In this paper Hildebrand’s moral ontology is discussed. It is shown that his moral ontology is, in essence, Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Although Hildebrand’s language differs from that of Plato, the ideas are very similar, given that both are moral absolutists who think that moral eidê are ante rem rather than in re. They agree on the structure of the moral realm and have identical views on participation of the ideal in the real. They also have similar ideas on man’s (...) relationship towards the moral realm. (shrink)

In this paper Hildebrand’s moral ontology is discussed. It is shown that his moral ontology is, in essence, Platonic rather than Aristotelian. Although Hildebrand’s language differs from that of Plato, the ideas are very similar, given that both are moral absolutists who think that moral eidê are ante rem rather than in re. They agree on the structure of the moral realm and have identical views on participation of the ideal in the real. They also have similar ideas on man’s (...) relationship towards the moral realm. (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century, moral philosophy in the Western world has been dominated by utilitarianism, Kantianism, and relativism. Only a few philosophers have been able to escape from this Procrustean bed. Foremost among these few is Nicolai Hartmann. Together with Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, Hartmann was instrumental in restoring metaphysics. Hartmann's metaphysics differs markedly from that of both Bergson and Heidegger, in his indebtedness to Plato. In 1926, Hartmann published a massive treatise, Ethik, which was translated into English by (...) Stanton Coit and published as Ethics in 1932. Ethics is probably the most outstanding treatise on moral philosophy in the twentieth century. The central concept of the book is "value." Drawing upon the pre-modern view of ethics, Hartmann maintains that values are objectively given, part and parcel of the order of being. We cannot invent values, we can merely discover them. The first part of Ethics is concerned with the structure of ethical phenomena and criticizes utilitarianism, Kantianism, and relativism as misleading approaches. After some introductory thoughts concerning the competence of practical philosophy, Hartmann discusses the essence of moral values, including their absoluteness and ideal being, and the essence of the "ought." Hartmann is both controversial and compelling. He provides a moral philosophy that rejects the subjectivism of the ruling approaches, without taking recourse to older theological notions on the foundation of the ethical. In sum: Hartmann's Ethics constitutes an impressive and preeminent contribution to moral philosophy. (shrink)

The Finalistic Difficulty in Freedom and Its Solution -- Chapter XVIII: Solution of the Ought-Antinomy -- The Inner Conflict in Free Will as the Moral Will -- Solution of the Conflict. Exposure of Equivocations -- The Conflict of the Two Factors in Moral Freedom -- The Complementary Relation behind the Apparent Conflict -- The Recurrence of "Negative Freedom" in the Ought-Antinomy -- The Scope of " Negative" Freedom and its True Relation to " Positive" Freedom -- Reciprocal Conditionality of Positive (...) and Negative Freedom with Regard to Values -- Two-sided Freedom in the Self-Determination of the Person -- Chapter XIX: Problems Still Unsolved -- The Difficulty Concerning Individuality in Moral Freedom -- The Positive Relation between Universal and Individual Autonomy -- The Question as to the Nature of the Individual Determinant -- Personal Teleology as a Determinational Mode of Positive Freedom -- The Ontological Difficulty in Personal Freedom -- The Categorial Structure of the Complex Conditioning-Relationship -- Moral and Categorial Freedom -- The Limit to the Problem -- Section VI: Appendix to the Doctrine of Freedom -- Chapter XX: Apparent and Real Defects of the Theory -- Chapter XXI: Ethical and Religious Freedom -- Index. (shrink)

