Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

This is an invited introductory discussion of tragedy in Hegel.

"A deeply thoughtful articulation of an enduring and appealing ideal. It is an ideal with a resonance beyond the world of Catholic higher education for all in the academy who still respond to the beckoning vision of the ultimate unity of all human knowing and who view it, indeed, as a necessary inspiration if we are to succeed in according to our intellectual activities the sort of seriousness and moral significance they properly deserve." —Francis Oakley, President Emeritus, Williams College "There (...) is a real need, indeed an absolute necessity, for a Catholic university that is true to its religious values. By so being, it makes other, non-Catholic institutions that much better." —E. Gordon Gee, Chancellor, Vanderbilt University "Dean Roche has done a rare thing. He has articulated a sharp and clear Catholic theology of Christian higher education. What has been implicit in the practice of great Catholic universities has now been made explicit in this fine essay." —Robert Benne, author of _Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions_ "Catholic identity will mean nothing in the world of higher education if it lacks a genuine _intellectual_ dimension. Mark Roche understands that fundamental fact, tackles the problem directly, and deals with it cogently." —Philip Gleason, author of _Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century_. (shrink)

The first evaluation and critique of Hegel's theory of tragedy and comedy, this book also develops an original theory of both genres.

The series Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Studies in German Literature) presents outstanding analyses of German-speaking literature from the early modern period to the present day. It particularly embraces comparative, cultural and historical-epistemological questions and serves as a tradition-steeped forum for innovative literary research. All submitted manuscripts undergo a double peer-review process. Please contact the editor Marcus Böhm (marcus.boehm [at] degruyter.com) for further information regarding manuscript submission and subsidies.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations by Anne E. PatrickMary M. Doyle RocheConscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations Anne E. Patrick NEW YORK AND LONDON: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2013. 197 PP. $24.95In Conscience and Calling, Anne Patrick weaves together insights into women's moral agency, vocational discernment, and historical narratives of religious women's engagement with clerical authority. Taking up James Gustafson's (...) question, "What is God enabling and requiring us to be and to do?" she offers a nuanced view of virtuous discernment and action in the context of the "ecclesial oppression" of women. Patrick asks, "What is correct 'church practice' for female moral agents in view of the institutionalized injustice toward women in Catholicism?" (59).Chapter 1 begins with cases of conflict between women's religious congregations and clerical leadership. In the first case, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary protested intolerable living conditions at a parish in Brooklyn, New [End Page 201] York, in 1939. When repeated requests for heat fell on the pastor's deaf ears, the sisters requested to leave the parish and were told that they would then also have to leave another thriving ministry in the diocese. The sisters acquiesced to this decision in a spirit of obedience and did not publicize the real reason for their departure. Fifty years later in Miami, Florida, when another conflict arose, the sisters involved discerned a very different response to injustice, one marked by concern for "justice, honesty, and personal responsibility." The model of a "good sister" had shifted from an emphasis on obedience and institutional loyalty toward shared responsibility for ministry and leadership.Chapter 2 surveys the landscape of women's engagement with the Church and its structures of leadership and adapts H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture to sketch five "types": women against the Church; women content with the Church; women above the Church; women and Church in paradox; and women transforming Church. Patrick proposes the transformationist model as the approach that most adequately meets the challenges that women face in the Church today; she calls on those who adopt this approach to live in creative tension with the Church and with those who follow the other models, to espouse justice and mutuality in organizational structures, and to be self-critical. Chapter 3 recounts the history of the National Assembly of Religious Women through this transformational lens.Chapter 4 proposes a "framework for love" that builds on Margaret Farley's ethic of commitment to envision an ethic of vocation that elicits "active receptivity," values the contributions of institutions, practices egalitarianism, and keeps justice and love in dialectical relationship. The "myth" of vocation (the notion that vocation is a "thing" to be discovered and pursued, like one's destiny or soul mate) is balanced by the "mystery" of vocation that engages ongoing, lifelong discernment. Controversial cases involving women religious illustrate this kind of discernment and women's striving to live justly and faithfully. The final chapter, "Vocation in a Transformed Social Context," recounts the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's visitation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a case that has changed the landscape for women's discernment once again. Patrick calls the Church to live out its rhetorical commitment to the dignity of women by opening all church ministries so that women might serve and lead.Conscience and Calling tells an important story about how women religious have discerned the signs of the times and imagined new vocations in the Church and the world. Though the focus here is on women in the American Catholic Church, Patrick's contribution should pave the way for sharing religious women's stories in the global context to further enrich a Christian vision of virtue and vocation for those navigating ecclesial politics and practicing ministry in particular. [End Page 202]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim’s influential exclusion argument attempts to demonstrate the inconsistency of nonreductive materialism in the philosophy of mind. Kim’s argument begins by showing that the three main theses of nonreductive materialism, plus two additional considerations, lead to a specific and familiar picture of mental causation. The exclusion argument can succeed only if, as Kim claims, this picture is not one of genuine causal overdetermination. Accordingly, one can resist Kim’s conclusion by denying this claim, maintaining instead that the effects of the (...) mental are always causally overdetermined. I call this strategy the ‘ overdetermination challenge’. One of the main aims of this paper is to show that the overdetermination challenge is the most appropriate response to Kim’s exclusion argument, at least in its latest form. I argue that Kim fails to adequately respond to the overdetermination challenge, thus failing to prevent his opponents from reasonably maintaining that the effects of the mental are always causally overdetermined. Interestingly, this discussion reveals a curious dialectical feature of Kim’s latest response to the overdetermination challenge: if it succeeds, then a new, simpler and more compact version of the exclusion argument is available. While I argue against the consequent of this conditional, thereby also rejecting the antecedent, this dialectical feature should be of interest to philosophers on either side of this debate. (shrink)

