The hypothetical scenarios generally known as trolley problems have become widespread in recent moral philosophy. They invariably require an agent to choose one of a strictly limited number of options, all of them bad. Although they don’t always involve trolleys / trams, and are used to make a wide variety of points, what makes it justified to speak of a distinctive “trolley method” is the characteristic assumption that the intuitive reactions that all these artificial situations elicit constitute an appropriate guide (...) to real-life moral reasoning. I dispute this assumption by arguing that trolley cases inevitably constrain the supposed rescuers into behaving in ways that clearly deviate from psychologically healthy, and morally defensible, human behavior. Through this focus on a generally overlooked aspect of trolley theorizing – namely, the highly impoverished role invariably allotted to the would-be rescuer in these scenarios – I aim to challenge the complacent twin assumptions of advocates of the trolley method that this approach to moral reasoning has practical value, and is in any case innocuous. Neither assumption is true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 2, November 2003, pp. 267-282 Skepticism and Philo's Atheistic Preference DAVID O'CONNOR [H]owever consistent the world may be... with the idea of... a very powerful, wise, and benevolent Deity... it can never afford us an inference concerning his existence. The consistence is not absolutely denied, only the inference.1 The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great (...) vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. (DNR, 211) The true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy. (DNR, 212) There may four hypotheses be framed concerning the first causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness, that they have perfect malice, that they are opposite and have both goodness and malice, that they have neither goodness nor malice.... The fourth... seems by far the most probable. (DNR, 212) David O'Connor is Professor of Philosophy, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey 07079. e-mail: [email protected] 268 David O'Connor What I have said concerning natural evil will apply to moral, with little or no variation; and we have no more reason to infer, that the rectitude of the supreme Being resembles human rectitude than that his benevolence resembles the human. Nay, it will be thought, that we have still greater cause to exclude from him moral sentiments, such as we feel them; since moral evil, in the opinion of many, is much more predominant above moral good than natural evil above natural good. (DNR, 212) Thus Philo in part 11 of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. I In the first of these passages, Philo is denying that the existence of "a very powerful, wise, and benevolent Deity" can justifiably be inferred from the facts of good and evil present to our experience. But power, wisdom, and benevolence are essential qualities of the God of traditional theism, thus Philo is here denying that the existence of such a being can justifiably be inferred from the empirical evidence of good and evil. The other passages show us Philo going further than this, indeed all the way to what seems to be a preference for moral atheism. The term is J. C. A. Gaskin's, and he defines it thus: "[moral atheism] will be [the position of] anyone who denies the existence of any god having moral attributes."2 In the second and third passages specifically, this prima facie preference is absolute ("[t]he whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature... without discernment" and "the original source of all things is entirely indifferent," respectively), while it is relative and more cautiously expressed in the fourth passage. And the fifth passage says at least as much as the first and perhaps as much as the second and third. Yet Philo very early in the book declares himself a skeptic on such metaphysical topics as "the origin of worlds" (DNR, 132), "the existence and properties of spirits" (DNR, 135), "the powers and operations of one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite" (DNR, 135). The principal reason he gives is the "weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason... even in subjects of common life and practice" (DNR, 131). Considering these limits, surely it is very likely that "we have... got quite beyond the reach of our faculties" (DNR, 135) if and when we turn to such metaphysical topics as those he just listed. On these matters, which "run wide of common life... [t]he mind must remain in suspense... and it is that very suspense or balance, which is the triumph of skepticism" (DNR, 135-6). Hume Studies Philo's Atheistic Preference 269 While the first of the passages I quoted in the beginning clearly squares with this skeptical outlook, and so does at least part of the fifth, it would seem that the rest of the quoted material does not... (shrink)

