: The debate between proponents of ideal and non-ideal approaches to political philosophy has thus far been framed as a meta-level debate about normative theory. The argument of this essay will be that the ideal/non-ideal debate can be helpfully reframed as a ground-level debate within normative theory. Specifically, it can be understood as a debate within the applied normative field of professional ethics, with the profession being examined that of political philosophy itself. If the community of academic political theorists and (...) philosophers cannot help us navigate the problems we face in actual political life, they have not lived up to the moral demands of their vocation. A moderate form of what David Estlund decries as “utopophobia” is therefore an integral element of a proper professional ethic for political philosophers. The moderate utopophobe maintains that while devoting scarce time and resources to constructing utopias may sometimes be justifiable, it is never self-justifying. Utopianism is defensible only insofar as it can reasonably be expected to help inform or improve nonutopian political thinking. (shrink)

However, other leading philosophers of the era--such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and J.G. Herder--placed greater emphasis on feeling, seeing moral and political ...

One of the most basic questions facing democratic theory is who ought to be included in political participation. Most recent discussions of this question have focused on the wrongful exclusion of those who ought to be included. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether political participation can be objectionably over-inclusive. Robert Dahl insists that it can; a claim to inclusion, he writes, “cannot be justified if it is advanced by persons whose interests are not significantly affected by (...) the decisions of that unit.” This essay is a moral defense of what Dahl would consider political over-inclusion, of empowering those entirely unaffected by a given political decision to participate in the making of that decision. My argument is not that the unaffected have a right to participate or that they are somehow wronged by political exclusion in a manner analogous to how the affected may be wronged when excluded. What matters morally is not what a proper resolution to a specific political conflict will do for the unaffected—by definition, it can do nothing for them. What matters is what the inclusion of the unaffected can do to improve the quality of the decision being made, and hence to benefit those affected by this decision. My focus will be on one particular manner in which the inclusion of the unaffected can improve political decision-making: namely, by increasing impartiality. As I argue in the first section of this essay, whereas the affected can only possess what I call “artificial impartiality,” the unaffected possess what I call “natural impartiality.” . (shrink)

Contemporary theorists critical of the current vogue for compassion might like to turn to Friedrich Nietzsche as an obvious ally in their opposition to the sentiment. Yet this essay argues that Nietzsche’s critique of compassion is not entirely critical, and that the endorsement of one’s sympathetic feelings is actually a natural outgrowth of Nietzsche’s immoralist ethics. Nietzsche understands the tendency to share in the suffering of their inferiors as a distinctive vulnerability of the spiritually strong and healthy. Their compassion, however, (...) is an essential element of the imaginative creativity that Nietzsche holds to be the goal of human existence. Although shared suffering may prove debilitating for some, great individuals must come to affirm their compassion as necessary in achieving accurate knowledge of the human condition. (shrink)

Given the extraordinary level of his philosophical achievements, John Rawls was by all accounts a remarkably modest man. This essay will focus, not on the role that Rawls’s modesty played in the presentation of his own ideas, but on the role it plays in his interpretations of the other canonical texts under examination in his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. It argues that the personal virtue of humility stands in a complicated relationship with the preeminent hermeneutic virtue of (...) interpretive charity: the principle (which Rawls repeatedly, explicitly endorses throughout his Lectures) that a text must always be read in its intellectually strongest form. (shrink)

Rival causal and interpretive approaches to explaining social phenomena have important ethical differences. While human actions can be explained as a result of causal mechanisms, as a meaningful choice based on reasons, or as some combination of the two, it is morally important that social scientists respect others by recognizing them as persons. Interpretive explanations directly respect their subjects in this way, while purely causal explanations do not. Yet although causal explanations are not themselves expressions of respect, they can be (...) used in respectful ways if they are incorporated into subjects’ self-directed projects. This can occur when subjects correctly understand and freely adopt researchers’ goals through a process of informed consent. It can also occur when researchers correctly understand and adopt their subject’s goals, using their research to empower those they study. (shrink)

