Irony is nothing new to philosophy; quite the contrary, it is as familiar as the figure of Socrates. Yet when, for example, Socrates asks Euthyphro to teach him about piety because of Euthyphro's obvious knowledge of the subject, Socrates‘ irony has little philosophical significance. Socrates says something contrary to what he means, and Euthyphro in his arrogance takes the statement literally. Plato uses Socratic irony to dramatic affect by allowing the events of the drama to unfold in such a way (...) that it becomes clear that Socrates’ literal praise of Euthyphro’s knowledge is incongruous with the results of the discussion taking place, although Euthyphro is hardly aware of the incongruity. The significance of this literary technique is that the reader be made conscious of the possibility of his own arrogance and the hindrance this would create to true philosophical understanding. As important as this use of irony is to Plato's Socratic dialogues, the irony is not the philosophical thesis. (shrink)

Within the context of a critique of volitionism, Trying Without Willing articulates a new philosophy of the mind and its role in intentional action, based on the notion of de re intentionality. This book will be of interest to anyone seriously interested in the philosophy of mind, the nature of intentional action and mental causation, or the influence of Cartesianism in contemporary analytic philosophy.

The present paper explores three interrelated topics in Popper's theory of science: (1) his view of conjecture, (2) the aim of science, and (3) his (never fully articulated) theory of meaning. Central to Popper's theory of science is the notion of conjecture. Popper writes as if scientists faced with a problem proceed to tackle it by conjecture, that is, by guesses uninformed by inferential considerations. This paper develops a contrast between guesses and educated guesses in an attempt to show that (...) there is more to scientific conjecture than conjecture. The suggestion is made that some inductive considerations enter into the process of educated guessing or scientific conjecture in such a way that the ‘context of discovery’ cannot be sharply separated from the ‘context of justification’. This discussion leads to a tension between Popper's negative method of conjecture and his realism. Given Popper's (implicit) theory of meaning it seems Popper's epistemology (the conjecture and refutation method) is incompatible with his metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Beyond Words argues that some works of fiction and poetry are especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical—scientific or philosophical—discourse cannot literally say.

In his book _Paradoxes, Mark Sainsbury suggests that degrees of truth can be justified and explained by analogy with degrees of belief. Considerations of vagueness place theoretical limitations on degrees of belief which require degrees of truth. This paper argues that considerations of vagueness and degrees of belief do nothing to illuminate degrees of truth. An account of vagueness need not postulate degrees of truth.

Within the context of a critique of volitionism, Trying Without Willing articulates a new philosophy of the mind and its role in intentional action, based on the notion of de re intentionality. This book will be of interest to anyone seriously interested in the philosophy of mind, the nature of intentional action and mental causation, or the influence of Cartesianism in contemporary analytic philosophy.

This is a critical review of a book that defends two basic theses about analytic philosophy--that the 'no entity without identity' ontology is basic to the four great analytic philosophers and that they were 'modified realists.' This review calls into question both of these claims. The ontological views of Frege, Russell, Quine, Wittgenstein and others are discussed as well other central issues in analytic philosophy.

Put relationship-centered communication at the forefront of care Today, physicians face a hypercompetitive marketplace in which they must meet unique and complex patient needs as efficiently as possible. But in a culture prioritizing clinical outcomes above all, there can be a tendency to lose sight of one of the most critical aspects of providing effective care: the communication skills that build and foster physician-patient relationships. Studies have shown that good communication between doctors and patients and among all caregivers who interface (...) with patients directly results in better clinical outcomes, reduced costs, greater patient satisfaction, and lower rates of physician burnout. In Communication the Cleveland Clinic Way, Dr. Adrienne Boissy and her team tell the story of how Cleveland Clinic created and applied the R.E.D.E. to Communicate: Foundations of Healthcare program, making the world-renowned hospital system a leader in relationship-centered care. They provide a step-by-step guide for healthcare leaders and decision-makers to design, develop, and implement communication skills training in their own institutions. Learn how to: • Craft an effective, colleague-supported communication skills program to include veteran physicians, residents, and medical students • Leverage creative program design and data transparency to engage and facilitate staff physicians and advanced care providers • Identify common misperceptions and myths in healthcare communication and respond to them successfully • Cultivate a true sense of empathy—with patients and fellow caregivers alike—while maintaining professionalism In a field where difficult conversations and stressful relationships are commonplace, clinicians need a structured approach to enable them to deliver the best care possible. Communication the Cleveland Clinic Way is the blueprint for establishing a relationship-centered program that will improve patient experience, reinvigorate doctors’ passion for their work, and elevate any organization. (shrink)

Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...) illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology and a notable contribution to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious.

