Almost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in (...) epistemology, including the concept of knowledge. This highly original work of philosophy for professionals will also provide students with an excellent introduction to epistemology, virtue theory, and the relationship between ethics and epistemology. (shrink)

Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, the author here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an ...

This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences (...) between divine and human knowing states. An appendix introduces a new foreknowledge dilemma that purports to show that omniscient foreknowledge conflicts with deep intuitions about temporal asymmetry, quite apart from considerations of free will. Zagzebski shows that only a narrow range of solutions can handle this new dilemma. A compelling contribution to the field, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge will appeal to students and scholars of theistic philosophy and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I argue that to understand the ethics of belief we need to put it in a context of what we care about. Epistemic values always arise from something we care about and they arise only from something we care about. It is caring that gives rise to the demand to be epistemically conscientious. The reason morality puts epistemic demands on us is that we care about morality. But there may be a (small) class of beliefs which (...) it is not wrong to hold unconscientiously. I also argue that epistemic values enjoy a privileged place in the panorama of what we care about because they are entailed by anything we care about. That means that when there is a conflict between caring about knowledge or true belief and caring about something else, that conflict cannot be resolved simply by following the one we care about the most because caring about knowledge in any domain is entailed by caring about that domain. Finally, I argue that whereas caring demands different degrees of conscientiousness in different contexts, contextualism about knowledge is less plausible. (shrink)

The attention for Moral case deliberation has increased over the past years. Previous research on MCD is often written from the perspective of MCD experts or MCD participants and we lack a more distant view to the role of MCD in Dutch health care institutions in general. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the state of the art concerning MCD in the Netherlands. As part of a larger national study on clinical ethics support in the (...) Netherlands, we will focus on the prevalence and characteristics of MCD in Dutch health. A mixed methods design was used in which we combined two survey questionnaires, two focus groups and 17 individual interviews with top managers or ethics support staff. The findings demonstrate that the prevalence of MCD is relatively high in Dutch health care, especially in mental health care. Institutions with MCD differ from institutions without MCD concerning size, kind of problems and importance of ideological background. Characteristic of MCD is that it often exists for 3 years or more, has a high participation of health professionals and middle managers and is both organized scheduled as unscheduled. As well integration in existing policy as key persons emerge as important issues in relation to the positioning of MCD. We conclude that MCD is a part of an integrated ethics policy and serves as a catalyst for such an integrated ethics policy. (shrink)

Critics of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment--the affirmation of human freedom is.

This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice.

Ethics support is called for to improve the quality of care in elderly institutions. Various forms of ethics support are presented, but the needs for ethics support remain unknown. Using a mixed-methods design, this article systematically investigates the specific needs for ethics support in elderly care. The findings of two surveys, two focus groups and 17 interviews demonstrate that the availability of ethics support is limited. There is a need for ethics support, albeit not unconditionally. Advice-based forms of ethics support (...) are less appropriate as they are removed from practice. Ethics support should be tailored to the often mundane and easily overlooked moral issues that arise in long-term care. Attention should also be given to the learning styles of nurses who favour experiential learning. Raising awareness and developing a climate of openness and dialogue are the most suitable ways to deal with the mundane moral issues in elderly care. (shrink)

Democracy and the problem of judgment -- Judging at the "end of reasons": rethinking the aesthetic turn -- Historicism, judgment, and the limits of liberalism: the case of Leo Strauss -- Objectivity, judgment, and freedom: rereading Arendt's "Truth and politics" -- Value pluralism and the "burdens of judgment": John Rawls's political liberalism -- Relativism and the new universalism: feminists claim the right to judge -- From willing to judging: Arendt, Habermas, and the question of '68 -- What on earth is (...) a "form of life"? Judging "alien" cultures according to Peter Winch -- The turn to affect and the problem of judgment: making political sense of the nonconceptual -- Conclusion: judging as a democratic world-building practice. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Political Theory as a Signifying Practice Political theory has been a heroic business, snatching us from the abyss a vocation worthy of giants. ...