Moral sentimentalism can be understood as a metaethical theory, a normative theory, or some combination of the two. Metaethical sentimentalism emphasizes the role of affect in the proper psychology of moral judgment, while normative sentimentalism emphasizes the centrality of warm emotions to the phenomena of which these judgments properly approve. Neither form of sentimentalism necessarily implies a commitment to virtue ethics, but both have an elective affinity with it. The classical metaethical sentimentalists of the Scottish Enlightenment—such as David Hume and (...) Adam Smith—were all, to a greater or lesser extent, also virtue theorists. The connection is even stronger in the case of Enlightenment philosophers who were also normative sentimentalists , as with Frances Hutcheson. For Hutcheson, virtue simply is a habit of acting from the warm motive of universal benevolence. Today, neo-sentimentalist metaethicists such as Allan Gibbard, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson generally remain agnostic on the question of whether virtue ethics is superior to its deontological and consequentialist competitors. Michael Slote, however, has developed a comprehensive theory of sentimentalist care ethics in an unambiguously virtue-centered form. (shrink)

John Rawls shares the Enlightenment's commitment to finding moral and political principles which can be reflectively endorsed by all individuals autonomously. He usually presents reflective autonomy in Kantian, rationalist terms: autonomy is identified with the exercise of reason, and principles of justice must be constructed which are acceptable to all on the basis of reason alone. Yet David Hume, Adam Smith and many other Enlightenment thinkers rejected such rationalism, searching instead for principles which can be endorsed by all on the (...) basis of all the faculties of the human psyche, emotion and imagination included. The influence of these sentimentalists on Rawls is clearest in his descriptive moral psychology, but I argue that it is also present in Rawls's understanding of the sources of normativity. Although this debt is obscured by Rawls's explicit "Kantianism," his theory would be strengthened by a greater understanding of its debts to the sentimentalist Enlightenment. (shrink)

A "how-to" guide to writing political theory in a sentimentalist mode.

When David Hume wrote to Baron de Montesquieu ‘J’ai consacré ma vie à la philosophie et aux belles-lettres’,1 he was not describing himself as having two separate callings. His was a single vocation — one involving the expression of deep thought through beautiful writing.2 This vocation did not come naturally or easily to Hume. He struggled continually to reshape his approach to prose, famously renouncing the Treatise of Human Nature as a literary failure and radically revising the presentation of his (...) philosophy in the Essays and two Enquiries. This essay will focus on Hume’s struggle between two modes of moral-philosophical composition prevalent in his day: the cold, unemotional style associated with experimental science that Hume metaphorically labels anatomy’ and the warm, rhetorical style which he labels ‘painting’. (shrink)

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily from (...) the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Enlightenment sentimentalism’s greatest potential contribution to scholarship today is not a matter for moral philosophy alone, but rather an agenda for fruitful collaboration between fields across the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary program for both understanding an improving human nature is contrasted with alternative approaches, and defended against objections that it cannot produce a moral code categorically binding on any rational being as such. The chapter concludes with some sociological and psychological hypotheses that might help (...) explain why the interdisciplinary and sentimentalist approach to ethics, for all its intellectual virtues, has not been adequately appreciated. (shrink)

Leo Strauss presents at least two distinct accounts of the idea that the authors in the political-philosophical canon have often masked their true teachings. A weaker account of esotericism, dependent on the contingent fact of presecution, is attributed to the moderns, while a stronger account, stemming from a necessary conflict between philosophy and society, is attributed to the ancients. Although most interpreters agree that Strauss here sides with the ancients, this view fails to consider the possibility that Strauss's writings on (...) esotericism may themselves be composed esoterically. A reevaluation of Straussian hermeneutics in light of this possibility suggests that the elitism and secrecy often associated with "Straussianism" may stem, not from Strauss's true account of esotericism, but instead from an exoteric doctrine designed to seduce students into a life of philosophy. (shrink)