Nicolai Hartmann, along with Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, was instrumental in restoring metaphysics to the study of philosophy. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Hartmann was clearly influenced by Plato. His tour-de-force, Ethik, published in English in 1932 as Ethics, may be the most outstanding work on moral philosophy produced in the twentieth century. In the first part of Ethics, Hartmann was concerned with the structure of ethical phenomena, and criticized utilitarianism, Kantianism, and relativism as misleading approaches. In the second part, (...) Moral Values, the author describes all values as forming a complex and as yet imperfectly known system. The actualization of the non-moral and elementary moral values is a necessary condition for the actualization of the higher values. It is on this account that rudimentary values have a prior claim. Hartmann outlines the main features of the chief virtues, and shows that the moral disposition required in any exigency is always a specific synthesis of various and often conflicting values. Specifically describing fundamental moral values-such as goodness, nobility, and vitality-and special moral values-such as justice, wisdom, courage, self-control, trustworthiness, and modesty-Hartmann takes theoretical philosophy and brings it very much into the realm of the practical. A compelling and insightful volume, Moral Values remains an essential contribution to the moral and ethical literature of the twentieth century. Hartmann offers a self-contained system of ethics that yet offers a conservative outlook on social life. (shrink)

ISI Books' Crosscurrents series makes available in English-usually for the first time-new translations of both classic and contemporary works by authors working within, or with crucial importance for, the conservative, religious, and humanist intellectual traditions. Book jacket.

_Do good and evil exist? Absolutely._ In this bracing book, the eminent Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging turns fashionable thinking on its head, revealing how good and evil are objective, universal, and unchanging—and how they must be rediscovered in our age. In mapping the geography of good and evil, Kinneging reclaims, and reintroduces us to, the great tradition of ancient and Christian thought. Traditional wisdom enables us to address the eternal questions of good and evil that confront us in (...) both public and private life. Though it is common to accept uncritically the blessings of modernity and its intellectual sources, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kinneging shows that traditional thinking is richer and more realistic. Indeed, we see how, in more than a few respects, the Enlightenment and Romanticism brought not progress but deterioration. Kinneging skillfully reformulates and defends the insights of traditional thinking for today’s readers, demonstrating how an objective morality is to be understood and how we can know what morality demands of us. At a time when the traditional virtues have practically disappeared from our language, he lays out the foundations of virtue and vice. Ultimately, Kinneging reveals the lasting significance of these seemingly archaic notions—to our own lives, to our families, to our culture, and to civilization.__ This profound, award-winning work establishes Andreas Kinneging as one of our wisest moral philosophers. _“Shows with utmost clarity the virtue of intellectual courage... A brilliant model for sallies against our dark age.”_ _—_The Intercollegiate Review____ _“[Kinneging is] leader of a conservative intellectual revival in the Netherlands.”__ —_New York Times Magazine__. (shrink)