An accessible and engaging introduction to the philosophy of religion. Written with verve and clarity by a leading philosopher and contributor to the field Places key issues and debates in the philosophy of religion in their historical contexts, highlighting the conditions that led to the development of the field Addresses the core topics, among them the the existence of God, the problem of evil, death and the afterlife, and the problem of religious diversity Rich with argument, yet never obtrusive Forms (...) part of the _Fundamentals of Philosophy_ series, in which renowned scholars explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy. (shrink)

As hospital ethics committees become more common in American hospitals, their degree of success should be measured. Just as new technological procedures are evaluated, institutional innovations should also be evaluated. Currently, little is known about the success of HECs, and some authors have wondered whether these committees serve any useful purpose at all. This article reviews the descriptive results of a 1990 study on HEC success as they pertain to the question of how to measure committee success.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. Wittgenstein.

This essay outlines an approach to virtue theory that makes the foundation of the theory direct reference to virtuous exemplars, modeled on the famous theory of direct reference, devised in the seventies by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke. The basic idea is that exemplars are persons like that, just as water is liquid like that, and humans are members of the same species as that, and so on. In this theory exemplars are picked out directly through the emotion of admiration (...) rather than through the satisfaction of a description. We discover the virtues empirically by investigating the qualities of exemplars in a way that parallels the discovery that water is H2O. It is also possible that although the virtues are discovered empirically, the connection between being admirable and having certain traits is necessary, just as Kripke claims that “water is H2O” is necessary, but known a posteriori. (shrink)

If one is a woman, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Virginia Woolf.

Traditional views separate cognitive processes from sensory–motor processes, seeing cognition as amodal, propositional, and compositional, and thus fundamentally different from the processes that underlie perceiving and acting. These were the ideas on which cognitive science was founded 30 years ago. However, advancing discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology suggests that cognition may be inseparable from processes of perceiving and acting. From this perspective, this study considers the future of cognitive science with respect to the study of cognitive development.

We explore an analogue of major subset for Π0 1 classes, which leads to the definition and characterization of almost complemented Π0 1 classes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This Universalism Which Is Not OneLinda M. G. Zerilli (bio)Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 1996.Judging from the recent spate of publications devoted to the question of the universal, it appears that, in the view of some critics, we are witnessing a reevaluation of its dismantling in twentieth-century thought. One of the many oddities about this “return of the universal” 1 is the idea that contemporary engagements with it are (...) more or less of a piece, and that they reflect a growing consensus that poststructuralist political theories are incapable of generating a viable alternative to the collective fragmentation that characterizes late modernity. 2 The putative return to the universal marks, on this view, both a homecoming to Enlightenment ideals—purified of their more poisonous elements, of course—and a reconciliation of sorts between those who refuted these ideals and those who sought to realize them. Now that “we” all know and agree that poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt; now that we all know and agree that the “old universal” was indeed a “pseudo-universal,” so the homecoming narrative goes; we can get on with the project of constructing a “new universal.” 3 This authentic universal would really be inclusive of all people, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and whatever else attaches to the “embarrassing etcetera” that, as Judith [End Page 3] Butler reminds us, inevitably accompanies such gestures of acknowledging human diversity.Before signing on to this felicitous agreement about “the necessity of universalism,” we may wish to know whether we have anything like a minimal agreement in language, that is, whether we who speak of this universal are even speaking about the same thing. Apart from the not insignificant problem of translating from a philosophical to a political idiom, the whole question of this agreement is virtually occluded by the rush to rescue politics from the virulent particularisms that admit no common ground or sense of collective belonging. Presented in terms of the familiar binary couple, the choice between universalism and particularism seems settled by merely pointing to global and domestic political realities. Universalism is the only alternative to social fragmentation, wild child of the collapse of communism, the rise of deadly nationalisms, and the multiculturalist romance with particularism. To invoke the name of the universal in any affirmative sense is already to sign on to the political diagnosis and its solution.One of the many virtues of Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s) is that it offers both an alternative to the binarisms spawned by the “return” to the universal (for example, false universalism/true universalism) and a trenchant critique of the original binary couple itself (universalism/ particularism). Demonstrating the imbrication of the universal and the particular, Laclau shows why it is a matter not of choosing one over the other but of articulating, in a scrupulously political sense, the relation between the two. He thus explicitly rejects the notion that this relation is one of mutual exclusion, and shows that the tendency to see it as just that has led to the impasse of the contemporary debate, an impasse that is glossed over in some highly visible academic cases by proclaiming the necessary return to the universal. Although the language of universalism as spoken by Laclau searches for some common ground between particularists and universalists, it is more by way of articulating their mutual contamination, that is, how each is rendered impure by the irreducible presence of the other.The Problem of UniversalsLaclau situates his collection of essays in the context of the increasingly polarized debate over multiculturalism, a debate in which the classical universalism of the philosophical tradition has come under serious question. Reading his essays, one comes to see the deep dependence of the entire contemporary discussion on this tradition, even when its metaphysical assumptions are explicitly rejected (as, say, in the work of Seyla Benhabib) or insufficiently comprehended (as in most of the popularized political discourse). Laclau’s book can help us to see that the political question of universalism cannot be posed properly as long as it remains tethered to the classical philosophical “problem of universals.” At stake in sorting out the affinities and... (shrink)