Michael Slote’s Moral Sentimentalism is a wonderful model of a particular, under-appreciated philosophical method. It demonstrates that exciting, original work can be created by putting old ideas to new uses, proving once again that the classics of moral and political philosophy offer too rich an array of intellectual resources to leave to historians alone. Whenever one is reclaiming old ideas, however, the most important decision is which ideas to reclaim, and which to leave in the dustbin of history. Slote (...) makes use of many ideas drawn from history’s greatest moral sentimentalist, David Hume, but he rejects many others. The work of Hume’s closest friend and greatest sentimentalist ally, Adam Smith, is rejected without adequate explanation. Smith is mentioned, but quickly dismissed. Yet even though Smith makes little contribution to Slote’s own version of sentimentalism, I think he deserved greater discussion in this book. Smith and Slote address many of the same subjects, using the same basic sentimentalist approach, but they come to very different conclusions. It is thus possible to construct a fruitful debate between them—a debate in which, since he can no longer speak on his own behalf, I will be taking Smith’s side. (shrink)

Drug Safety Communications are used by the Food and Drug Administration to inform health care providers, patients, caregivers, and the general public about safety issues related to FDA-approved drugs. To assess patient knowledge of the messaging contained in DSCs related to the sleep aids zolpidem and eszopiclone, we conducted a large, cross-sectional patient survey of 1,982 commercially insured patients selected by stratified random sampling from the Optum Research Database who had filled at least two prescriptions for either zolpidem or eszopiclone (...) between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013. Among the 594 respondents, two-thirds reported hearing generally about drug safety information prior to starting a new drug, with the remaining one-third “rarely” or “never” hearing such information. Providers and pharmacists were primary sources of drug safety information. Two-thirds of zolpidem users and half of eszopiclone users reported having heard about the related DSC messages, ability to accurately identify the major factual messages was limited. Respondents reacted to new drug safety information about their sleep aids by reporting that they would want to learn about alternative ways to help them sleep and seek out more information about the safety of their specific sleeping pill. Opportunities may exist for the FDA to work with providers and pharmacies to help ensure the DSC information is more widely received and is more fully understood by those taking the affected medications. (shrink)

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family values’ (...) such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects. (shrink)

Focusing on diverse aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy, this volume not only provides a valuable introduction, but also investigates connections between the philosophy of Wittgenstein, other philosophers--in particular, Frege, Frazer, Carnap, and Strawson--and philosophical trends. It also illuminates very different aspects of Wittgenstein's thought, probing into the controversies it stimulates, as well as into its influence.

Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies consists of thirteen thematically linked essays on different aspects of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, by one of the leading commentators on his work. After an opening overview of Wittgenstein's philosophy the following essays fall into two classes: those that investigate connections between the philosophy of Wittgenstein and other philosophers and philosophical trends, and those which enter into some of the controversies that, over the last two decades, have raged over the interpretation of one aspect or another (...) of Wittgenstein's writings. The connections that are explored include the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy and the humanistic and hermeneutic traditions in European philosophy, Wittgenstein's response to Frazer's Golden Bough and the interpretation of ritual actions, his attitude towards and criticisms of Frege, the relationship between his ideas and those of members of the Vienna Circle on the matter of ostensive definition, and a comparison of Carnap's conception of the elimination of metaphysics and of Strawson's rehabilitation of metaphysics with Wittgenstein's later criticisms of metaphysics. The controversies into which Hacker enters include the Diamond-Conant interpretation of the Tractatus, Winch's interpretation of the Tractatus conception of names, Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's discussion of following a rule, and Malcolm's defence of the idea that Wittgenstein claimed that mastery of a language logically requires that the language be shared with other speakers. These far-ranging essays, several of them previously unpublished or difficult to find, shed much light upon different aspects of Wittgenstein's thought, and upon the controversies which it has stimulated. (shrink)

