Ethical theories do not always focus sufficiently on the correct characterization of morally bad choices. Standard accounts include: acts that are unprincipled, low‐utility, badly directed, or in violation of contracts. These standard accounts of immorality are inadequate. The concept of vices – a key part of virtue theory – offers a better account of bad choice. Most virtue ethics focuses on the warm vices (greed, lust, pride, anger, acquisitiveness …), but the cool vices – the vices of insensitivity – may (...) pose as many dangers to human life and happiness. I discuss a range of insensitivities and the ways in which they can infiltrate personality, often spreading so as to affect the entire character. I address the objection that insensitivity is a weak account of bad choice since insensitivity is often an involuntary characteristic. I borrow from Adam Smith the concept of ‘piacularity’ to explain how involuntary habits (and the acts they cause) can be bad despite the fact they are not culpable. (shrink)

The paper presents Aquinas’s account of conscience, and argues that key elements of this account are key elements too of Aristotle’s moral theory. The paper’s purpose is to encourage debate over conscience as not only a Stoic/Christian concept but one with deeper— and more widespread—roots in western ethical tradition.

What does philosophy have to say about the argument that blasphemous art ought not to be publicly displayed? We examine four concepts of blasphemy: blasphemy as offence, attack on religion, attack on the sacred, attack on the blasphemer himself. We argue all four are needed to grasp this complex concept. We also argue for blasphemy as primarily a moral, not a religious concept. We then criticise four arguments for the public display of blasphemous art: it may be beautiful, provocative, devoutly (...) intended, and is autonomous of religious concerns. Finally, we discuss the notions of blasphemy and blasphemous art as public offences. We conclude that the display of blasphemous art is a public, and not merely a private moral offence, and that there are respectable philosophical arguments for this conclusion. (shrink)

Leisure activities account for much of our time - and money. But are contemporary forms of leisure good for us? Are they really leisure? And how much does (and should) leisure matter? Classical philosophers paid attention to these questions. Increasingly, modern philosophers too are realizing the importance of leisure, and of a good leisure / work balance. Hayden Ramsay looks at the meaning of leisure, and the links between recreation, relaxation, virtue, and happiness. By focusing on leisure activities (...) such as sport, travel, music and reading, Ramsay explores the need for good play in a good life. (shrink)

Virtue ethics or natural law? Most contemporary accounts treat these as rival approaches. This book argues both are necessary since virtue is commitment to objective human goods. It also argues integrity is planning one's life by commitment to reasonableness, rejects traditional natural law and virtue ethics for more deontological accounts of the human good and virtue, and explains human personhood accordingly. Part 2 then analyses Aquinas's accounts of emotion, the body and happiness in terms of integrity.

RÉSUMÉ: Je discute dans le présent article le concept de vertu naturelle chez Aristote et Thomas d’Aquin. J’analyse l’idée de Thomas d’Aquin de vertus qui sont naturelles à tous les être humains en m’aidant de la théorie contemporaine de la loi naturelle; et je défends son idée de vertus qui sont naturelles à certains êtres humains en discutant quelques problèmes en éthique contemporaine de la vertu et en comparant ses conceptions à celles de David Hume. Finalement, je recours au concept (...) de vertu naturelle pour examiner la question de l’unité des vertus et le problème du «courageux meurtrier nazi». Je comprends cette exploration du thème de la vertu naturelle comme une contribution à la réflexion sur la vertu en général et, plus particulièrement, au débat entre une éthique de la vertu et une éthique des principes. (shrink)

RésuméJe discute dans le présent article le concept de vertu naturelle chez Aristote et Thomas d'Aquin. J'analyse l'idée de Thomas d'Aquin de vertus qui sont naturelles à tous les être humains en m'aidant de la théorie contemporaine de la loi naturelle; et je défends son idée de vertus qui sont naturelles à certains êtres humains en discutant quelques problèmes en éthique contemporaine de la vertu et en comparant ses conceptions à celles de David Hume. Finalement, je recours au concept de (...) vertu naturelle pour examiner la question de l'unité des vertus et le problème du «courageux meurtrier nazi». Je comprends cette exploration du thème de la vertu naturelle comme une contribution à la réflexion sur la vertu en général et, plus particulièrement, au débat entre une éthique de la vertu et une éthique des principes. (shrink)

