This chapter contains sections titled: A Minimalist Account of Truth Correspondence Theories of Truth Deflated Is Minimalism Adequate? Conclusion: Moral Semantics as a Moral Matter.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:25 MORALITY AS A BACK-UP SYSTEM: HUME'S VIEW? The sense of duty is a useful device for helping men to do what a really good man would do without a sense of duty..... Nowell-Smith A certain picture of morality — arguably a Humean one — has come to have a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. On this picture, morality, as Richard Brandt asserts, is "a back-up system, which (...) operates when spontaneous personal caring fails 2 to motivate us to do as we ought." Morality — at least in the form of moral principles, whose force is felt through one's sense of duty — is, on this view, ideally superfluous. As a guide for one's own conduct it is needed only insofar as the agent's affective network is deficient. If one only spontaneously desired a, cared about b, cared for c, felt aversion towards d as, ideally, one should, moral principles and a sense of duty would be of no use. There are good reasons for supposing that this is Hume's view. After all, his characterization of acting from duty is more than a little disparaging: When any virtuous motive or principle is common in human nature, a person, who feels his heart devoid of that motive, may hate himself upon that account, and may perform the action without the motive, from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice, that virtuous principle, or at least, to disguise to himself,,as much as possible, his want of it. I will argue, however, that there is tension in Hume's ethics between two lines of thought. According to the first line of thought, and the one 26 usually associated with Hume, good conduct is conduct which is spontaneously prompted by virtuous desires. Unless our desires either are not what they should be or are motivationally weak, there is no need for mediation or tempering by a sense of duty or moral principles. According to the second line, the very good desires of a very good person may nonetheless need to be filtered, tempered, redirected or checked. This line is most evident in "Of the Origin of the Natural Virtues and Vices." Before arguing that these strains of thought are in tension in Hume's ethics, I need to clarify what is at issue and to develop the two competing pictures of moral motivation. First the issue. The issue is not 'Who is better: someone with a sense of duty but corrupt desires or someone with no sense of duty but ideal desires?' Nor is the issue one of the moral worth of actions ('Can an action have moral worth if it is not performed out of duty?') The issue, rather, is how to characterize morally good (or right) conduct. What role, if any, does a sense of duty or a Butlerian principle of reflection, i.e., an overarching, guiding conception of what is right or good which is 'juridically' supreme within the self, play in good conduct? Is morally good conduct ideally a matter of acting as one should from the proper desires? Or should the desires be governed and guided by moral principles? Consider two models of moral conduct. Model I: Morality as a Back-Up System On this picture, wrongness in conduct is traceable to an affective deficiency. The claim underlying this picture seems to be as follows: One 27 acts wrongly because one's passions are not quite what they should be. One person cheats in her business dealings because she cares too little about the welfare of others (and too much about her own); another is harsh and abrupt to a student because he cares too little about his students' concerns and is jealous and possessive when it comes to 'his time.' In each case the problem can be traced to an affective deficiency. Hume appears to be supporting this view when he asserts, "it may be establish'd as an undoubted maxim, that no act can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from a sense of its morality' (T 479). A few pages later he writes, "[E]very immorality... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Moral Dilemmas in Medieval Thought: From Gratian to AquinasTaina M. HolopainenM.V. Dougherty. Moral Dilemmas in Medieval Thought: From Gratian to Aquinas. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 226. Cloth, $90.00.In this book, M.V. Dougherty challenges the assumption that the medieval period of Western ethical thought has little to say concerning the question of moral dilemmas (while [End Page 138] understanding a (...) class='Hi'>moral dilemma generally as “any situation in which an agent cannot fulfill all genuine impending moral obligations” [3]). He aims to show that this is not the case by examining debates on the subject of moral dilemma from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. According to medieval terminology, an agent in a moral dilemma is considered to be perplexed (perplexus) or to be suffering from perplexity (perplexitas). Dougherty emphasizes the importance to his study of the ontological and objective sense of perplexitas: an agent is said to be confused in the presence of a genuinely dilemmatic situation. The book deals with the topic through a selection of prominent thinkers from the major schools of the period (e.g. Franciscan, Dominican, and Thomistic).Canon law was the first discipline in which systematic discussion of moral dilemmas took place. Accordingly, in chapter 1 Dougherty discusses two opposing views from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that were equally authoritative and conveyed the canon law tradition to later medieval thinkers. Gratian asserts, in his Decretum, the existence of genuine moral dilemmas (through conflicts within natural law itself) and counsels agents in those situations to choose the lesser of two evils. Gratian’s views were commented on by many glossators who argued against him in the Glossa ordinaria, contending that moral agents can fulfill all moral obligations, as the well-known maxim “ought implies can” asserts, and so avoid moral wrongdoing. If an agent finds himself in a perplexed state, it is due to his own culpable negligence, never the result of the disordered moral order.In addition to canon law there were other forums for discussions of moral perplexitas. In chapter 2, Dougherty expands the theme to two influential thirteenth-century summaries of theology: the Summa aurea, authored by William of Auxerre, and the Summa Halesiana, associated with Alexander of Hales. In these, Dougherty thoroughly examines a number of dilemma cases and shows both works concluding that moral agents can find themselves trapped in such situations, with some degree of moral wrongdoing being inescapable. The maxim “ought but cannot” is evident, then, in these works. Further, their concrete advice for agents in a moral dilemma is to apply the principle of choosing the lesser evil, or, as William of Auxerre specifies in certain cases, “what obliges more greatly is to be done”; however, his connection between these two principles seems not so clear: why would the choice of that which obliges more be identified with the choice of a lesser evil?Chapter 3 is one of the book’s highlights. It presents the distinctive medieval moral dilemma position of Raymond Lull (ca. 1232–1316) through an analysis of four of Lull’s own dilemmas in his autobiographical work, Vita coaetanea. Dougherty argues that Lull is opposed to the traditional solution of medieval commentators on Lombard, since Lull did not claim that a judgment of conscience, which dictates something contrary to natural law or a command of God, had to be in error. Lull thinks that the world truly is such a place where agents find themselves in dilemmatic situations from which they are unable to escape by their own powers and therefore are in need of divine intervention (“the Divine Intervention resolution”). Dougherty also argues that Lull implicitly appeals to “the Lesser Evil resolution” in one dilemma case.In chapter 4, Dougherty considers passages from Aquinas’s texts in which agents appear to be perplexed. The aim is to confirm Alan Donagan’s interpretation of Aquinas and to reveal the misinterpretations by contemporary theorists who have claimed that Aquinas accepted the view that innocent agents could find themselves in situations of genuine moral dilemmas. According to Aquinas, all real moral dilemmas are generated by some prior moral failure (past misdeed) on... (shrink)

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply (...) to loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)

