The concern people are now expressing about the human environment, ecology, pollution, and overpopulation, though admittedly legitimate from a moral point of view, has not attracted much attention from philosophers. This is notable particularly inasmuch as the United States civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, and various responses of civil disobedience and violence to social problems have all aroused philosophers to careful thought on rights and obligations. I do not want to suggest that a social problem is interesting only if (...) it is philosophically interesting; nor do I want to make light of the way in which the problems of waste, noise, and overcrowding have captured the popular imagination. Yes, we must protect and use wisely the human environment and natural resources. But still, saying it seems banal, and philosophers do not feed on banalities. Here we have a modern moral commandment which speaks to an urgent and serious matter but which, like “Do not steal,” seems so obvious as to be trite. Yes, we must plan the world’s population in a rational way. Even that commandment, though disputed by some, seems trite. (shrink)

Since 1960 the prevailing interpretation of Anselm’s Proslogion has been that it contains not one but at least two ontological arguments for the existence of God. The first argument, appearing in Proslogion II, assumes that existence is a perfection and shows that God, the being more perfect than which no being can be conceived, exists. The crucial difficulty with this proof, as Kant pointed out and many contemporary philosophers agree, is that ‘existence’ is not a predicate, and therefore can not (...) signify any property, and hence can not signify a perfection. However, the prevailing interpretation claims, there is an additional argument in Proslogion III which at least is not subject to the difficulty Kant exposed. There the premiss is not that existence is a perfection but rather that necessary existence is a perfection. To this premiss the objection that ‘existence’ is not a predicate is irrelevant. Claiming that something necessarily exists does contribute to our concept of the entity in question. It tells us that the entity can not be brought into existence, is compatible with all conceivable states of affairs, and hence can not be destroyed. Since necessary existence is a consistently conceivable perfection which God can have, God, the being more perfect than which nothing can be conceived, must have it. Furthermore, some recent interpreters of the Proslogion maintain that the conclusion of the second argument is stronger than the conclusion of the first. Proslogion II, even if valid, yields nothing more than God’s existence, whereas Proslogion III yields God’s necessary existence. From the conclusion of Proslogion III the conclusion of Proslogion II is entailed, but not vice versa. The purpose of my paper is to show that the current interpretation of Anselm on these points is incorrect. (shrink)

James Collins writes that some modern philosophers have not been given revisionary treatment by their critics.This is the case with Wolff, Bentham, and Comte, who are held fast in their respective categories of rationalism and utilitarianism and positivism, with only minor flurries of research aimed at reconsidering them from a fresh angle.Fortunately, Bentham's day has now come, and we have in David Lyons’ In the Interest of the Governed, a major new interpretation. Lyons permits us to continue to call Bentham (...) a “utilitarian,” but we have to revise what we understand by the term in this context. (shrink)

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir revealed that it is just this freedom of withdrawal from self that woman cannot gain because of the constant effort of establishing and guarding her identity against an enforced background of passivity, ornamentality and self-enclosure. Even as a small child, woman is taught how to.

On the basis of a distinction between suffering and punishment, I maintain that divine punishment is suffering understood against the backdrop of an ultimate or divine morality. Suffering can in some cases be a retributively just desert even where there is an obvious absence of distributive justice. After reconciliation with God the suffering may continue unabated, but the suffering loses its status as punishment. An innocent or forgiven person cannot be punished no matter how much s/he is made to suffer. (...) Divine punishment is an ultimate moral concept, an interpretation placed on suffering by a person of morally good will. (shrink)

This is an attempt to understand the ethics of leonard nelson as dealing with some of the same problems arising from kant's moral philosophy as have concerned the rule utilitarians in anglo-American philosophy. In particular, They share the attempt to provide a rationale for specific duties in terms of ends to be achieved, And they try to correct what they see as excessive rigidity and formalism in the kantian imperatives.

