplinary field specifically concerned with giving us suitable cognitive tools to understand the world’s complexity. Additionally, the use of the adjective ‘complexical’ would avoid the common confusion caused by the adjective ‘complex’, which belongs to everyday usage and already has its own connotations of complication and confusion. Thus, ‘complexical’ thinking and ‘complexical’ perspective would provide clearer terms, be freer of confusion, and refer more precisely to epistemic elements in contrast to the ‘complexity’ typical of many phenomena of (...) reality. In short, the world would be ‘complex’, but our way of looking at the world would be ‘complexical’. As a meta-transdiscipline, ‘complexics’ would carry on the perspective of cybernetics: “Cybernetics deals with all forms of behaviour insofar as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant… The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations” (Ashby, 1956:1). Thus, it has a distinctly transdisciplinary mission to provide concepts, schema and possibilities of thinking and representation able to express the multidimensional and systemic interwovenness and interdependence of the many, highly significant phenomena of reality that have these characteristics. On the level of theory, complexics needs to provide a set of principles, concepts and conceptual landscapes that can be applied transversally to distinct areas of knowledge and phenomena of reality, enabling us to gain a much firmer grasp of the complex aspects of their existence than we currently have. For this reason, our aim needs to be, as Morin says, not “to reduce complexity to simplicity, [but] to translate complexity into theory” (1994:315). (shrink)

Some expressions, such as ‘generous’ and ‘stingy’, are used not only to describe the world around us. They are also used to evaluate the things to which they are applied. In this paper, I suggest a novel account of how this evaluation is conveyed—the conventional triggering view. It partly agrees and partly disagrees with both the standard semantic view and its popular pragmatic contender. Like the former and unlike the latter, my view has it that the evaluation is conveyed due (...) to the conventional meaning of the sentences in question. Unlike the former and much like the latter, my view suggests that the evaluation is a secondary rather than a primary content. (shrink)

Altered Conditions provides a bold new intervention into existing theories of the human body and its meanings in a variety of cultural contexts. By exploring the history of medical narratives, especially medical case histories, as well as the exciting work that has been done in feminist and lesbian and gay studies, Julia Epstein poses a number of provocative questions about the relations between bodies, selves, and identities. Epstein focuses on a number of diagnoses that shed light on what is at (...) stake when cultures regulate human bodies, including hermaphroditism, birth malformations, and AIDS. She pays special attention to the regulation of sexual minorities and women and looks carefully at the ways in which cultures attempt to define and control behaviors seen as threatening or subversive. (shrink)

El més gran dels pensadors i el més petit dels homes”; amb aquestes paraules va referir-se Gadamer d'una manera molt punyent a la desconcertant figura del seu mestre, Martin Heidegger. L’autor d’Ésser i temps ens ha deixat en herència no només una obra filosòfica capaç d’exercir una grandíssima influència, sinó també el repte d’interpretar la tensió entre vida i pensament. Hem de creure que cal una gran vida per tal que hi hagi un gran pensament? O hem d’admetre que no (...) hi ha cap relació entre una cosa i l’altra i, per tant, que un gran pensador pot adherir-se de forma entusiasta a un dels règims polítics més abjectes de la història d’Europa sense comprometre la qualitat de la seva producció filosòfica? Heidegger és segurament un exponent d'una Europa contradictòria i angoixant: no només un representant excepcional de la millor tradició filosòfica, sinó també de les grans bogeries i pors del segle XX. (shrink)

Recognized as one of the greatest philosophers in classical China, Chu Hsi is especially known in the West through translations of one of his many works, theChin-su Lu. Julia Ching, a noted scholar of Neo-Confucian thought, provides the first book-length examination of Chu-Hsi's religious thought, based on extensive reading in both primary and secondary sources.

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)

In The Virtues of Ignorance the author demonstrates that classical theories of virtue are flawed and developes a consequentialist theory of virtue. ;Virtues are excellences of character. They are traits which are considered to be valuable in some way. A person who is virtuous is one who has a tendency to act well. Classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, believed that virtues, as human excellences, could not involve ignorance in any way. On their view, the virtuous agent, when acting (...) well, knows what she is doing under the description which makes the action conform to virtue. For example, the generous person must know that she is, in fact, helping others in need. Yet, there is a class of virtues, the "virtues of ignorance," which essentially involve ignorance. For example, modesty requires that the agent underestimate self worth. In the first portion of the dissertation, this class of virtues is discussed, and problems raised for the traditional theories of virtue. ;In the latter portion of the dissertation, the author outlines a consequentialist theory of virtue. It is argued that the only hope of developing a unified theory of virtue is along consequentialist lines, because attempts at identifying the psychological state which is necessary for virtue have failed. On a consequentialist theory, a virtue is defined in terms of its consequences. Thus, the moral quality of the character trait is determined by how much good it brings about . The virtues of ignorance can easily be accommodated in such a theory because these traits do bring about good, even if the agent possessing the trait acts out of ignorance. (shrink)