Philosophers commonly argue that conflicts of values are deeply problematic for ethical theories in so far as they force the theories into impracticality, incompleteness, or irrealism. To be complete, a theory must tell us in every case what must be done. To be practical, it must never tell us to do what is impossible. As conflict seems to involve just these features, some philosophers argue from the fact that avoiding conflict is impossible to the conclusion that ethical (...) theories must either be silent in some cases or that it requires us to do both of the jointly impossible acts. Others seek to explain the conflict away as merely apparent. Against these views, it is argued that mere incompossibility does not make for a conflict. All choice involves incompossibility, but not all choice involves conflict. Conflict must be understood in terms of what is conflicting. Understanding this requires seeing that many act evaluations are not action‐guiding. (shrink)

This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a (...) certain normative status upon those that do so count, which the kind person certainly satisfies. I argue that metaphysical accounts of personal identity often contain certain mistaken background assumptions concerning personhood, often due to a failure to recognize that being a person is environmentally dependent. -/- Because being a person is environmentally dependent, but this is not often noted, let alone incorporated into our theories of persons, although there are exceptions, a closer look at those theories is required if we are to have a just society. In fact, it is a bit surprising that this is the current situation, since the claim that certain members of society are oppressed due to being denied full personhood and its attendant rights has been the basis of several social movements: first-wave feminism, anti-slavery movements, and civil rights movements generally. Historically, these resistance movements aimed at claiming that, unlike how they were treated, they did in fact meet the requirements for personhood that those in more privileged sectors did and should therefore enjoy the same rights as the more privileged. -/- While I agree with the justification for these movements -- that the injustice driving them is that of the denial of the rights of persons -- I advocate for moving away from the idea that the only appropriate response is to count those who make such claims as being members that meet the dominant conception of personhood. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that if being a person is an environmentally dependent fact, theories of the nature of persons must recognize this or risk reflecting and perpetuating the current status quo. -/- For these reasons, those in need of recognition of their rights as persons should not only resist the failure of having them granted but should also question the current understanding of the concept itself, since the very notion may be riddled with normative assumptions typical only of those with certain kinds of privilege. That is, fighting for recognition as persons, without also resisting and questioning the source and objectivity of our current concept of personhood, risks failing to truly challenge the currently unfair social structure in any deep way. -/- There is a risk, however, with taking such a stance -- that it will be fallaciously inferred that there is no fair concept of persons at all to which are owed rights. But this does not follow from the stance I take. All that follows is that we must recognize our fallibility in offering metaphysical theories, particularly when the concept under investigation is normatively sensitive and environmentally dependent in the way that the kind person seems to be. -/- Theories concerning the metaphysics of persons, then, must address the fact that those with privilege not only have more power to assert their rights as persons, but they are also the source of most received views of the concept itself. It is possible, therefore, that our current metaphysical theories may be mis-describing the objective nature of personhood as a kind for politically biased reasons. -/- I argue that one of the particularly pernicious assumptions frequently made is that to be a person is to be a certain kind of psychologically integrated being. This is an ideal we seem to hold dear, since we tend to pathologize the failure to achieve it. I claim, however, that this thesis about persons as integrated is exactly the kind of idea that fails the environmental dependence test, since this state of integration is often only readily had by those who have a certain amount of control over their external environment, which many of us do not enjoy. For those who are not members of the dominant group, a strongly integrated self is sometimes simply not on the horizon, since being subject to the vicissitudes of the external environment often leads to conflict, fragmentation, or disintegration. Having inadequate power over one's own circumstances tends to produce what we might call “fractured selves,” selves that face a multitude of environmental forces, many times thrusting contradictory norms, roles, and traits, upon those subjected to them. -/- The fact that the failure to achieve integration is in fact pathologized makes the integration thesis seriously questionable, since it creates a situation in which those most in need of being conferred the normative status of being a person will fail to get such recognition, and in fact, possibly labelled as "defective" in some way or other. This is unjust for many reasons, at least one of which is that it relies on morally irrelevant facts to determine a person's normative status. -/- The previous issues raise the question of whether the aim of a giving a metaphysical account of persons ought to be understood descriptively or prescriptively, since current metaphysical accounts would fail to count many individuals as persons. However, taking metaphysical accounts as a prescriptive is highly controversial. I doubt that most of those offering explicit metaphysical theories of persons would agree that they are engaged in any kind of prescriptive project. Some psychologists and psychiatrists perhaps may take themselves to be determining whether a person is "healthy" by our current understanding of what it is to be a person, but the idea of having a healthy psychology sufficient for being a fully competent person is vastly different from having a healthy physical body, which does seem to have a more objective basis, although even this is questioned in disability studies. -/- The strong integration thesis, then, as now applied, clearly raises political issues, and has potential negative consequences for many beings that we typically do think of as persons. The integration thesis then needs to be replaced with a more adequately descriptive metaphysical theory or revised in a way so that it avoids these negative political consequences. -/- I see two paths open: (1) maintain the integration thesis as an ideal, and grant those who fail to meet it a temporary kind of normative status equal to that of being a person and push for substantive equal opportunity to achieve integration; or (2) reject the ideal altogether and offer a different account of the nature of being a person that counts so-called "fractured selves" as persons. -/- I believe that path (2) is preferable to path (1) for several reasons. First, it requires no condescension or paternalistic attitudes towards those who fail to be fully integrated; second, it expresses intellectual humility in accepting that standards that appear objective are often, in reality, biased and should not be universally applied; and third, it is more realistic in that it does not assume that there is an infinite amount of resources, and therefore harbors no illusions that equalizing power structures will allow everyone to enjoy the same amount and kind of power currently held by the dominant classes. -/- My own metaphysical account of what matters for survival to persons over time advocates for the idea that persons ought to be understood as constituted not only by internal psychological relations, but also by their relations to their surrounding environments, and this includes relations to inanimate objects. This view, I argue, can accommodate fractured selves as full persons, allowing for various psychological configurations to count as persons. It is also an improvement on views that do happen to recognize the environmental influence on persons -- social constitution views. The reason is that these views argue that persons just are what their environmental social surroundings dictate, which also has potentially negative political consequences, since it threatens to bind persons so closely to socio-cultural contexts that it closes off the possibility of resistance to them. However, because the view I endorse, makes persons environmentally dependent not only on their socio-cultural context, but on the whole of their environment, this makes persons partly independent of socio-cultural contexts, allowing them room to question them, which as noted, I believe they should be. (shrink)

