To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...) when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation. What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. (shrink)

In order to be a self-governing agent, a person must govern the process by means of which she acquires the intention to act as she does. But what does governing this process require? The standard compatibilist answers to this question all assume that autonomous actions differ from nonautonomous actions insofar as they are a more perfect expression of the agent’s agency. I challenge this conception of autonomous agents as super agents. The distinguishing feature of autonomous agents is, I argue, the (...) nonagential role they play in the formation of their intentions. I offer an account of the relevant role. (shrink)

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: (...) we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude towardnonpersons. (shrink)

The original essays in this book address Harry Frankfurt's influential writing on personal identity, love, value, moral responsibility, and the freedom and ...

I wish more books of philosophy were like this one. It is elegantly written. It is filled with provocative claims and ingenious arguments. It is a really good read, even while it forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about practical reason and practical reasoning, morality and agency.

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: (...) we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude towardnonpersons. (shrink)

My chief aim is to explain how someone can act freely against her own best judgment. But I also have a second aim: to defend a conception of practical rationality according to which someone cannot do something freely if she believes it would be better to do something else. These aims may appear incompatible. But I argue that practical reason has the capacity to undermine itself in such a way that it produces reasons for behaving irrationally. Weakness of will is (...) possible because it is possible to conclude that one has sufficient reason to reject the verdicts of one's own reason. (shrink)

In the context of a largely exploratory inquiry, I warn against oversimplifying the relationships among intuitions, emotions, principle-governed reasoning, and responsiveness to reasons. I point out that one cannot determine the normative status of some fact without determining whether a case can be made for this status. But I also note that, though reason is thus autonomous, every episode of reasoning depends causally on the way things nonnormatively are, and this makes it possible for any reasoner to challenge even her (...) most basic normative assumptions. (shrink)

All of us have personal ideals. We are committed to being good (enough) friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, citizens, human beings, and more. In this paper, I examine the thick and thin aspects of these ideals: (i) their substance (to internalize an ideal is to endorse a particular way of being) and (ii) their accountability to reason (to internalize an ideal is to assume that this is really a good way to be). In considering how these two aspects interact in the (...) ideal of rational agency, I address two philosophical debates that are generally conducted in isolation of each other: (i) debates over the anti-ideal of normative “fetishism” and (ii) debates over whether acting for a reason is acting “under the guise of the good.” In the final two sections of the paper, I further explore the relations among the thick and the thin. I note the role that coherence constraints play in the process whereby our ideals gain determinacy. At the same time, I argue, our ideals constrain the possibility and desirability of coherence. This has implications for a third debate: the debate over the possibility of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

I experienced the 2016 Presidential election as a loss of innocence. For the first time in my life, the prospect of losing my most basic rights and freedoms did not feel so remote. Confronting this possibility prompted the musings in this article. I call them ‘musings’ because the article is not a systematic defense of a clearly demarcated position. It is, rather, a somewhat circuitous exploration of the many questions that pressed themselves upon me as I struggled to understand what (...) distinguishes reasonable accommodations to injustice from morally unacceptable accommodations. When is a commitment not really a commitment? When does reasonable fear become shameful cowardice? When does my knowledge that I can do something to resist injustice give me good enough reason to resist? Under what conditions is my reason an enemy of my ideals? What is the proper balance between valuing myself beyond price and appreciating that many, many things matter far more than my own life and security? In grappling with these questions, I have been reminded of the extent to which moral discernment does not involve applying a ‘philosophy’ and the extent to which it cannot be secured by prior training. (shrink)

To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? In exploring the value of humanity, the essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to this question. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively (...) human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest or certain shared interests or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human. (shrink)

In this essay I attempt to identify the conditions of morally responsible action; and from the start, I conceive morally responsible action as free action. Some philosophers argue that the causal origins of an act are irrelevant to whether it is a free act; others believe that free acts cannot be causally determined; and still others believe that a free act is an act from which the agent must be capable of refraining. I defend a view at odds with each (...) of these positions: a free act may be causally determined by events over which the agent has no control, but it must issue from the agent's attitudes and beliefs in a particular way. On my account, moreover, though the ability to do otherwise is relevant to free agency, it is not a necessary condition: some free agents are incapable of refraining from the acts they perform. ;I develop my position by investigating three major challenges to the claim that someone is a free agent if and only if she has a certain attitude toward what she does. The first of these challenges comes from thought experiments in which mad scientists directly induce an agent's motives; the second, from the phenomenon of weakness of will; and the third, from the main argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. An essential feature of my response to these challenges is the appeal to a normative notion of will power. (shrink)

In this paper I consider three widespread assumptions: (1) the assumption that we are accountable for our intentional actions only if they are in some special sense ours; (2) the assumption that it is possible for us to be more or less “true to” ourselves, and that we are flawed human beings to the extent that we lack “integrity”; and (3) the assumption that we can sometimes give ourselves reasons by giving ourselves commands. I acknowledge that, as Ruediger Bittner has (...) argued, each of these assumptions is problematic, and that the failure to appreciate the problems has led many philosophers astray. I try to show, however, that it is possible to make sense of each assumption in a way that addresses Bittner’s concerns. (shrink)

I wish more books of philosophy were like this one. It is elegantly written. It is filled with provocative claims and ingenious arguments. It is a really good read, even while it forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about practical reason and practical reasoning, morality and agency.

A response to Sarah Buss's article, ‘Some Musings about the Limits of an Ethics that Can Be Applied,’ focusing on issues connected with Buss’s claims about human insignificance, and the indifference to self that the recognition of insignificance allegedly engenders.