Для широкого круга читателей (слушателей, аспирантов, преподавателей) интересующихся данной проблемой.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:570 BOOK REVIEWS like reasonable rule for economic life. This effort is worthy of more attention than is possible here, but let it be noted that it must inevitably suffer the same fate as any ethical calculus: someone must decide for others what is their due and what is not. How much wealth, for example, makes for a concentration [of wealth] that would be " demonstrably detrimental to some (...) people's exercise of their generic rights "? His is ultimately an entitlement or rights ethic, rather than an aitial ethic of goal-purposive fulfillment for the individual, projected outwards for a common good scenario. While his rejection of goal ethics's inability to detail principles for distribution of goods is noteworthy, it does not appear that a tightened version of generic rights theory will come closer to either of Phillips's desiderata: a justification of moral reasoning apart from any theory of nature or a calculus for its application. Desan and Phillips wish to think against the limits of the human situation. For Desan, rising above limitation is a moral task and obligation facing us each, if there is to be a common future. His call is to be World Citizen in a Polis of Nations. Phillips's vision is more concrete, a distribution of benefits to benefit all with well-being and freedom. But this mundane task is no less difficult than Desan's transcendent one. Indeed, according to Augustine, even the Divine Mind must utilize an artifice in dealing with human creation: "He loves each of us as though there were only one of us." Both ethicists have striven to show us how we might think this vision for ourselves, i.e., for each other of us. ]OIIN B. DAVIS, O.P. ' Detroit, Michigan Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays. By HUGH TREVOR-ROPER. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317. $27.50 (hardbound). Even to list the changes and events which occurred in seventeenth century England is a difficult task: the century spans the period from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, through the Civil War, the accession and exile (twice) of the Stuarts, the rise of science, the transformation of the theological and religious issues of the English Reformation, to name only the most obvious. To conceive a book, in the form of occasional essays, which not only addresses these changes and events but does so by establishing the connections which were present with European currents at the same time surely tempts fate, even when it does not tempt reviewers. BOOK REVIEWS 571 But Hugh Trevor-Roper is a master, both of the period under survey and of the form of the essay. With one exception, each of these essays began as a lecture or seminar paper, and the pleasantly legible style in which they are written must bear some trace of that origin. The occasional flashes of wit, mixed with rthe fairly non-technical style, make the book a joy to read and a welcome escape from the usually constipated style of scholarly prose. In his Introduction, the essayist clearly sets forth his thesis that English intellectual history does not exist apart from the currents of European intellectual history (a thesis for which Trevor-Roper has already staked a claim). That leads to what may very well be the major problem with these essays: its end is in its beginning. The list of names cited in these essays only partially coincides with the list of names in the index; the former is much longer than the latter. And while the style of the essay welcomes the reader to the period, it also throws up more names and places and events than can be explained or even annotated adequately. This occurs both on a large and on a small scale. The first essay, on "Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist" contains such a vast array of names that at times it becomes the prosopo· graphical equivalent of a telephone book. On a large scale, there is the problem with a definition of Arminianism. No definition, at least no formal definition, is attempted-and this is probably wise. But, particularly in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Inference That Makes Science. By ERNAN McMULLIN. The Aquinas Lecture, 1992. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1992. Pp. iv +112. In this ambitious lecture Father Ernan McMullin recapitulates and refines a thesis that has guided his thought for the past forty years. In essence the thesis is this: precisely how science is made has eluded the best minds for centuries, and only in the work of Charles (...) Sanders Peirce, suitably emended by McMullin, has the puzzle finally been solved. " Retroduction " is the inference that makes science. Once this is understood, errors on what constitutes scientific method-those of Aristotle, Aquinas, Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Hume, et al.-can be rectified and one can see science for what it truly is: a complex process of theory appraisal that yields, not definitive truth, but well-established results to which assent can be given with at best "practical certainty," whatever that might be (pp. 91-96). Why McMullin should have chosen such a theme for an Aquinas Lecture is a question that defies reasonable answer. Surely one does not have to he so negative about the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Galileo to advance one's ideas about science in the present day. What McMullin could easily have done, and he hints at this in the last two paragraphs of his lecture (pp. 97-98), is show how retroduction is itself simply a relaxed version of the demonstrative regress, the method actually endorsed by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Galileo. Such a retroductive version, fair enough, yields knowledge of a probable cause, the type of knowledge most typical of modern science. McMullin did not have to embark on the dangerous course of trying to prove that proof and certainty are forever beyond the grasp of science, or that never in the history of science has anyone established a definitive truth. That, in effect, is what McMullin has tried to do, and in the attempt to make the point he fumbles at almost every juncture throughout a very long lecture. To set the record straight more than a review is being re--·quested; perhaps a book, and even that might not suffice for those whose minds are made up. To understand the import of the lecture one must appreciate that it is hut a brief episode in a debate over demonstration in science that has been going on since McMullin first came to the University of Notre Dame in 1954. I myself have published many hooks and articles that engage the very point of his lecture and provide the contra evidence to 131 132 BOOK REVIEWS show elements of continuity in scientific method from Aristotle to the present. My last two volumes, in press at the same time as McMullin's Aquinas Lecture, answer in detail the aporiai he there raises.1 I need 1 Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof. The Backgrnund, Content, and Use of His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 137. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, xxiii + 323 pp.; Galileo's Logical Treatises. A Translation, with Notes and Commentary, of His Appropriated Questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 138. DordrechtBoston -London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992, xix + 239 pp. only refer the interested reader to them for an extended and documented reply to his arguments. Some idea of the flavor of our debate, however, can be gained from the following. To support his thesis, McMullin has to maintain that Aristotle's proof that the moon is a sphere (from its having phases) and that Galileo's proofs that there are mountains on the moon, that Jupiter has satellites, and that Venus circles the sun (all based on telescopic observations) are not strictly demonstrative, that is, they do not yield true and certain conclusions. He declines to answer a query I have often tendered whether he personally is certain on the basis of pre-spacecraft evidence that the moon is a sphere, that there are mountains on it, that Jupiter has satellites, and so on. Instead he offers the categorical response "that planetary science is not an apodictic science, indeed that no natural science is... (shrink)