Human rights belong to individuals in virtue of their common humanity. Yet it is an important question whether human rights entail or comport with the possession of what I call group-specific rights, or rights that individuals possess only because they belong to a particular group. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says they do. Article 15 asserts the right to nationality, or citizenship. Unless one believes that the only citizenship compatible with a universal human rights regime is (...) cosmopolitan citizenship in a world state – a conception of citizenship that is not countenanced by the UDHR – one must interpret the human right to citizenship as a universal right to a particular group right. Other UN Conventions affirm the right of national minorities and indigenous people to cultural autonomy.[1] In these cases the right attributed to the group is understood as protecting an individually held human right to freedom of religion, association, or cultural expression. Because these individual rights are exercised collectively and exclusively, they ensure that individual members of a particular group have the freedom to act unhindered by outsiders. However, groups often view their right to freedom of religion, association, and cultural expression in an entirely different way. Not only do they wish that their individual members be free from outside interference but they wish to be freely self-determining as a group. That is, they wish to collectively define their own identity, including the identity of their individual members, according to the dominant views of the majority. This right to collective self-determination entitles a group to limit the full exercise of its members’ human right to act as they wish whenever the group determines that this exercise endangers the identity of the group. In these cases, the internal threat to the group’s cultural identity posed by the heterodox practices of its own members appears to be indistinguishable from the external threat to the group’s cultural autonomy posed by outsiders. I shall argue that groups are sometimes morally entitled to limit the exercise of their members' human rights under certain conditions.[2] In some respects the notion of limitation operant here is familiar to us from our own understanding of what liberal democratic societies legitimately demand of their citizens. No right – human or otherwise – is exercised unconditionally, since rights sometimes conflict with one another and their possession is contingent upon respecting the rights of others, which normally involves accepting some limitations on what may be said or done. Laws merely codify how the majority understands these limits. Also, many philosophers have argued that the meaning of human rights is far from settled, so that even a liberal democratic interpretation of rights of the sort that is contained in the first article of the UDHR is far from being universally accepted.[3] Leaving aside the possibility that human rights do not entail the extensive liberty associated with a liberal understanding of them,[4] I shall argue that groups can sometimes be morally justified to limit the expressive liberty of their individual members so long as they are both ontologically and morally legitimate and provide dissenters with reasonable opportunities for exit. [1] These include the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries and the Declaration of Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities. [2] Following Thomas Pogge, I regard human rights as claims that individuals raise against institutions that are supposed to guarantee them the conditions and resources necessary for leading a minimally decent human life. Because institutions are imperfect and fallible, assessing their compliance with human rights involves weighing their overall success along a number of variables which normally preclude simple judgments that fall into the either/or of fully satisfying or fully violating a human right. An institution may perform reasonably well in insuring that almost all of the persons on whom it is imposed are relatively successful in enjoying human right X but not human right Y; likewise, it may insure that some persons on whom it is imposed have greater success in enjoying a human right than others. [3] Article 1 states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This article can be given a distinctly liberal interpretation if “equal” is understood as “same” and “rights” are understood in to include political rights to equal participation in government and “freedom to manifest his religion or belief in teaching practice, worship, and observance” “in public or private”. [4] There has been an extensive debate over whether human rights, understood as claims that individuals raise against the social institutions that are imposed on them, reflect a conception of individual self-assertion that is universally valid for all societies or only for liberal societies that have embarked upon a Western course of modernization. Some, like John Rawls, have sought to circumvent this impasse by defining the list of universally valid human rights minimally, and in terms that do not imply robust notions of freedom and equality of the sort associated with the Western liberal constitutional tradition. (shrink)

Many meta-ethicists have thought that rationality requires us to heed apparent normative reasons, not objective normative reasons. But what are apparent reasons? There are two kinds of standard answers. On de dicto views, R is an apparent reason for S to \ when it appears to S that R is an objective reason to \ . On de re views, R is an apparent reason for S to \ when R’s truth would constitute an objective reason for S to (...) \ , and it appears to S that R. De re views are currently more popular because they avoid overintellectualizing rationality. But they face problems owing to the way in which they do so. Some assume that we can escape these problems by requiring more information to be apparent or by appealing to defeat. But these strategies fail. So, I defend a new view: apparent reasons are apparent facts that agents are competently attracted to treat like objective reasons, where competence is indirectly defined in terms of objective reasons and a competence/performance distinction is honored. Since one can treat X like an F without having the concept of an F, the view does not overintellectualize rationality. But it is also strong enough to dodge the pitfalls of de re views. (shrink)

An important part of ethics consists in the attempt to find a theoretical framework for the sincere moral discourse of ordinary people; to present, if possible, a consistent account of the ways in which such terms as “good,” “right,” “duty,” “obligation” are used in moral contexts. It is surprising that it should ever have been thought possible to account for such utterances as expressions of emotion. For the most part nothing could be less like the sighs, groans, shouts, (...) and chuckles with which we normally express emotion than are our assertions about right and wrong, good and bad; these are usually the outcome of careful consideration and they are almost invariably expressed in cognitive terms. That is, we describe ourselves as “thinking out what we ought to do,” “coming to a conclusion as to what is right,” “knowing the difference between right and wrong,” “recognizing our obligations,” “seeing our duty.” When we do employ “emotive” words in these contexts it is almost always for the purpose of expressing anger or remorse or disgust with regard to our own moral lapses or those of others. Moral utterances, in short, have all the appearance of being statements of fact, and statements, moreover, which cannot be made in other than moral terms. (shrink)