Anyone who goes beyond procedural questions of a discourse theory of morality and ethics and, in a normative attitude … embarks on a theory of the well-ordered, or even emancipated, society will very quickly run up against the limits of his own historical situation.For some time now, a certain strand of contemporary critical theory has understood its task not as providing a substantive critique of power relations, let alone an alternative normative conception of what social relations might be, but as (...) how to justify critique as such: how to justify those elements which critique owes to its philosophical origins, albeit in a nonfoundationalist manner.1 This focus on—if not obsession with—the theoretical problem of... (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Luce Irigaray’s aesthetic of sexual difference, which she develops by extrapolating from Paul Klee’s idea that the role of painting is to render the non-visible rather than represent the visible. This idea is the premise of her analyses of phenomenology and psychoanalysis and their respective contributions to understanding art and sexual identity. I claim that Irigaray assembles an aesthetic of sexual difference that exceeds these familiar intellectual traditions, one that articulates the encounter of non-visible, material (...) forces that engender modes of sexuate being and becoming. I further claim that this encounter is the very matter of artistry and art-making. (shrink)

As is so often the case in a common law system, the legal protection conferred by one strand of law is undermined by other legal provisions. There is no blanket legal duty which compels health care professionals to undergo HIV/AIDS tests; on the other hand, appropriately drafted contracts of employment, duties imposed by courts on employees and the risk of litigation by patients with pressurise individual workers to submit to testing. Whereas in Italy the law clearly condemned any compulsory testing (...) of health care workeers, but must now be interpreted to support it, in England and Wales each individual worker's case must be examined in order to determine whether testing must be submitted to. (shrink)

To many observers, the moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into force under the aegis of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986, is both a moral and an environmental victory. Moreover, many governments have found it to be an advantageous, easy and costless policy to support. However, a critical analysis of the diverse viewpoints of IWC member states, especially those expressed by the delegations of the United Kingdom, Norway and Japan at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the IWC in (...) Aberdeen, raises doubts about the moral and practical coherence of the arguments supporting the continuation of the moratorium. In this paper, these doubts will be rehearsed, and an alternative policy to that of the moratorium—sustainable resource management—is put forward as founded on a more coherent moral and practicable basis. (shrink)

To many observers, the moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into force under the aegis of the International Whaling Commission in 1986, is both a moral and an environmental victory. Moreover, many governments have found it to be an advantageous, easy and costless policy to support. However, a critical analysis of the diverse viewpoints of IWC member states, especially those expressed by the delegations of the United Kingdom, Norway and Japan at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the IWC in Aberdeen, (...) raises doubts about the moral and practical coherence of the arguments supporting the continuation of the moratorium. In this paper, these doubts will be rehearsed, and an alternative policy to that of the moratorium—sustainable resource management—is put forward as founded on a more coherent moral and practicable basis. (shrink)