Organizational ethics—defined as the alignment of an institution’s practices with its mission, vision, and values—is a growing field in health care not well characterized in empirical literature. To capture the scope and context of organizational ethics work in United States healthcare institutions, we conducted a nationwide convenience survey of ethicists regarding the scope of organizational ethics work, common challenges faced, and the organizational context in which this work is done. In this article, we report substantial variability in the structure of (...) organizational ethics programs and the settings in which it is conducted. Notable findings included disagreement about the activities that comprise organizational ethics and a lack of common metrics used to assess organizational ethics activities. A frequently cited barrier to full engagement in these activities was poor institution-wide understanding about the role and function of organizational ethics resources. These data suggest a tension in the trajectory of organizational ethics’ professionalization: while some variability is appropriate to the field’s relative youth, inadequate attention to definitions of organizational ethics practice and metrics for success can impede discussions about appropriate institutional support, leadership context, and training for practitioners. (shrink)

The grammatical manipulation and production of language is a great deceiver. We have become habituated to accept the use of well-constructed language to indicate intelligence, understanding and, consequently, intention, whether conscious or unconscious. But we are not always right to do so, and certainly not in the case of large language models (LLMs) like ChapGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA, and Google Bard. This is a perennial problem, but when one understands why it occurs, it ceases to be surprising that it so stubbornly (...) persists. This paper will have three main sections. In the Introduction I will say a little about language, its aetiology, and useful sub-divisions into natural and cultural. In the second section I will explain the current situation with regard to large language models and fill in the background debates which set the problem up as one of increased complexity rather than one of a qualitatively different kind from narrow or specific AI. In the third section I will present the case for the missing phenomenological background and why it is necessary for the co-creation of shared meaning in both natural and cultural language, and I will conclude this section by presenting a rationale for why this situation arises and will continue to arise. Before we do any of this, I need to clarify one point: I do not wish to challenge the ascription of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to LLMs, indeed I think agnosticism is best in this respect, but I do challenge the more serious, and erroneous, ascription of understanding, intention, reason, and consciousness to them. And so, I am making two points: an epistemological one about why we fall into error in our ascription of a mental life to LLMs, and an ontological one about the impossibility of LLMs being or becoming conscious. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to find out to what demand of philosophical and scientific thinking is culturology a response, treating culturology from two aspects: as a set of approaches to culture and as a school subject in the system of education. The task is not to define the subject boundaries of some science . I am interested in the "metaphysical location" of the interest in culture, in the lacuna of man's understanding of the world and of himself it (...) seeks to fill. (shrink)

Developing an intellectualist account of skill, Stanley and Williamson define skill as a kind of disposition to action-guiding knowledge. The present paper challenges their definition of skill. While we don’t dispute that skill may consist of a cognitive, a dispositional, and an action-guiding component, we argue that Stanley and Williamson’s account of each component is problematic. In the first section, we argue, against Stanley and Williamson, that the cognitive component of skill is not a case of propositional knowledge-wh, which is (...) typically indexical. In the second section, we seek to show that Stanley and Williamson face difficulties in arguing for a generic claim about skill as a kind of disposition, and they fail to defend intellectualism about skill based on the dispositional account. In the third section we argue that Stanley and Williamson need a more detailed account of the action-guiding aspect of skill to avoid several difficulties, including a threat of a regress. We close with some lessons for the debate over intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about skill. (shrink)

On the fundamentals of Vedanta philosophy and Hindu spiritual life.

Mysticism ; Islamic philosophy ; Sufism.