Up in the last one in the United States comes to understand the general process: it is linguistics and history, and it requires a priori understanding that In order to understand the current situation before, prior to a full understanding effectiveness and bias as understanding the meaning is from whole to part and from part to whole , in the understanding of the history and heritage hermeneutic circle is always in operation, understanding related to the sight of the fusion eventually (...) like Q & A dialogue. In order to interpret this paper, the classic text of the task. Gadamer on this topic already has a large amount of experience, and to make you pleasantly surprised or not surprised the way described in this topic. This presentation will define and into the road to discuss seven key words, these seven key words will help us to understand Gadamer are talking about the interpretation of the classic text. Each of these seven words on a word, the speaker will be asked whether you find in your own experience is true. 1. Gleichzeitigkeit-both of the words appear in the "real management and methods" up to the U.S. for the aesthetic experience in the timing of the discussion. He found that when visual field interaction, the reader found In order to interpret the ancient texts and aging time distance between the disappearance of the activities in reading, and text with our own game to attract you into the presence. In this part of the final, which also is mentioned for the moral, economic, regardless of language and other classics: They attract you to the significance of the cycle, like they were written today. 2. Applicatio-application In order to make up the United States is not used in accordance with such assertions: "understand something is to understand how it applies to pre-existing condition." So when the text is not only common, as in # 1, it means that something in the present before. In order to understand the application will be leading. History of the United States up to review the timing of the application was excluded, as well as understand the text is treated as just understanding and interpretation of events, but up to the United States want to re-restored early priority in the 19th and 20th centuries, the elements of hermeneutics. 3. Erfahrung-up experience in the United States defined by the qualification before a person experiences some of the things. Its typical form, is involved in the Lok empty hope, therefore, sentence description if not in the pit, not wisdom. Gadamer claims previous experience in the concept: "not to consider the experience of the inner history of." But up to the United States said that experience, "teaches us to recognize the reality." Experience, the result is "to know What is the What." The other result is that we "Experiences", it is not arbitrary and open to new experiences. In order to find you first read the classic text commands were prohibitive, and dismissed out of hand In order to your expectations, but in the end so make sure you are not the more arbitrary and more open to new experiences it? 4. Wahrheit-up to the United States is not really reasonable satisfaction of reasonable scientific definition of truth. His concern is that we insisted that the "true" regardless question. Description is described in "What things are the way" - a real management of ontology definitions. He followed Heidegger aletheia true management point of view, is to expose shield . According to this definition, even works of art can be "real". That is, it can expose the shield there things through other means in a way not possible. So the question is, under the classic in the sense that the writing is true? Gadamer description is. 5. Selbst-Verständnis-up to their own understanding to the United States in this裡In order to further understand more. It is not more deeply understand the true management classic, it is found that work experience change a person's sight and view of life, and it changed the understanding of a person's own. When the text of the event experience, we can integrate it into the "existence of a continuous nature." We can find the concept of other games in this裡: Application, experience and true management. Events with the classic encounter with a person unable to read the classics before he was the same person. 6. Verwandlung ins Gebilde-conversion into the structural changes that are described in works of art up to the way the United States. Some things have been transformed into the experience and continued with the description of future generations made ​​the structure裡. This is one of the functions of art: something to save future generations, but is really something. This is Why is it up to the United States in terms of tradition is so important. This structure is special, it no longer be measured by our standards, but from its own standards. Finally, the significance of change is more true for the mediocre, reading the text is found in its own transformation, a person will not stay in place. 7. Solidarität, Fest-one of the festival in the late works with up to learn to find beauty in the human basis of his artistic point of view. Therefore, "the United States related" has three parts, the game, , symbol , and festivals. In later works, he found time not only festivals are important, it's time from the day In order to inspire us, but it also brought together a community and the joint, to celebrate the event in its creation裡. Festival "to improve our sense of life." Arts festival to share with so many things, when we have nature and art associated, the more we are able to understand art. The end of this lecture will ask you to read the classic self-experience, Gadamer's concept of the Concept for you is true. An introductory section explains that the lecture will present seven key terms, representing seven aspects of the universal process of understanding. It is noted that a published lecture in Chinese by this author under the title "Seven Key Terms in the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer "is not the same as this, and indeed only one of the terms in that lecture is used in this one, although four of them are used in tomorrow's lecture. (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render certain norms, (...) but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Can Virtue Be Bought?Eugene Garver1. The problem: Epistemic elitism or cognitive dominanceDemocracy and rationality can be enemies. Superior intelligence and information can silence people, and the voices of reason can be drowned out by anti-intellectual populism. Given the dearth of both democracy and rationality in contemporary American politics, I hope that each can be fortified by association with the other, but I don't think that mutual reinforcement is easy. (...) I start by giving short quotations from two of the most significant contemporary thinkers who question the relation between democracy and intelligence.First a thesis from James Bohman that sets the challenge for practical intelligence and rhetoric in a democracy: "Deliberative democracy should not reward those groups who simply are better situated to get what they want by public and discursive means; its standard of political equality cannot endorse any kind of cognitive elitism" (1997, 332).1Next, a longer passage from Henry Richardson:The fatal objection to an objectivist interpretation of arbitrary power [in which the public good is thought of as a determinate object] is that it excludes from counting as domination what should be counted as one of its primary cases, namely domination on the basis of superior knowledge and information. Whatever the content of the public good may be, we may suppose—absent liberal justificational restrictions—that there are some people who are relatively expert in discerning it. One way to track the public good with reasonable reliability, then, is to turn political decisions over to those experts or wise persons. If we accept an objectivist interpretation of what "nonarbitrary power" means, then we could not count such Platonic guardians as dominating us. Intuitively, however, I think that we would: They would be dominating us precisely in virtue of their superior knowledge and information about the public good. (2002, 41)2 [End Page 353]Bohman worries about the injustice of unequal powers of eloquence. Richardson worries about what I think is a harder problem, the injustice of unequal powers of practical intelligence, the domination by superior knowledge. These two concerns, rhetorical and epistemic, are related. In Hobbes's wonderful phrase, "eloquence is seeming prudence," everything turns on the permanently contested relation between the appearance of facility with public and discursive means and the reality of superior practical knowledge. The only practical knowledge worth worrying about is manifested practical knowledge.Richardson and Bohman pose the ethical problem of what happens to community when there are claims to superior practical wisdom. The question isn't whether such claims are true or false, but the conditions under which they can be asserted and accepted. When are successful claims to knowledge "arbitrary," "dominating," or in a word, unjust? Thus, David Estlund writes, "Even granting that some people might be far better at making the morally and technically best political decisions, such invidious comparisons among citizens are bound to be open to reasonable disagreement" (2000, 137). But the issue is whether such reasonable disagreement is itself grounds for denying the comparison. Why is a judgment of better and worse necessarily "invidious"? When is disagreement about what is the best political decision a "reasonable" disagreement?Of course we should worry when eloquence silences people. But many other things silence citizens, too. Some argue, for example, that the discursive power of cross-burning "has a silencing effect" since it intimidates African Americans, and similar arguments have been made about how pornography silences women, but it would be strange to call these powers superior eloquence, certainly not in the sense that Bohman, Richardson, and Estlund worry about (Fiss 1996, 119).3 Many forms of coercion and ways of limiting freedom have nothing to do with silencing, as they prevent us from even getting to a point where there can be discussion. Extra-discursive signs of power, such as age, wealth, or difference, can inhibit me from speaking my mind. The personal experience of a purported victim is hard to argue against. So are people with access to powerful symbols.For example, consider the resistance to some forms of victim impact statements. Opponents argue that these are too emotional to have probative value. Their presence is unfair. They are unfair because... (shrink)

Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions that seem to indicate that mere changes in practical context can impact the propriety of assertions and knowledge attributions. For example, in Keith DeRose’s famous pair (...) of low stakes versus high stakes bank cases, the consequences of Keith’s acting on The bank is open on Saturday if it were false change from trivial in low stakes to catastrophic in high stakes. We are to suppose that the proposition is true, and that Keith has access to the same quantity and quality of evidence for it in both cases. In low stakes, but not in high stakes, we are inclined to think that Keith can appropriately assert to his inquiring wife “The bank is open on Saturday.” In low stakes, Keith’s knowledge ascription “I know that the bank is open on Saturday” strikes us as aptly asserted and true. In high stakes only a knowledge denial on Keith’s part strikes us as aptly asserted and true.If we want to hang on to KNA, it looks like we will have to abandon CI and concede that ‘knows’ or knowledge is sensitive to changes in practical considerations. If we want to retain CI, we can try to say that, while Keith does still know that the bank is open on Saturday in high stakes, he does not have sufficient warrant to properly assert that it is. But such a move seems to run counter to KNA. We appear to be stuck in the Shiftiness Dilemma.Keen to get us out of the dilemma and to preserve the idea that epistemically good thinking and asserting are independent of practical concerns, Simion suggests a strategy that can also be used to protect other epistemic speech-act norms and notions from similar threats of practical shiftiness. She notes that having an impact on the degree of epistemic warrant required is not enough to make a norm an epistemic one. Fair enough. If I am given strong practical reason (a million dollars, or a gun to the head) not to adopt full belief until I have gathered more evidence, there is potentially some nonepistemic norm at work in the demand for further evidence. So it is a live possibility (indeed, a plausible one, as Simion would say) that our intuitions in the Shiftiness Dilemma are being misdescribed: they are tracking all-things-considered propriety of assertion, not epistemic propriety. In high stakes, practical norms override the epistemic norm KNA. Keith’s asserting “The bank is open on Saturday” would be epistemically proper but all-things-considered improper.Simion backs up her account with an etiological-function origin story and typology for the norms of assertion. Here is her characterization of etiological function for traits, artifacts, and actions. E-function.A token of type T has the e-function of type B of producing effect E in a system S iff (1) tokens of T produced E in the past, (2) producing E resulted in benefit of type B in S/S’s ancestors, and (3) producing E’s having B-benefited S’s ancestors contributes to the explanation of why T exists in S.In this schema, norms governing an action are typed by the functions or purposes of the action, which in turn are typed by the benefits the action delivers. The epistemic norm of assertion will be the one that characteristically and reliably enables participants in the practice of assertion to secure its primary epistemic good, which Simion identifies as knowledge (testimonial knowledge in hearers generated under normal conditions by the assertions of knowledgeable speakers). Moves in a practice either directly or indirectly aim at fulfilling the goal of the practice. Assertion is a move in the practice of inquiry, which has the generation of knowledge as its aim. Hence, Simion concludes, assertion aims at generating knowledge.This account helps to explain why, in cases like high stakes, Keith all-things-considered ought not to assert “The bank is open on Saturday,” even though he knows it is true. Prudential norms of assertion override the epistemic KNA, for when multiple functions come into conflict, the ones that are more important to the survival of the organism will generate weightier normative constraints.Simion then applies her account to the general category of constatives—for example, speech acts that express a speaker’s belief and the intention that the hearer form or continue to hold the like belief. Employing the taxonomy of Bach and Harnish, she argues that, as expressions of belief and hence varieties of assertion, constatives are subject to knowledge norms as well. Bach and Harnish identify fifteen different subcategories of constatives, each characterized in terms of the kind of belief and intention they express. The norms governing a species have to be at least as strong as the norms governing the corresponding type. As species of the type assertion, each subcategory, then, is subject to at least the necessary direction of KNA. Ultimately, we arrive at a knowledge norm for every speech act on the list, such as The Knowledge Norm of Conjecture (KNC):One’s conjecture that p is epistemically permissible only if one knows that there is reason, but not sufficient reason, to believe that p. Most of the proposed interpretations of various constatives are on the whole reasonable enough, though J. L. Austin would surely be unhappy to see so many different speech acts fashioned into varieties of assertion. Simion concludes with reflections on conjecturing, telling, and moral assertion.Construing the challenge of shiftiness intuitions in terms of the Shiftiness Dilemma allows Simion to declare success when the compatibility of KNA and CI with the relevant data of intuition is secured. Ensuring empirical adequacy for an explanatory framework is an important step, but pronouncements of victory by way of inference to the best explanation would be premature.Other candidates have been shown to match KNA’s familiar explanatory successes (involving lottery propositions, Moorean statements, etc.). Unlike KNA, alternatives that require only epistemically justified or rational belief or credence can allow that a subject is epistemically proper to assert what they believe when their belief is epistemically rational, even under conditions where there are defeating reasons that they are not in a position to be aware of. Furthermore, such norms seem better suited for philosophical or heated moral discussions where there is little consensus and individuals routinely fail to know that what they assert is true. Simion sounds the alarm that the Shiftiness Dilemma threatens to generalize “to epistemic normativity as a whole” (xi–xii), but norms concerning rational credence seem particularly immune.As Simion notes, the etiological-function model of norms that she proposes could be rebuilt with a different central epistemic aim at its core. Indeed, Millikan-inspired models along these lines are appealed to in other areas in philosophy where the concept of information takes center stage—a concept that may be more amenable to rigorous definition and use in dialogue with the sciences than knowledge. We can wonder, also, what special weight the etiological-function model accords to a knowledge-first perspective on epistemic normativity when the model is malleable in this way.The effectiveness of Simion’s strategy for shielding epistemically good thinking and assertion from practical shiftiness becomes less apparent when we try to apply it to Keith’s belief or judgment that the knowledge ascription/denial he asserts is true. It is unclear whether we are to suppose that, in high stakes, Keith epistemically ought to believe/judge that his asserted knowledge denial is false, but all-things-considered he ought to believe/judge that it is true. We do not have to accept that the knowledge-first, etiological function account of normativity for assertion carries over to belief, of course, but then what progress have we made in accounting for the shiftiness in Keith’s judgment that he knows the bank is open on Saturday in low stakes but not in high stakes?Furthermore, there are other ways to