St. Paul writes, “whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10: 31 NABRE).” This essay employs the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and the recent philosophical work of Daniel Johnson (2020) on this command to investigate a series of questions that the command raises. What is glory? How does one properly act for glory and for the glory of another? How is it possible to do everything for the glory of God? I begin with Aquinas’ (...) account of glory and the pursuit of glory for God’s glory and Aquinas’s answers to some of the above questions that can be drawn from his discussion in De Malo. I defend Aquinas against criticisms from Daniel Johnson and present his own interpretation of the command. I advance the discussion through adding two additional interpretations that do not rely on a controversial assumption Johnson makes. Next, I address the puzzle of how we can intend everything for the glory of God using Aquinas’s three-fold account of intention. Finally, I discuss the relation between charity and the desire for God’s glory and how regular, actual intentions of one’s actions for the glory of God increases charity. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider recent attempts to metaphysically explain agentive modality in terms of conditionals. We suggest that the best recent accounts face counterexamples, and more worryingly, they take some agentive modality for granted. In particular, the ability to perform basic actions features as a primitive in these theories. While it is perfectly acceptable for a semantics of agentive modal claims to take some modality for granted in getting the extension of action claims correct, a metaphysical explanation of agentive (...) modality cannot, at least not in the way that conditional approaches to agentive modality do. We argue that this problem was present even in the classical conditional analysis. By a pessimistic induction, we suggest that, probably, no conditional approach to agentive modality will succeed. (shrink)

Theologian, social psychologist, and activist Christena Cleveland draws on her journey to dismantle the cultural "whitemalegod" and discover the Sacred Black Feminine, weaving together personal story and research to introduce a Black Female God who imbues us with hope, trust, and presence.

Knepper criticizes existing efforts in the philosophy of religion for being out of step with, and therefore useless to, the academic study of religion, then forwards a new program for philosophy of religion that is in step with, and therefore useful to, the academic study of religion.

According to the Fragmentation Analysis, epistemic akrasia is a state of conflict between beliefs formed by the linguistic and non-linguistic belief-formation systems, and epistemic akrasia is irrational because it is a state of conflict between beliefs so formed. I argue that there are cases of higher-order epistemic akrasia, where both beliefs are formed by the linguistic belief-formation system. Because the Fragmentation Analysis cannot accommodate this possibility, the Fragmentation Analysis is incorrect. I consider three objections to the possibility of higher-order epistemic (...) akrasia. Along the way, I offer a revision of the Fragmentation Analysis that can allow for the possibility of higher-order akrasia while avoiding the problems I point out for the original view. (shrink)

In this global introduction to philosophy of religion you begin not with a single tradition, but with religious philosophies from East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, and Native North America, alongside the classical Abrahamic and modern European traditions. Matching this diversity of traditions, chapters are organized around questions that acknowledge there is no single understanding of any god or ultimate reality. Instead you approach six different traditions of philosophizing about religion by asking questions about the journeys of both the self (...) and the cosmos such as "What is my path?" and "Where did the cosmos come from?" Accompanied by introductory materials and an extensive glossary, each chapter includes learning objectives, questions for discussion, and suggested primary and secondary sources. The categories of religion and philosophy are interrogated throughout. Equipped with study tools and universal questions about the self and the cosmos, Philosophies of Religion: A Global and Critical Introduction shows you how to philosophize about religions around the world. (shrink)

Second-order logic and modal logic are both, separately, major topics of philosophical discussion. Although both have been criticized by Quine and others, increasingly many philosophers find their strictures uncompelling, and regard both branches of logic as valuable resources for the articulation and investigation of significant issues in logical metaphysics and elsewhere. One might therefore expect some combination of the two sorts of logic to constitute a natural and more comprehensive background logic for metaphysics. So it is somewhat surprising to find (...) that philosophical discussion of secondorder modal logic is almost totally absent, despite the pioneering contribution of Barcan. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a family of responses to the evidential problem of evil. What unifies this family is two general claims. First, that even if God were to exist, we shouldn’t expect to see God’s reasons for permitting the suffering we observe. Second, the previous claim entails the failure of a variety of arguments from evil against the existence of God. In this essay, we identify three particular articulations of skeptical theism—three different ways of “filling in” those two claims—and describes (...) their role in responding to evidential arguments of evil due to William Rowe and Paul Draper. But skeptical theism has been subject to a variety of criticisms, several of which raise interesting issues and puzzles not just in philosophy of religion but other areas of philosophy as well. Consequently, we discuss some of these criticisms, partly with an eye to bringing out the connections between skeptical theism and current topics in mainstream philosophy. Finally, we conclude by situating skeptical theism within our own distinctive methodology for evaluating world views, what we call “worldview theory versioning.”. (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

The paper explores the main competing interpretations of Aristotle's view of the relation between happiness and external goods in the Nicomachean Ethics. On the basis of a careful analysis of what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics (and other works such as the Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, etc.) it is argued that it is likely that Aristotle takes at least some external goods to be actual constituents of happiness provided that (1) they are accompanied by virtuous activity and (2) the (...) agent enjoying and using those external goods does so in ways compatible with the continuous aim of acting virtuously. (shrink)

Jecker and colleagues open (2024) a critical and needed dialogue about the ethics of international conferencing. In particular, they focus on proposing a set of principles in selecting the location...