The moral argument for the existence of God is really a family of arguments. What they have in common is Kant’s insistence that philosophical theology proceed by drawing out the presuppositions of moral reasoning. Kant’s own favorite version of the argument is widely rejected today. Kant maintained that the summum bonum, the perfect unison of virtue and happiness, is the aim of rational action. Because it ought to be achieved it is possible, as the ought implies the ability to bring (...) it about. The moral faith is that God’s existence and human immortality enable continued moral progress after death and the enjoying of happiness appropriate to it, thus making the arrival at the summum bonum possible. Kant also urged that the categorical commands of the moral conscience suggested the existence of a cosmic lawgiver and commander, and there are a number of nineteenth-century arguments which proceed along those lines. (shrink)

One of the widely held philosophical doctrines of this century in the English speaking world is that there is no logical bridge between fact and value, between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Human nature may be such that all or most of us approve common states of affairs. That is, there seem to be experiential or psychological ways of bridging the gap. But, on this view, no value judgment is ever inconsistent with any description of the world or of part (...) of the world. Describe the world as you will, there is no logical reason to move on to any specific value judgment about the event or events under the given description. (shrink)

This article criticizes an attempt by j. Brenton stearns to refute naturalism as an account of evaluative language ("a refutation of axiological naturalism," journal of value inquiry, I, No.2 (fall, 1967)). Stearns argued that if the goodness of a thing were, As naturalism claims, Equivalent to its possession of certain non-Evaluative properties, Then two things could differ from one another solely with respect to their goodness. And since this is impossible, Stearns concludes that naturalism is false. (...) This argument is criticized by logical analogy. It is argued that if this argument shows that a naturalistic account of "good" is false, Then it equally shows that a naturalistic account of "large" or "primary color" is false. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Yarkoni highlights patterns of overgeneralization in psychology research. In this comment, we note that such challenges also pertain to applied psychological and organizational research and practice. We use two examples – cross-cultural generalizability and implicit bias training – to illustrate common practices of overgeneralization from narrow research samples to broader operational populations. We conclude with recommendations for research and practice.

Attempts to reclaim mindfulness from the commercial and corporate juggernaut it has become and to demonstrate its usefulness in spiritual (including Christian) life.

Metaphysics and language: Quine, W. V. O. On the individuation of attributes. Körner, S. On some relations between logic and metaphysics. Marcus, R. B. Does the principle of substitutivity rest on a mistake? Van Fraassen, B. C. Platonism's pyrrhic victory. Martin, R. M. On some prepositional relations. Kearns, J. T. Sentences and propositions.--Basic and combinatorial logic: Orgass, R. J. Extended basic logic and ordinal numbers. Curry, H. B. Representation of Markov algorithms by combinators.--Implication and consistency: Anderson, A. R. Fitch on (...) consistency. Belnap, N. D., Jr. Grammatical propaedeutic. Thomason, R. H. Decidability in the logic of conditionals. Myhill, J. Levels of implication.--Deontic, epistemic, and erotetic logic: Bacon, J. Belief as relative knowledge. Wu, K. J. Believing and disbelieving. Kordig, C. R. Relativized deontic modalities. Harrah, D. A system for erotetic sentences. (shrink)

Of all the developments in twentieth century physics, none has given rise to more heated debates than the changes in our understanding of science precipitated by the quantum revolution''. In this revolution, Niels Bohr's dramatically non-classical theory of the atom proved to be the springboard from which the new atomic physics drew it's momentum. Furthermore, Bohr's contribution was crucial not only because his interpretation of quantum mechanics became the most widely accepted view but also because in his role as educator (...) and spokesman for atomic physics Bohr was very much the patron spirit of the entire quantum revolution. The conceptual framework which he proposed to provide a new viewpoint for understanding the quantum theoretical description of atomic systems became for most of this century the dominant outlook of countless productive experimental and theoretical physicists. He called this new framework complementarity''. (shrink)

Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of a (...) trope qua abstract particular by rejecting arguments that purport to show that tropes should not be understood as abstract and by arguing that the abstractness of tropes plays an indispensable role in one of our more promising trope-theoretic analyses of universals and of concrete objects. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

The concept of instantiation is realized differently across a variety of metaphysical theories. A certain realization of the concept in a given theory depends on what roles are specified and associated with the concept and its corresponding term as well as what entities are suited to fill those roles. In this paper, the classic realization of the concept of instantiation in a one-category ontology of abstract particulars or tropes is articulated in a novel way and defended against unaddressed objections.

Fifteen essays addressing conceptions of individualism and holism as they emerged in Chinese literature and philosophy from the time of Confucius and Chuang-tzu to the present.