"The aim... is to show what implications Wittgenstein's approach has in moral philosophy and in so doing to cast light on that subject-matter itself". While this carefully crafted and well-reasoned book develops ideas in an area that the later Wittgenstein did not discuss in a sustained way, Johnston also sheds light on several of Wittgenstein's remarks including the "Lecture on Ethics," passages from Culture and Value, and "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough." The author is interested in Wittgenstein's thought in (...) not merely a scholarly way but because he thinks it offers the best account of the matters at hand. He tries to justify this assessment by criticizing a number of contemporary thinkers including Mackie, MacIntyre, Davidson, and Blackburn. (shrink)

Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) showed how, consistent with the predictions of error‐driven learning models, the order in which stimuli are presented in training can affect category learning. Specifically, learners exposed to artificial language input where objects preceded their labels learned the discriminating features of categories better than learners exposed to input where labels preceded objects. We sought to replicate this finding in two online experiments employing the same tests used originally: A four pictures test (match a label (...) to one of four pictures) and a four labels test (match a picture to one of four labels). In our study, only findings from the four pictures test were consistent with the original result. Additionally, the effect sizes observed were smaller, and participants over‐generalized high‐frequency category labels more than in the original study. We suggest that although Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, and Thorpe (2010) feature‐label order predictions were derived from error‐driven learning, they failed to consider that this mechanism also predicts that performance in any training paradigm must inevitably be influenced by participant prior experience. We consider our findings in light of these factors, and discuss implications for the generalizability and replication of training studies. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans Temps zéro, nº 1, 2007. Nous remercions Michael Sheringham de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Si l'expérience de la quotidienneté, qui préoccupe un philosophe comme Henri Lefebvre ou un écrivain comme Georges Perec, semble résister à l'emprise du roman, Michel de Certeau a pu mettre une réflexion sur le récit au cœur de son essai fondamental, L'invention du quotidien. En effet, les notions de « récits délinquants » ou d'« (...) énonciations piétonnières », chez Certeau, (...) - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

The chapter presents a largely sympathetic account of W. V. O. Quine’s account of mathematics and logic. The themes of naturalism, confirmational holism, and ontological relativity are discussed in detail, along with the indispensability argument for the truth of mathematical theories and the existence of mathematical objects.

_ Source: _Page Count 11 Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii +279. isbn 978–0–19–993647–2.

In this paper, I defend Husserl against Derrida's critique that Husserl's phenomenology is of a piece with the "the metaphysics of presence." I show much of Derrida's critique can be met by what Husserl calls "genetic phenomenology.".