generate problems for fallibilist Classical Invariantists in low versus high stakes pairs of cases. Here is a simplified version of a puzzle from the debate over pragmatic encroachment. Consider low cases where you meet the invariant standards for knowing that p, but your justified confidence falls short of certainty. Among these cases, there must be some where you also meet the invariant standards for knowing that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. Say, for instance, that you have a machine with a ϕ button, and your machine, which you know to be extremely reliable, tells you what the cost or benefit will be if you push the button and p is true versus if p is false. If you ϕ (push the ϕ button) and p is true, you win one hundred dollars; if you ϕ and p is false, you lose one hundred dollars. You face the choice: to ϕ or not to ϕ. Since you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, you rationally conclude that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, and hence that you ought to ϕ. If you know which choice of action has the best overall outcome, that is what you all-things-considered should do. Now consider high, where the quantity and quality of your evidence for p is the same, and you still know that your machine is extremely reliable. This time, however, the machine tells you that if you push ϕ and p is true, you win one hundred dollars, but if you push ϕ and p is false, you lose $1 million. Your rational confidence in p is not high enough to justify pushing the button, so you rationally conclude that you ought not to ϕ. Since in high nothing evidentially relevant has changed (all that has changed is the machine informing you of a new, more serious cost of acting on p if p is false), the classical invariantist will have to say that you still know that ϕ, and you still know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. So, according to CI, you should still be able to reason properly as follows: you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, so you know that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, hence you ought to ϕ. Classical invariantists owe us an explanation concerning how we can avoid the paradox here without conceding that knowledge is practically shifty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THOMISTIC METAETIDCS AND A PRESENT CONTROVERSY XOOD STARTING point for understanding the recent controversy regarding the Grisez-Finnis interpretaition oi St. Thomas Aquinas's ethical theory is Finnis's claim that "by a 'Simple act of non-inferential understanding one grasps that the objeot of the [natural] inclination which one experiences is an instance of a general form of good, for oneself (and others like one)." 1 For here Finnis is denying an (...) inferential process by which one moves from a theoretical understanding (" understanding this nature from the outside, as it were" 2) of what inclinations humans,as humans have to the conclusion that the object oi the particular inclination in question is ·a human good. Instead, he is asserting that it is in a practical context that one understands an object of an inclination to be a human good, and thus generates, via the practical reason, ·a practical, prescriptive principle. An example of such a principle is " Knowledge is something good to have " which, for Finnis, is the same logically as " Knowledge is a good to be pursued " 3 which, in turn, is equivalent to "Knowledge ought to be pursued ",4 which is a prescriptive ("normative") rather than descriptive (factual) utterance.5 1Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; hereafter NLNR), p. 34. Cf. Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983; hereafter FE), pp. 20-22. 2NLNR p. 34. s Ibid., p. 63. 4lbid., p. 42, note 56; "The Basic Principles of Natural Law: A Reply to Ralph Mclnerny," John Finnis and Germain Grisez, American Journal of Jurisprudence 26 (1981), pp. 21-31 (hereafter Reply to Mcinerny), pp. 23-24. See also Germain Grisez's well-known article "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1-2, Question 94, Article 2," Natural Law Forum 10 (1965), pp. 168-201 (hereafter FPPR), p. 194. 5 See, e.g., NLNR, pp. 44-45; Reply to Mcinerny, p. 23. Grisez and Finnis attempt to distinguish imperatives and prescriptions, which I argue against in 40 THOMISTIC METAETHICS AND A PRESENT CONTROVERSY 41 Finnis and Grisez, then, argue that practical principles, which encompass value-judgments about human goods, are arrived at through the practical reason and thus are prescriptive ("normative ") utterances, as opposed to descriptive or theoretical truths "of metaphysical anthropology ".6 Hence these principles cannot be derived from metaphysical claims.7 To argue for such,a derivation would he to hold that prescriptivity or normativity can emerge from pure descriptivity. Such a derivation, of course, would not account for the appearance of the prescriptive or action-guiding element. An alternative position, to be returned to below, is that value-judgments about human goods are descriptive in themselves. At the same time, owing to the natural inclination to do what we understand to be morally or humanly good, human beings could prescribe to themselves the pursuit of such human goods, once they are understood to be human goods. It should be noted that for Grisez and Finnis the basic practical principles are not moral but pre-moraL8 Still, Grisez and Finnis consider that they direct to ends completive of human nature. Hence, although these authors reserve the characterization of "' moraily right choices " to those that are not simply harmonious with one or another basic human good but rather to those that also do not run counter to any other human good,9 my paper "Is-Ought: Prescribing and a P1·esent Controversy," The Thomist 49, l (January, 1985), pp. 1-23 (hereafter Schultz), esp. pp. 10-Hl. s Reply to Mcinerny, pp. 23-24. 7 Ibid.; see note 13 below. In the paper mentioned in note 5 above I point out that Finnis seems to allow for the possibility of arriving at value-judgments through theoretical reasoning, since he says "I assert that judgments [about man's natural goods, about what man should be] are primarily (though perhaps not exclitsively) judgments of practical reason...." ("Natural Law and 'Is'-'Ought' Question: An Invitation to Professor Veatch," Catholic Lawyer 26, 4, 1981, p. 272, my emphasis. This article is subsequently referred to as Response to Veatch.) But he doesn't explain this, and in Reply to... (shrink)

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...) middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. -/- Keywords Plato; early dialogues; middle dialogues; being; knowledge; development -/- Introduction The differences between two groups of the early and middle period dialogues have always been a matter of dispute. Whereas the developmentalists like Vlastos, Silverman (2002), Teloh (1981), Dancy (2004) and Rickless (2007) think that from the early to the middle dialogues Plato’s philosophy changes, at least in some essential points, the unitarists like Kahn, Cherniss and Shorey believe that there happens no development and the differences must be taken as natural, ignorable and even pedagogic. In his well-known article, Socrates contra Socrates in PLATO, Vlastos lists ten theses of difference between two groups of dialogues. The first group which includes Plato’s early dialogues he divides to 'elenctic' (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras and Republic I) and 'transitional' (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno) dialogues. These transitional come after all the elenctic dialogues and before all the dialogues of the second group which compose Plato’s middle period dialogues, including (with Vlastos' chronological order) Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus (1991, 46-49). Vlastos asserts strictly that his list of differences are 'so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotole’s' (ibid, 46). Vlastos’ list of differences between two Socrateses is considered a view breaking sharply between the early and the middle dialogues. Besides all ten differences between the two Socrateses in Vlastos’ list that can be supportive for our doctrine here, we intend to focus on some ontological as well as epistemological distinctions that have not completely been discussed hitherto. Contrary to the developmentalist theory of Vlastos, unitarian theory of Charles Kahn wishes to eliminate any substantial difference between the early and the middle dialogues. He distinguishes seven 'pre-middle' or 'threshold' dialogues including Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis and Euthydemus from the other Socratic dialogues which he calls 'earliest group' (1996, 41). The threshold dialogues, Kahn thinks, 'embarke upon a sustained project' that is to reach to its