The relationship between the structural identity of narrative and the truth claim of the historical narrative work is one of importance to Ricœur. He considers the attempts of two interwoven models of history emerging from analytic philosophy—explanatory and narrative—to articulate this relationship. This paper explores the trajectories of these models as well as the epistemological and ontological crises culminating from the “simple” theses of each model. The solution to these crises requires a more complex method to account for the nature (...) of the connections underlying historical understanding. Georg Henrik von Wright’s provisional or “hybrid” model of explanation and understanding revises the simple explanatory model and is foundational for Ricœur’s own complex revision of narrativist models through his notion of questioning back. The present paper argues that the structure of this hybrid model was unsatisfactory for von Wright, and leads in the direction of Ricœur’s own narrative method. Keywords: Ricœur, von Wright, Narrative, History, Questioning back. Résumé La relation entre l’identité structurale du récit et la prétention à la vérité de l’œuvre de récit historique est fondamentale chez Ricœur. Il considère que les deux modèles historiographiques de provenance analytique – le modèle explicatif et le modèle narratif – peuvent s’articuler. Cet article explore les trajectoires de ces modèles autant que les crises épistémologiques et ontologiques qui culminent dans chacune des thèses prise dans un sens unilatéral. La solution pour remédier à ces crises requiert une méthode plus complexe pour tenir compte de la nature des liens qui sous-tendent la compréhension historique. Le modèle d’explication et de compréhension, provisoire et “hybride,” de Georg Henrik von Wright permet de réviser le simple modèle explicatif. Ceci est fondamental pour comprendre la révision complexe que Ricœur apporte aux modèles narrativistes à travers la reprise de la notion de “questionnement à rebours.” La présente contribution fait valoir que la structure de ce modèle hybride n’est pas satisfaisante pour von Wright, et débouche dans le sens de la méthode narrative proposée par Ricœur. Mots-clés: Ricœur, von Wright, Narrative, Histoire, Questionnenement à rebours. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the filmakers' intention of making a film about Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture series on Friedrich Holderlin's poem, 'Der Ister,' as an 'act of philosophical expression'. With and against Heidegger's principles of thought and the possibilities of expression, I argue the filmmakers undermine its generic classification as an essay film through interruption, a technique that is exemplary of Holderlin's poetry.

A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century. By Marinos Sariyannis, with a chapter by E. Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas. Handbook of Oriental Studies, sect. 1, vol. 125. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xi + 596. $179. Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought. By Hüseyin Yilmaz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 370. $39.95 ; $27.95.

The Islamic historical narrative indicates a sharp break between the “age of ignorance” and the age of Islam that extends beyond religion and ethics to politics and culture. This article contributes to the scholarly effort to refute that break by examining an aspect of continuity in political thought, the Circle of Justice, a shorthand description of the organization of the state in the Middle East since ancient times. The stereotype sees the Circle as a Persian product; this article shows that (...) the Circle of Justice emerged millennia before the Persians, that the Persians were actually slow to make it their own, that aspects of it were part of Arabic culture before Islam, and that many people other than Persian scribes quoted or used it in the early Islamic centuries. Examining ancient cuneiform royal inscriptions, Pahlavi documents, the poetry addressed to Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid rulers, and early works of history and political thought, the article traces the Circle’s ideas down through the centuries until their encapsulation in the form we know today, the earliest version of which is found in the work of the historian and adab writer Ibn Qutayba. (shrink)

The “Open Air Laboratories” (OPAL) is a large, England-wide environmental public engagement (PE) project based on the “citizen science” model. It is designed to involve people of all backgrounds and abilities in the production of environmental science and in the process to educate and raise awareness and enthusiasm about nature and its importance. This article draws on a series of interviews with scientists and science communicators involved in the project to explore their motivations and aims for the project and what (...) they see as the goals of public engagement generally. We find a varied and nuanced array of motivations and aims that interviewees cite for taking part in the project, pointing toward a reevaluation of traditional ways of understanding the value of public engagement, policy relevance, and dialogue within public engagement. Especially relevant in relation to thinking about the policy relevance of PE is our conclusion that there are many different ways of thinking about the value of PE, characterized in this article as “the neglected middle.”. (shrink)