This addition to the St Andrews Studies series contains a wide-ranging collection of essays on all aspects of moral philosophy and its impact upon public life in the twenty-first century. The book brings together ethicists from a variety of traditions interested in moral truth and its relation to religious faith. A key theme is interaction between major Catholic thinkers with philosophers from non-religious traditions. Topics include reason and religion, natural law, God and morality, anti-consequentialism, rights and virtues.

Nussbaum argues for a (limited) transcendence through contemplation which is compatible with practical reasoning and aspiration towards other human goods. This paper raises difficulties for this account based on a) the relation of thinking to human freedom, and b) the self‐constitutive nature of human thinking. It explores connections Thomas Aquinas makes between contemplation, transcendence and happiness, and explains the relation between (unlimited) transcendent experience and rationality by considering individuals who lack rational judgement but do seem capable of contemplation (young children, (...) certain mentally disordered persons). What contemplation by these individuals and by rational, mature adults have in common is awareness (by the less than perfectly rational) of the possibility of a life of unlimited rationality. I claim this awareness does not come naturally to us but is made possible by some super‐natural cause acting in a way that does not violate human nature but rather perfects our contemplative faculty and enables our happiness. (shrink)

The first in a new series with Australian Catholic University, this collection of essays deals with two important themes. 'Faith' and 'reason' are heavily weighted words. They point to elemental aspects of human existence. The papers and discussions presented strive to clarify and corelate these basic activities or dimensions of human beings. In all the complexities of the possible relationships and interweaving of faith and reason, two kinds of questions keep recurring. One the one hand, what is the value of (...) human intelligence, and how is it endorsed and supported by faith' On the other hand, what is the distinctive intelligence or rationality of faith, and how does it relate to the perennial search for wisdom represented in it various philosophical forms' Contributors include: Marilyn McCord Adams, Raimond Gaita, John Haldane, John McDermott SJ, Kevin Hart, and Anthony Kelly CSsR. (shrink)

I have two objectives in this article. The first is methodological: I elaborate a minimal phenomenological method and attempt to show its importance in studies of infant behavior. The second objective is substantive: Applying the minimal phenomenological approach, combined with Meltzoff’s “like-me” developmental framework, I propose the hypothesis that infants learn the pointing gesture at least in part through imitation. I explain how developments in sensorimotor ability (posture, arm and hand control and coordination, and locomotion) in the first year of (...) life prepare the infant for acquiring the pointing gesture. The former may directly enable the latter by allowing the infant to experience its own body as being “like those” of others, thus allowing it to imitatively appropriate a broader range of adult behavior. My proposal emphasizes the embodiment of mind in the development of cognition, contrary to latent dualistic tendencies in some developmental literature. (shrink)

In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

The first in a two-volume anthology of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing White as a public intellectual. It places White's thought in context, explaining its major themes, sources, and frames of reference, and features five previously unpublished lectures as well as more complete versions of several published essays.

This paper proposes a theory of text on-screen as “unvoiceover.” It addresses both the case for captioning as social good and the affordances (aesthetic, affective) of writing in or over the moving image. Advancing an argument informed by perspectives from d/deaf Studies, Critical Disability Studies and Digital Interface Studies, and applying modes of analysis from literary criticism alongside those proper to the study of moving image and sound, it examines the idiosyncrasies of text-in-motion as non-sonorous, fugitive counterpart to the traditional, (...) troublesome “voiceover.” To develop a poetics of the unsounding voice on-screen, the paper focalizes its argument through multimedia artist Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned series: a body of moving image work that is itself, paradoxically, uncaptioned. Framing Sylvestre’s lyrical “unvoiceover” as a reimagining of the lost roles of film explainers and literary intertitles, I argue that the artist’s takeover of the caption track intervenes critically in contemporary debates about the ethics of audio-visual translation, situated description and access as public ethos rather than private concern. Posing the artist’s personal-and-political writing as suggestive of a lower-case analogue to Deaf Gain, I show how Sylvestre’s “unvoiceover” educates its “receivers” in the purpose and functioning of captions. By reading Sylvestre’s writing on-screen more closely than its fugitive form seems to invite, I show how the unvoiceover encultures its own demands on its readers and elicits its own habits of reading. By scrutinizing how Sylvestre’s series makes the case for captioning, this paper makes the case for a new appraisal of the aesthetic, affective and political affordances of the unvoiceover as writing on the run. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue that a selective lockdown of older people is not ageist because it would treat people unequally based on morally relevant differences. This response argues that a selective lockdown of older people living in long-term care homes would be unjust because it would allow the expansive liberties of the general public to undermine the basic liberties of older people, (...) and because it would discriminate on the basis of extrinsic disadvantages. (shrink)