Citizenship rights have become vital to our sense of personal identity and social membership in modern society. Roche argues that today we have to shift from the conventional postwar politics of social rights to a new politics of social obligations and personal responsibility.

Is there some general reason to expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And after you observe that an organism occasionally occupies a given neural state that you think encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the semantic content that that state has, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution by natural selection and (...) show how organisms that are risk-prone in the beliefs they form can be fitter than organisms that are risk-free. To address the second question, we discuss a problem that is widely recognized in statistics – the problem of over-fitting – and one influential device for addressing that problem, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We then use AIC to solve epistemological versions of the disjunction and distality problems, which are two key problems concerning what it is for a belief state to have one semantic content rather than another. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a “screening-off” thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider (...) how it bears on the claim that unification is evidentially relevant. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

I argue elsewhere (Roche 2014) that evidence of evidence is evidence under screening-off. Tal and Comesaña (2017) argue that my appeal to screening-off is subject to two objections. They then propose an evidence of evidence thesis involving the notion of a defeater. There is much to learn from their very careful discussion. I argue, though, that their objections fail and that their evidence of evidence thesis is open to counterexample.

Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is interesting but peculiar and can seem implausible. He denies that we can know by introspection that we have thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But he allows that we can know by introspection what we think, feel, and experience. We consider two puzzles. The first puzzle, PUZZLE 1, is interpretive. Is there a way of understanding Dretske’s theory on which the knowledge affirmed by its positive side is different than the knowledge denied by its negative side? The (...) second puzzle, PUZZLE 2, is substantive. Each of the following theses has some prima facie plausibility: there is introspective knowledge of thoughts, knowledge requires evidence, and there are no experiences of thoughts. It is unclear, though, that these claims form a consistent set. These puzzles are not unrelated. Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is a potential solution to PUZZLE 2 in that Dretske’s theory is meant to show how,, and can all be true. We provide a solution to PUZZLE 1 by appeal to Dretske’s early work in the philosophy of language on contrastive focus. We then distinguish between “Closure” and “Transmissibility”, and raise and answer a worry to the effect that Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge runs counter to Transmissibility. These results help to secure Dretske’s theory as a viable solution to PUZZLE 2. (shrink)

We argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr = Pr. We defended this screening-off thesis by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called (...) “SOT*”, and contends that it too gives the wrong result. We here reply to Climenhaga’s arguments and suggest that SOT provides a criticism of the widely held theory of inference called “inference to the best explanation”. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is widely used in research ethics to signal attention to participants who require special protections in research. However, this concept is vague and under‐theorized. There is also growing concern that the dominant categorical approach to vulnerability (as exemplified by research ethics regulations and guidelines delineating vulnerable groups) is ethically problematic because of its assumptions about groups of people and is, in fact, not very guiding. An agreed‐upon strategy is to move from categorical towards analytical approaches (focused (...) on analyzing types and sources of vulnerability) to vulnerability. Beyond this agreement, however, scholars have been advancing competing accounts of vulnerability without consensus about its appropriate operationalization in research ethics. Based on previous debates, we propose that a comprehensive account of vulnerability for research ethics must include four components: definition, normative justifications, application, and implications. Concluding that no existing accounts integrate these components in a functional (i.e., practically applicable) manner, we propose an integrative and functional account of vulnerability inspired by pragmatist theory and enriched by bioethics literature. Using an example of research on deep brain stimulation for treatment‐resistant depression, we illustrate how the integrative‐functional account can guide the analysis of vulnerability in research within a pragmatist, evidence‐based approach to research ethics. While ultimately there are concerns to be addressed in existing research ethics guidelines on vulnerability, the integrative‐functional account can serve as an analytic tool to help researchers, research ethics boards, and other relevant actors fill in the gaps in the current landscape of research ethics governance. (shrink)