The author discusses statements such as 'virtue is blue' as proposed by a n prior. He agrees with prior to a point but investigates this type of statement, In the end calling for us to drop them from use altogether. (staff).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 545-546 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland Michael Hunter, editor. The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late 17th Century Scotland. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2001. Pp. vii + 247. Cloth, $90.00. This is a superb collection of original materials (including a range of private (...) correspondence, scribal works, and printed texts) related to the "strange reports" of incidence of "second sight" in Scotland from the 1680s to the 1700s. The material includes literary exchanges between powerful figures in the Anglo-Scottish intellectual community like Robert Boyle, John Aubrey, Robert Kirk, John Frazer, and Samuel Pepys. All of these texts are edited with immaculate care and informative annotation. The lengthy introduction provides both intellectual context and a detailed bibliographical account. Collectively the texts reproduced here provide a comprehensive resource for the examination of attitudes to magic and the supernatural in the late seventeenth century. From these texts one can reconstruct the battle between "orthodox" Anglican defenders of a "spirit world" and the sceptical assault on its authenticity. This was a war of ideas with the victors hoping to fix the meaning and nature of second sight as either supportive or corrosive of the established ecclesiastical institutions. Was this phenomena an established "matter of fact" which proved the routines of nature and also the paranormal intervention of God? Or was it, as some sceptics argued, evidence of priestly fraud and manipulation? The debates over the meaning and significance of these transgressions of the ordinary course of nature vacillated between treating them as acts of God or the Devil, as manifest frauds or ignorant misunderstandings. As Michael Hunter argues in his introduction, men like Boyle focussed upon the issue of second sight because it was a less exotic and less controversial phenomenon than the more culturally unstable manifestations of witchcraft. Fundamental to the orthodox cultural project was the creation of an empirically robust form of knowledge that combined folklore, antiquarian erudition, and biblical exegesis to establish the reality and boundaries of the natural and the divine.Although Hunter establishes the "origins" of the interest as an intellectual spin off from Boyle's project for the "Protestantisation" of the Highlands, the core text reproduced here is Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth. Kirk, educated in Edinburgh and St. Andrews, was minister of Aberfoyle and worked with Boyle on his Gaelic Bible after 1684. This scriptural labor brought him to London in the late 1680s and into an elite Anglican circle that included Edward Stillingfleet. The text edited here is based on the earliest surviving manuscript of the early 1690s which was compiled from earlier notes. It is clear that the work was circulated in the period only in scribal form: a partial version was first printed in 1815 and a complete text in 1964. As Hunter establishes by examining Kirk's overlooked student notebooks from the 1660s and 1670s, it is possible to reconstruct the eclectic intellectual culture that formed the background to the work—here Aristotelian texts mingled with more modern authors like Campanella and Descartes. These notebooks not only record Kirk's pastoral concerns and the spiritual health of his flock, they also register a range of more exotic interests in folkish charms and the various operations and manifestations of the "invisible powers." The discovery of a "kingdom of fairies," which was apparently comprehensible to certain individuals with second sight, was ideal material upon which Kirk was able to synchronize the findings of Holy Scripture and modern natural philosophy.As Hunter's elegant and effective introduction outlines, men like Kirk, Frazer, and later Martin Martin, deliberately mimicking the epistemological strategies of the London-based Royal Society, aimed to display matters of fact as a dispassionate means of responding to the cultural assault of the sceptical wits who dismissed stories of the "lychnobious" world as [End Page 545] idle fantasy or deliberate fraud. Although this work was learned, serious, and erudite, and in the... (shrink)

What is going on under the hood in philosophical analysis, that familiar process that attempts to uncover the nature of such philosophically interesting kinds as knowledge, causation, and justice by the method of posit and counterexample? How, in particular, do intuitions tell us about philosophical reality? The standard, if unappealing, answer is that philosophical analysis is conceptual analysis—that what we learn about when we do philosophy is in the first instance facts about our own minds. Drawing on recent work on (...) the psychology of concepts, this book proposes a new understanding of philosophical analysis, which I call inductive analysis. The thesis that philosophical analysis is inductive analysis explains how novel, substantive philosophical knowledge can be generated in the armchair. It also explains why attempts at philosophical analysis tend to fall short of providing a complete and uncontroversial definition, and supplies reasons not to lament this apparent shortcoming. (shrink)

The problem of evil is considered to be the most formidable objection to theism and a central element in the case for atheism. This essay surveys and evaluates the two key formulations of the problem expressed as an argument: the logical argument and the evidential argument. It also analyzes two types of defences offered in response to the argument from evil: the Free Will Defence against the logical argument and Skeptical Theist Defence against the evidential argument. Also treated are several (...) greater-good theodicies that are generally employed as responses to the evidential argument: free will theodicy, natural law theodicy, and soul-making theodicy. Because it sounds a slightly different note from traditional greater good approaches, the theodicy of Open Theism—which argues that the theistic God could create a universe in which there is the possibility of evil occurring that does not serve some greater good—is examined. (shrink)

Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitive science, the set of imaginative processes (...) is then divided into two kinds: one that is unconscious, uncontrolled, and effortless, and another that is conscious, controlled, and effortful. This paper outlines the different epistemological strengths and weaknesses of the two kinds of imaginative process, and argues that a dual process model of imagination helpfully resolves or clarifies issues in the epistemology of imagination and the closely related epistemology of thought experiments. (shrink)