I briefly defend the following claims in response to my critics: (1) We cannot make a principled division between features of contingent reality that do and features that don’t "cry our for explanation." (2) The physical data indicating fine-tuning provide confirmation of the hypothesis of a personal necessary cause of the universe over against an impersonal necessary cause, notwithstanding the fact that the probability of either hypothesis, if true, would be 1. (3) Theism that commits to God’s necessary existence makes (...) more sense than theism that denies it. (4) God is likely to have created an infinity of universes, and this conclusion helps with (though does not solve) the many problems of evil. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AsphyxiationsSteven Connor (bio)Recent events and sociorhetorical expatiations upon them have reaffirmed breathing as the ideal form of free and unimpeded life, that struggles against the throttlings of oppression. The root meaning of oppression, from the past participle of Latin opprimere, is to press, crush or bear down upon, and the word oppression has commonly been used to signify the feeling of the difficulty of breathing, through some constriction or (...) pressure, as in the nocturnal attentions of the nightmare, the spirit imagined as settling suffocatingly on the chest of the sleeper. As a mare that rides rather than being ridden, the spirit is often imagined as a female succubus, though in Fuseli's 1781 painting the mare is accompanied by a simian incubus who squats on the chest of a female sleeper, prompting these lines from Erasmus Darwin:So on his Nightmare through the evening fogFlits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.(Darwin 2.16)'Pressing' meant the forcing of somebody into some condition or service, typically the army or navy. In oppressive weather, the clouds may seem to 'lower', or the humid air to cramp and confine the body.We think of breathing as opening or release, of a piece with open windows and unbounded spaces. Human beings have brewed up fantasies for centuries of more complete modes of breathing that would overcome the constriction represented by the respiratory apparatus, exhorting themselves and each other to breathe more deeply, suffusing, not just the lungs, but the diaphragm, the head, and other items of phantasmal physiology. Indeed, the factitiously hollow spaces of the body–the head that we seek to keep 'clear'–are the proof of the belief in the strange principle of vital vacuity, the idea that we exist most fully in empty spaces of innerness, bodily enclosures evacuated of body. Without this sense of the animating function of the breath, the body suffers the inanition of a "want of living [End Page 74] breath in its lungs, which are full of gases but empty of spirit" (Wilkinson 78). In being taken in and given out, breath seems to commute between what Wittgenstein calls "two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials." The fact that "the mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal," seems to Wittgenstein to be related to "the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy,–when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object" (Wittgenstein 47). The conception of the soul as an afflatus, or a special kind of magic gas, which has been common among so many different peoples, suggests just this kind of aethereal object-that-is-not-one. It embodies the conviction that we are most essentially present as ourselves where we are closest to being nothing, in an out-of-body kind of body.We breathe out–phew, originally in the seventeenth century a violent expression of disgust or emancipatory emptying, as we might nowadays plosively and purifyingly say poo–when we 'ex-press', as we say, our sense of being, as we also say, 'relieved,' from re + levare, to lift up, implying a lightening, or levitation, that approaches in imagination the condition of air itself. To ventilate is to levitate. To be relieved is to dream of remission from the clinging pressure of your own embodiment, as though you could simply emit or expel your own weight. To inhale is to prepare for stress and struggle: to exhale is to relax, to sigh into satisfaction, converting becoming momentarily to being. Exhalation is therefore the decorporizing of the body, or the corporealization of the incorporeal. But though human beings exalt imaginary emptying, as the purifying expulsion of what is evil, infective, invasive, persecutory, expiration is also death. Speech is the expressive sound formed from the impressing of exhaled breath, the dissolving openness of air given imaginary... (shrink)

In Cajetan's Biblical Commentaries, Michael O'Connor argues that Cajetan's motive was more 'Catholic Reform' than 'Counter-Reformation', and that his method was a bold hybrid of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, correcting the Vulgate's errors and expounding the text according to the literal sense.

Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism is a superb guide to the works of Flannery O'Connor; and like O'Connor's stories themselves, it is captivating, provocative, and unsettling. Edmondson organizes O'Connor's thought around her principal concern, that with the nihilistic claim that "God is dead" the traditional signposts of good and evil have been lost. Edmondson's book demonstrates that the combination of O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius provide the best response to (...) the nihilistic despair of the modern world—a return to "good and evil" through humility and grace. (shrink)

A good deal of attention has been given in recent philosophy of religion to the question of whether we can sensibly attribute to God a form of knowledge which the 16th-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina termed "middle knowledge". Interest in the doctrine has been spurred by a recognition of its intimate connection to certain conceptions of providence, prophecy, and response to petitionary prayer. According to defenders of the doctrine, which I will call "Molinism", the objects of middle knowledge are (...) all the true counterfactuals of the form, 'If C were to occur, then S would freely do A', where C specifies a particular set of circumstances. (Such propositions are usually referred to as "counterfactuals of freedom" - hereafter "CFs".)' I will try to assess the current status of two distinct questions: (1) Are there true CFs? and (2) Could God know true CFs if there are any? Obviously, Molinism must answer both questions affirmatively. Most of the discussion has focused on the first question. I hope to show that this approach has been a dialectical mistake on the part of critics of Molinism, for the difficulties of giving an affirmative answer to question (2) are, I believe, far easier to state clearly and convincingly. (shrink)

Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism is a superb guide to the works of Flannery O'Connor; and like O'Connor's stories themselves, it is captivating, provocative, and unsettling. Edmondson organizes O'Connor's thought around her principal concern, that with the nihilistic claim that 'God is dead' the traditional signposts of good and evil have been lost. Edmondson's book demonstrates that the combination of O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius provide the best response to (...) the nihilistic despair of the modern world—a return to 'good and evil' through humility and grace. (shrink)

In this new book, Alessandra Tanesini demonstrates that feminist thought has a lot to offer to the study of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, and that -at the same time-that work can inspire feminist reflection in new directions. In Wittgenstein, Tanesini offers a highly original interpretation of several themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy. She argues that when we look at his work through feminist eyes we discover that he is not primarily concerned with providing solutions to technical problems in the philosophy of mind, (...) mathematics, and language. Instead, his remarks on these topics are intended to offer insights about human finitude, the loneliness of the modern autonomous self, and our relations to other human beings. Thus, the modern conception of the individual emerges as the critical target of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, both early and late. This conception has also been one of the dominant concerns of contemporary feminist philosophy. In this book, Wittgenstein's insights are deployed to further feminist debates on issues such as identity, difference, the masculine character of the modern self. (shrink)

In this classic, exciting, and thoughtful text, Metaphysics , Peter van Inwagen examines three profound questions: What are the most general features of the world? Why is there a world? and What is the place of human beings in the world? Metaphysics introduces to readers the curious notion that is metaphysics, how it is conceived both historically and currently. The author's work can serve either as a textbook in a university course on metaphysics or as an introduction to metaphysical thinking (...) for the interested reader. This second edition, revised though not fundamentally changed, includes the basis of the first edition with a new chapter on the nature of time. (shrink)

In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...) meaning about and when some states are more likely than others. In these cases, we find that actors are less likely to arrive at strategies where signals have clear conventional meaning. We conclude with a proposal for extending the use of the methodology of experimental economics in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Collaboration is increasingly popular across academia. Collaborative work raises certain ethical questions, however. How will the fruits of collaboration be divided? How will the work for the collaborative project be split? In this paper, we consider the following question in particular. Are there ways in which these divisions systematically disadvantage certain groups? -/- We use evolutionary game theoretic models to address this question. First, we discuss results from O'Connor and Bruner (unpublished). In this paper, we show that underrepresented groups (...) in academia can be disadvantaged in such situations by dint of their small numbers. Second, we present novel results exploring how the hierarchical structure of academia can lead to bargaining disadvantage. We investigate models where one actor has a higher baseline of academic success, less to lose if collaboration goes south, or greater rewards for non-collaborative work. We show that in these situations, the less powerful partner is disadvantaged in bargaining over collaboration. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno, İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrası dönemin önde gelen filozof ve toplum kuramcılarından biridir. Eleştirel Kuramın gelişmesinde önemli rolü olan, özgün ve de genellikle zor olan yazıları sadece temel felsefi sorular ileri sürmekle kalmayıp aynı zamanda edebiyat, sanat, müzik, sosyoloji ve siyaset kuramına ilişkin derin analizler de sunar. Bu kapsamlı kitapta Brian O’Connor, Adorno’nun felsefesini, onun eserleriyle ilk kez karşılaşanlara açıklamaktadır. O’Connor, bu amaçla, yaşamı ve entelektüel çevresinin bağlamını oluşturan ana felsefi görüşleri aracılığıyla Adorno felsefesinin merkezi unsurlarını değerlendiriyor. Bu (...) bağlamda Aydınlanmanın diyalektiği, şeyleşme, bütünsellik, dolayımlama, özdeşlik, özdeşsizlik, deneyim, negatif diyalektik, içkinlik, özgürlük, özerklik ve sanatta taklit gibi kavramları, felsefesinin temel alanları üzerinden tartışıyor. Kronoloji ve terimler sözlüğünün yanı sıra ek okuma önerileri de içeren Adorno, felsefe, edebiyat, sosyoloji ve kültürel çalışmalarla ilgilenenler için ideal bir giriş kitabı... (shrink)

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? Can it (...) be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above. (shrink)