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Les savants de langue syriaque - une branche de l'arameen - ont joue un role aujourd'hui reconnu dans la transmission du patrimoine philosophique et scientifique grec aux auteurs de langue arabe, et cela grace aux nombreuses traductions qu ...

The aim of the present study was to further examine the impact over time of single‐sex and coeducational school environments on girls’ motivation in language arts and mathematics. Two cohorts comprising 340 girls from eight coeducational and two single‐sex schools were followed during a period of three academic years in a longitudinal research scheme. Data were collected with a self‐reported questionnaire including several scales: parental and teachers’ support, competence beliefs, utility‐value and achievement goals. In general, mixed‐design repeated measures analyses of (...) variance indicated no effect of the environment or of the interaction between environment and time of measurement. Significant time effects on several variables indicated a general decline of achievement motivation over time. Consequently, the multiplication of non‐mixed high schools, as proposed by some, would constitute an expensive and inefficient social policy, as far as girls’ motivation is concerned. (shrink)

The man and his times -- Early epistemology -- The new scientific mind -- Fragmentation and the temptation of ontology -- Fire, water, and the material imagination -- Air, earth, and the dynamic imagination -- A phenomenology of the creative imagination.

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

I develop a probabilistic account of coherence, and argue that at least in certain respects it is preferable to (at least some of) the main extant probabilistic accounts of coherence: (i) Igor Douven and Wouter Meijs’s account, (ii) Branden Fitelson’s account, (iii) Erik Olsson’s account, and (iv) Tomoji Shogenji’s account. Further, I relate the account to an important, but little discussed, problem for standard varieties of coherentism, viz., the “Problem of Justified Inconsistent Beliefs.”.

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. (...) In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

It is shown that a locally finite polyadic algebra on an infinite set V of variables is a Boolean-algebra object, endowed with some internal supremum morphism, in the category of locally finite transformation sets on V. Then, this new categorical definition of polyadic algebras is used to simplify the theory of these algebras. Two examples are given: the construction of dilatations and the definition of terms and constants.

Some authors have studied in an ad hoc fashion the inclusive logics, that is the logics which admit or include objects or sets without element. These logics have been recently brought into the limelight because of the use of arbitrary topoi for interpreting languages. (In topoi there are usually many objects without element.)The aim of the paper is to present, for some inclusive logics, an axiomatization as natural and as simple as possible. Because of the intended applications to category theory, (...) the logics studied are many-sorted and intuitionistic. (shrink)

According to Michael Friedman’s theory of explanation, a law X explains laws Y1, Y2, …, Yn precisely when X unifies the Y’s, where unification is understood in terms of reducing the number of independently acceptable laws. Philip Kitcher criticized Friedman’s theory but did not analyze the concept of independent acceptability. Here we show that Kitcher’s objection can be met by modifying an element in Friedman’s account. In addition, we argue that there are serious objections to the use that Friedman makes (...) of the concept of independent acceptability. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Batterman and Rice ([2014]) argue that minimal models possess explanatory power that cannot be captured by what they call ‘common features’ approaches to explanation. Minimal models are explanatory, according to Batterman and Rice, not in virtue of accurately representing relevant features, but in virtue of answering three questions that provide a ‘story about why large classes of features are irrelevant to the explanandum phenomenon’ ([2014], p. 356). In this article, I argue, first, that a method (the renormalization group) they propose (...) to answer the three questions cannot answer them, at least not by itself. Second, I argue that answers to the three questions are unnecessary to account for the explanatoriness of their minimal models. Finally, I argue that a common features account, what I call the ‘generalized ontic conception of explanation’, can capture the explanatoriness of minimal models. (shrink)