Thought experiments feature prominently in both scientific and philosophical methods. In this paper, I investigate two questions surrounding knowledge in the thought experiment process. First, on what implicit knowledge do thought experiments rely? Second, what provides epistemic justification for beliefs acquired through the process? I draw upon neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and Husserlian phenomenology to argue that essence is the object of implicit knowledge that anchors the imagined possibilities involved in thought experiments to the actual world, and that this essentialist knowledge enables (...) the possibility of prima facie justification being conferred by the phenomenological givenness of thought experiment scenarios. (shrink)

What is a paradox? -- Knowing and believing -- Vagueness and identity -- Logic and truth -- Mathematical paradoxes -- Probability paradoxes -- Space and time -- Impossibilities -- Deciding and acting -- Index of philosophers.

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 36-37.

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Alexander Pho and Benjamin A. White respond to Nicolas Dixon’s critique of mixed martial arts (MMA) through a ‘companions in innocence’ argument. Taking up a counterexample that Dixon is quick to dismiss, the authors argue that MMA techniques are on a par with the ‘pain-leveraging’ tactics used by cyclists and that pressing for a moral distinction between cycling and MMA leads to absurd conclusions about other practices. So, because cycling is morally permissible, MMA is morally permissible. This companions in (...) innocence argument fails. But cycling can be used to develop a better, though only partial, defense of MMA. (shrink)

Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences; have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events ; and often neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would (...) if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

In post-independence India secularism was almost taken for granted as a defining feature of the women?s movement with its rejection of the public expression of religious and caste identities. However, already by the 1980s, the assumption that gender could be used as a unifying factor was challenged, revealing that women from different social and religious backgrounds understand and sometime use their identities in ways that are not driven necessarily by some ideology, but by more immediate concerns and even opportunism. This (...) realization opened up a debate about new strategies to tackle women?s activism, especially in light of aggressive political activism of some women associated with right-wing parties in India, which has clearly shattered the perception, held by some, of women as inherently peace-loving, whose gender identity would override their caste and religious belonging. (shrink)

Research on metaphors has shown that individuals form associations between the verticality, brightness, and distance of stimuli and their valence. Building on the literature on conceptual metaphor...

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met by major critiques. Most notable (...) is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a (...) fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

In _Politics and Progress_, Muir aims to outline the political and social aims of liberalism and how it differs from conservatism and socialism as well as philosophising what a truly liberal society would look like. Originally published in 1923, this study details the political situation as it stood then, the past achievements of liberalism and what immediate problems society is facing that need to solved. This title will be of interest to students of politics.

For aggregative theories of moral value, it is a challenge to rank worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world's value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds—without a cardinal value for each world, we cannot apply expected value theory. How then can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed (...) separately by Arntzenius, Bostrom, and Meacham), which is to compare the prospects for value at each individual location, and to then represent and compare lotteries by their expected values at each of those locations. But, as I show here, this approach violates several key principles of decision theory and generates some implausible verdicts. I propose an alternative—one which delivers plausible rankings of lotteries, which is implied by a plausible collection of axioms, and which can be applied alongside almost any ranking of infinite worlds. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 202-238, Spring 2022.