This is the first single volume to offer a comprehensive and systematic account of British and American aesthetics from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Things in common: an introduction -- Life -- Specters -- Subscendence -- Species -- Kindness.

The chapter argues that a model‐building methodology like that widespread in contemporary natural and social science already plays a significant role in philosophy. One neglected form of progress in philosophy over the past fifty years has been the development of better and better formal models of significant phenomena. Examples are given from both philosophy of language and epistemology. Philosophy can do still better in the future by applying model‐building methods more systematically and self‐consciously, with consequent readjustments to its methodology. Although (...) it is neither likely nor desirable for model‐building to become the sole or even main philosophical method, its use enhances the power and reliability of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives on "the sublime," the singular aesthetic response elicited by phenomena that move viewers by transcending and overwhelming them. The book consists of an editor's introduction and fifteen chapters written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Part One examines philosophical approaches advanced historically to account for the phenomenon, beginning with Longinus, moving through eighteenth and nineteenth century writers in Britain, France, and Germany, and concluding with developments in contemporary continental (...) philosophy. Part Two explores the sublime with respect to particular disciplines and areas of study, including Dutch literature, early modern America, the environment, religion, British Romanticism, the fine arts, and architecture. Each chapter is both accessible for nonspecialists and offers an original contribution to its respective field of inquiry. (shrink)

The author argues that all forms of life are interconnected and that no being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, nor does "nature" exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what the author calls the ecological thought. He investigates the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of this interconnectedness.

The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is the so‐called negative program's critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since the negative program has been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordinary judgments about real‐life cases, the critique is in immediate danger of generating into global scepticism, because all human judgments turn out to depend on intuitions. (...) Recently, some proponents of the negative program have tried to demarcate the target of their critique more narrowly. However, their attempts are still far too indiscriminate, and over‐generate scepticism. Nevertheless, once experimental philosophy has refined its own methodology, it may contribute to the refinement of the methodology of mainstream philosophy, by filtering out the effects of cognitive bias, although it offers no prospect of doing without judgments on real or imaginary cases. (shrink)

Lewisian reference magnetism about linguistic content determination [Lewis 1983 has been defended in recent work by Weatherson [2003] and Sider [2009], among others. Two advantages claimed for the view are its capacity to make sense of systematic error in speakers' use of their words, and its capacity to distinguish between verbal and substantive disagreements. Our understanding of both error and disagreement is linked to the role of usage and first order intuitions in semantics and in linguistic theory more generally. I (...) argue, partially on the basis of these more general considerations, that reference magnetism delivers implausible results. Specifically, I argue that the proponent of reference magnetism maintains her analysis of genuinely systematic error at the cost of an empirically unjustifiable error theory regarding ordinary usage. In response, I describe an alternative view of content determination—MUMPS, or Meaning is Use Minus Pragmatics—which is not committed to such error theories. Despite this advantage, MUMPS has high prima facie costs. On such a view, there is a great deal of variation in linguistic meaning across speakers and times. As a result, a large number of seemingly mistaken claims are analysed as expressing true propositions. Correspondingly, a large number of seemingly substantive disagreements are analysed as terminological. However, I argue that these consequences are not as costly as they seem. Despite appearances, MUMPS is consistent with objective, metaphysically realist adjudication of disagreements, even in cases where meanings are not shared and where both parties to a dispute speak truly. MUMPS thus allows for a more nuanced understanding of linguistic usage, change, and variation, without imposing a commitment to any form of metaphysical anti-realism. (shrink)

The general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boundaries approach to learning. These theorists have presented a variety of data showing that supposedly general laws of learning may in fact be limited in their applicability to different species and learning tasks, and they argue that the limitations are drawn (...) by the nature of each species' adaptation to the particular requirements of its natural environment. The biological boundaries approach has served an important critical function in the move away from general process learning theory, but it is limited in its ability to provide an alternative to the general process approach. In particular, the biological boundaries approach lacks generality, it is in some respects subservient to the general process tradition, and its ecological content is in too many cases limited toex post factoadaptive explanations of learning skills. A contrasting, ecological approach to learning, which can provide a true alternative to general process theory, is presented. The ecological approach begins by providing an ecological task description for naturally occurring instances of learning; this step answers the question:Whatdoes this animal learn to do? The next step is an analysis of the means by which learning occurs in the course of development, answering the question:Howdoes the animal learn to do this? On the basis of such analyses, local principles of adaptation are formulated to account for the learning abilities of individual species. More global principles are sought by generalization among these local principles and may form the basis for a general ecological theory of learning. (shrink)