Sarah Buss has recently argued that endorsement theories of autonomy face three problems: they conflate autonomous agency with agency simpliciter, they face a vicious regress, and they get the extension of autonomous actions wrong. I argue that one such theory, Gary Watson’s Platonic Model, is not subject to any of these problems. I conclude that Buss has not given us reason to reject the Platonic Model and that it may be compatible with her own theory of accountability.

I respond to Sarah Buss first by considering Socrates as an exemplar of courageous resistance to injustice, then by adding two caveats: exemplary resistance seems to flow from very diverse psychological profiles, and cowardice may not always be best understood as expressing fearful self‐attachment.

Capturing a scientific change in thinking about personality and individual differences that has been building over the past 15 years, this volume stands at an important moment in the development of psychology as a discipline. Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon which selection operates, the contributing authors provide theories and empirical evidence which suggest that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and behavioral functioning. The book draws theoretical inspiration from life history (...) theory, evolutionary genetics, molecular genetics, developmental psychology, personality psychology, and evolutionary psychology, while utilizing the theories of the "best and the brightest" international scientists working on this cutting edge paradigm shift. In the first of three sections, the authors analyze personality and the adaptive landscape; here, the authors offer a novel conceptual framework for examining "personality assessment adaptations." Because individuals in a social environment have momentous consequences for creating and solving adaptive problems, humans have evolved "difference-detecting mechanisms" designed to make crucial social decisions such as mate selection, friend selection, kin investment, coalition formation, and hierarchy negotiation. In the second section, the authors examine developmental and life-history theoretical perspectives to explore the origins and development of personality over the lifespan. The third section focuses on the relatively new field of evolutionary genetics and explores which of the major evolutionary forces--such as balancing selection, mutation, co-evolutionary arms races, and drift--are responsible for the origins of personality and individual differences. Existing as a seminal work in the newly emerging evolutionary psychology field, this book is a "must-read" for anyone invested in the development of psychology as a field. (shrink)

Band 1. Von Augustinus bis Nietzsche -- Band 2. Das 20. Jahrhundert.

Martin Heideggers Denken nach 1938 ist vor allem durch drei grosse Themen gepragt: den Wandel des Menschenbildes, die Einfuhrung eines neuen Begriffes vom Denken und den Nachweis, dass Sein Seyn in Beziehung ist. Dabei stutzt er sich auf das Denken Franz Rosenzweigs, das bereits in der Formulierung von Sein und Zeit erkennbar ist, in den Schriften der 40er und 50er Jahre aber in besonders intensiver Weise nachwirkt. Ausgehend von dieser Zusammenschau von Heideggers und Rosenzweigs Denken zeichnet sich auch eine neue (...) Bewertung des Denkens von Emmanuel Levinas ab. (shrink)

Book synopis: A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of (...) his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers. (shrink)

Excerpt from Die Weltanschauungen der Großen Philosophen der Neuzeit Der Hufforberung, Die I'leuauflage Diefes mit Beifall aufgenomme nen Büchleins 3u beforgen, glaubte ich mich um fo weniger ent3iehen 3u fallen, als mich mit Dem früh verftorbenen Derfaffer manche the meinfamieit Der über3eugung verbanb. Ba Der bisherige Umfang nicht wefenilüh uberfchritten werben follie, habe ich mich Darauf bee fchränit, Die bio; unb bibliographifchen Eingaben 3u revibieren, ein paar £iteraturvermerie hin3u3ufügen fowie einige ftiliftifche mängel3u befeitigen. Ilm übrigen erforberte Die Dietat Beibehaltung Des (...) Gertes auch Dort, wo Dem Derfaffer Die verantwortung überlaffen bleiben muß. Nur an wenigen Stellen habe ich eine. Durch Die Buchftaben R. 5. Als von mir herrührenb geienn3eichnete - Elnmeriung beigefügt. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Seit dem 2. nachchristlichen Jahrhundert werden die Schriften von Aristoteles kommentiert. Diese Ausgabe enthält griechische Kommentare zu seinem Werk vom 3. bis 8. Jahrhundert n. Chr., u. a. von Alexander von Aphrodiensias, Themistios, Joh. Philoponus, Simplicius in griechischer Sprache.

Buss, S.R., The undecidability of k-provability, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 53 75-102. The k-provability problem is, given a first-order formula ø and an integer k, to determine if ø has a proof consisting of k or fewer lines . This paper shows that the k-provability problem for the sequent calculus is undecidable. Indeed, for every r.e. set X there is a formula ø and an integer k such that for all n,ø has a proof of k sequents (...) if and only if n ε X. (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

Wie kann eine Theorie der Ethik beschaffen sein, wenn sie aus dem gedanklichen Repertoire der Existenzphilosophie entworfen wird? Sie bedarf vor allem einer speziellen Sprachfindung, die einen Diskurs mit zeitgenossischen Ethik-Konzeptionen im ersten Moment zu erschweren scheint. Susanne Mobua zeigt auf, dass dieses nicht zwangslaufig gilt, wenn der strukturelle Rahmen, in dem die Ethik der Existenz sich artikulieren kann, in die Untersuchung einbezogen wird. Hier kommt das Konzept des Neuen Denkens zum Tragen, das 1925 von Franz Rosenzweig vorgestellt wurde. Zum (...) ersten Mal ist es moglich, die Bedeutung des Rosenzweig'schen Denkens fur die Entwicklung von Existenzphilosophie und Dekonstruktion darzustellen. (shrink)