climax in the middle period dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium and Republic. Believing in that there is no 'fundamental shift'between the early and middle dialogues (ibid, 40), Kahn thinks the Socratic dialogues are just the 'first stage' with a 'deliberate silence' towards the theories of later periods (ibid, 339). One of the reasons of the surprising fact that Plato gives no hint of the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms in the early dialogues, he thinks, is the pedagogical advantages of aporia. He thinks that Plato 'obscurely', and mostly because of education, hinted to some doctrines and conceptions in his early dialogues and with the aim of clarifying them only in the later ones (ibid, 66). The seven threshold dialogues, Kahn asserts, 'had been designed from the first' to prepare the pupils and readers for the views expounded in the middle period dialogues (ibid, 59-60). To show that the differences of the two Socrateses of the early and middle period dialogue are in their onto-epistemological grounds and thence cannot be explained by a unitaristic view, we try to draw the ontological and epistemological principles of the early dialogues in the first part below in order to show, in the second part, that those principles have been developed in the middle period dialogues. -/- A. The Onto-Epistemologic Principles of the Early Dialogues Socratic dialogues are paradoxical about knowledge because while being knowledge-oriented always searching for knowledge, they deny it and even never discuss it directly. Three elements of Socrates’ way of searching Knowledge throughout the early dialogues, i.e. Socratic 'what is X?' question, his disavowal of knowledge and his elenctic method combined together produce something like a circle which works, more or less, in the same way in these dialogues. Though this circle is an embaressing inquiry always resulting in ignorance instead of knowledge, its motivation is surprisingly Socrates’ passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an intensive love of wisdom. The starting point of this circle is Socrates’ confession of having no knowledge which might be explicitly asserted or presupposed, maybe because it was one of the famous characteristics of Socrates; a confession always paradoxically accompanied with his intense longing for knowledge (e.g., Gorgias 505e4-5). Every time Socrates encounters with someone who thinks he knows something (οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι) (Apology 21d5) and tries to examine him. This examination seems to be the simplest one asking just what it is that he knows. Socrates’ elenchus, therefore, is always connected with 'what is X?' (τίς ποτέ ἐστιν) question, a question that most of the early dialogues of Plato are concerned with; 'what is courage?' in the Laches, 'what is piety?' in Euthydemus, 'what is temperance?' in Charmides and 'what is beauty?' in Hippias Major. This question we call here 'Socratic question' and probably is the very question the historical Socrates used to employ, is tightly interrelated with both his disavowal and his elenchus. He disclaims knowledge because he cannot find the answer to the question himself and he rejects others’ since they cannot offer the correct answer too. Every interlocutor can claim he knows X, if and only if he can answer the Socratic question. Otherwise, he is more of an ignorant than of a knower of τί ποτέ ἐστι X. Knowing the answer to this question is, thus, knowledge’s criterion for Socrates. Having found out that he cannot answer what it is which he would claim to know, the interlocutor comes to the point Socrates was there at the beginning. The least advantage of this circle is that he becomes as wise as Socrates does about the subject, becoming aware that he does not know it. At the end of the circle they are both still at the beginning, not knowing what X is. So let us first take a glance at these three elements. Socratic disavowal of knowledge is strictly asserted in some passages. At Apology 21b4-5, Socrates says: -/- I do not know of myself being wise at all (οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν) -/- Moreover, at 21d4-6: -/- None of us knows anything worthwhile (καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι) …. I do not know (οἶδα) neither do I think I know. -/- In Charmides Socrates speaks about a fear about his probable mistake of thinking that he knows (εἰδέναι) something when he does not (166d1-2). The somehow generalization of this disavowal can be seen in Gorgias. After calling his disavowal 'an account that is always the same' (509a4-5), Socrates continues (a5-7): -/- I say that I do not know (οἶδα) how these things are, but no one I have ever met, like now, who can say anything else without being absurd. -/- At the end of Hippias Major (304d7-8), Socrates affirms his disavowal of knowledge of 'what is X?' this time about the fine: -/- I do not know (οἶδα) what that is itself (αὐτὸ τοῦτο ὅτι ποτέ ἐστιν). Some other passages, however, made a number of scholars dubious about Socrates’ disavowal. Vlastos mentions Apology 29b6-7 as an evidence : 'that to do wrong and to disobey one’s master, both god and men, I know (οἶδα) to be evil and shameful'. He thinks that if we give this single text 'its full weight' it can suffice to show that Socrates does claim knowledge of a moral truth (1985, 7). Vlastos’ claim is not admittable since it would be too strange, I think, for a man like Socrates to violate his disavowal claim just after emphasizing it. We can see his claim just before the already mentioned passage: -/- And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything it world be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge (οὐκ εἰδὼς ἱκανῶς) of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have (οὐκ εἰδέναι) (Apology 29b1-6) Vlastos tries to solve what he calls the 'paradox' of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge distinguishing the 'certain' knowledge from 'elenctic' knowledge (1985, 11) and thinking that when Socrates avows knowledge, we must perceive it as an elenctic knowledge, a knowledge its content 'must be propositions he thinks elenctically justifiable' (ibid, 18). Irwin’s solution is the distinction of knowledge and belief. He approves that Socrates does not 'explicitly' make such a distinction, but still thinks that Socrates’ 'test for knowledge would make it reasonable for him to recognize true belief without knowledge, and his own claims are easily understood if they are claims to true belief alone' (1977, 40). While I agree with Vlastos up to a point, I strongly disagree with Irwin about the early dialogues. As I will try to show below, we are not permitted to consider any kind of distinction within knowledge in Socratic dialogues because only one category of knowledge is alluded to there and the distinction of knowledge and belief thoroughly belongs to the second Sorcates. Although no kind of distinction can be admittable here, I think Vlastos’ distinction can be accepted only if we regard it as a distinction between knowledge, which is unique and without any, even incomparable, rival, and a semi-idiomatic and ordinary one that is a necessary requirement for any argument, and thus, unavoidable even for someone who does not claim any kind of knowledge. An apparent evidence of this is Gorgias 505e6-506a4: -/- I go through the discussion as I think it is (ὡς ἄν μοι δοκῇ ἔχειν), if any of you do not agree with admissions I am making to myself, you must object and refute me. For I do not say what I say as I know (οὐδὲ γάρ τοι ἔγωγε εἰδὼς λέγω ἃ λέγω) but as searching jointly with you (ζητῶ κοινῇ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν). -/- The minimal degree of knowledge everyone must have to take part in an argument, conduct it and use the phrase "I know" when it is necessary is what Socrates cannot deny. We can call it elenctic knowledge only if we agree that it is not the kind of knowledge that Socrates has always been searching, the one that can be accepted as the answer of Socratic 'what is X?' question. His disavowal of knowledge is applied only to the knowledge which can truly be the answer of Socratic question and pass the elenctic exam; a knowledge that, I believe, is never claimed by first Socrates. Socrates conducts his method of examining his interlocutors’ knowledge, our second element here, by almost the same method repeated in Socratic dialogues. That whether we are allowed to regard all the examinations of Socrates in the early dialogues as based on the same or not has been a matter of dispute. Vlastos himself (1994, 31) distinguished Euthydemas, Lysis, Menexenns and Hippias Major from the other Socratic dialogues because he thinks Socrates has lost his faith to elenchus in there. Irwin (1977, 38) distinguishes Apology and Crito where Socrates’ own convictions is present. Contrary to some scholars like Benson (2002, 107) who take elenchus in all the Socratic dialogues as a unique method, Michelle Carpenter and Ronald M. Polansky (2002, 89-100) argue pro the variety of methods of elenchus. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (2002, 145-160) even reject such a thing as Socratic elenchus which can gather all of the Socrates’ various arguments under such a heading. There can be no solution for the problem of elenchus, they think, is due to 'the simple reason that there is no such thing as 'the Socratic elenchos"'(p.147). Though we consider elenchus a somehow determined process and a part of Socratic circle in the early dialogues, all we assume is that whatever differences it might have in different dialogues, it has the same onto-epistemological principles and, thus, we are not going to take it necessarily as a unique method. This method sets out to prove that the interlocutors are as ignorant as Socrates himself is. That whether elenchus is constructive, capable of establishing doctrines as Vlastos (1994) or Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 20-21) believe or not is another issue to which this paper is not to claim anything. What is crucial for our discussion here is that elenchus does not reach to the very knowledge Socrates is looking for. This is strictly against Irwin who thinks that not only elenchus leads to positive results, 'it should even yield knowledge to match Socrates’ conditions'(1977, 68, cf. 48). He does not explain where and how they really yield to that kind of knowledge. He explains his elenctic method in his apology in the court (Apology 21-22), that how he used to examine wise men, politicians, poets and all those who had the highest reputation for their knowledge and every time found that they have no knowledge. If we accept, as I strongly do, that Socrates’ disavowal of his knowledge is not irony, it might seem more reasonable to agree that the process that has that disavowal as its first step cannot be irony as well. The key of the circle which can explain why Socrates disclaims knowledge and how he can reject others’ claim of having any kind of knowledge lies in the third element, Socratic question. In Hippias Major (287c1-2), Socrates asks: 'Is it not by Justice that just people are Just? (ἆρ᾽ οὐ δικαιοσύνῃ δίκαιοί εἰσιν οἱ δίκαιοι). He insists at 294b1 that they were searching for that by which (ᾧ) all beautiful things are beautiful (cf. b4-5, 8). At Euthyphro 6d10-11 it is said that the Socratic question is waiting for 'the form itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος) by which (ᾧ) all the pious actions are pious; and at 6d11-e1: -/- Through one form (που μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ) impious actions are impious and pious actions pious. -/- Since the X itself is that by which X is X, knowing 'X itself' is the only way of knowing X. It is probably because of this that Socrates makes the distinction between the ousia as a right answer to the question and effect as a wrong one: -/- I am afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is (τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν) you did not wish to make clear its nature itself (οὐσίαν … αὐτοῦ) to me, but you said some effect (πάθος) about it. (Euthp. 11a6-9) -/- 1. Knowledge of what X is Now it is time to look for the onto-epistemological principles of Socratic circle and its three elements. It cannot reasonably be expected from the first Socrates to present us explicitly and clearly formulated principles of his onto-epistemology when such explications cannot be found even in the second Socrates who has some obviously positive theoris. Since there must be some principles underlying this first systematic inqury of knowledge, we must seek to them and be satisfied with elicitation of the first Socratas’ principle. What will be drawn out as his principles cannot and must not, thus, be taken as very fix and dogmatic principles. Some very slightest principles and grounds suffice for our purposes here. The first principle that is the prima facie significance of the Socratic question and his implementation of all those elenctic arguments I call the principle of 'Knowledge of What X is' (KWX): -/- KWX To know X, it is required to know what X is. -/- Aristotle (Metaphysics 1078b23-25, 27-29, 987b4-8) takes Plato’s τί ἐστι question as seeking the definition of a thing that is the same as historical Socrates’ search but applying to a different field. That Plato’s 'what is X?' question was a search for definition became the prevailed understanding of this question up to now. I am going neither to discuss the answer of Socratic question nor to challenge taking it as definition. What I am to insist is that knowledge is attached firmly to the answer of the question: Knowledge of X is not anything but the knowledge of what X is. It entails, certainly, the priority of this knowledge to any other kind of knowledge about X but it also has something more fundamental about the relation of knowledge and Socratic question. Socrates’ exclusive focus on the answer of his question can authorize the consideration of such an essential role for KWX in his epistemolgoy. The total rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are unable to answer the question can be regarded as a strong evidence for it. Socrates’ elenctic method and his rejection of others’ knowledge in the early dialogues, which all end aporetically with no one accepted as knower and nothing as knowledge, prevent us from finding any positive evidence for this. We have to be content, therefore, of negative evidences which, I think, can be found wherever Socrates rejects his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are not able to give an acceptable answer to his 'what is X?' question. 2. Bipolar Epistemology Socrates’ rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge has another epistemological principle as its basis. Let me call this principle Bipolar Epistemology' (BE): BE There is no third way besides knowledge and Ignorance. -/- BE says that about every object of knowledge there are only two subjective statuses: knowledge and Ignorance. Socrates’ disavowal, however, says nothing but that he is ignorant of knowledge of X because he does not know what X is. This means that BE is presupposed here. Socrates’ elenchus and his rejection of interlocutors’ having any kind of knowledge are the necessary results of the fact that he does not let any third way besides knowledge and ignorance. The first Socrates never let anyone partly know X or have a true opinion about it, as he would not let anyone know anything about X when he did not know what X is. -/- 3. Bipolar Ontology The principle of BE in first Socrates’ epistemology is parallel to another principle in his ontology. Plato’s bipolar distinction between being and not being is as strict and perfect as his distinction between knowledge and ignorance. This principle I shall call the principle of 'Bipolar Ontology' (BO): BO Being is and not being is not. BO is apparently the same with the well-known Parmenidean Principle of being and not being (cf. Diels-Kranz (DK) Fr. 2.2-5). Euthydemus’ statement against the possibility of false knowledge can be good evidence for this principle: -/- The things which are not surely do not exist (τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα … ἄλλο τι ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν). (Euthydemus 284b3-4) -/- He continues (b4-5): -/- There is nowhere for not being to be there (οὖν οὐδαμοῦ τά γε μὴ ὄντα ὄντα ἐστίν). -/- That BE does not let true opinion as a third option besides knowledge and ignorance seems to be related to BO’s rejecting a third option besides being and not being, which is itself the basis of the impossibility of false belief. Socrates’ elaborate discussion of the problem of false belief in Theatetus that leads to a more decisive discussion and finally to some solutions in Sophist can make our consideration of BO for the first group of dialogues authentive. -/- 4. &5. Split Knowledge and Split Being The fourth principle I shall call the principle of 'Split Knowledge' (SK): -/- SK Knowledge of X is separated from any other knowledge (of anything else) as if the whole knowledge is split to various parts. -/- This Principle is hinted and criticized as Socrates’ way of treating with knowledge in Hippias Major: -/- But Socrates, you do not contemplate the entireties of things, nor do people you have used to talk with (τὰ μὲν ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς, οὐδ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). (301b2-4) -/- Contrary to Rankin who regards the passage as 'antilogical, almost eristic in tone rather than presenting a serious philosophy of being' (1983, 54), I think it can be taken as serious. Hippias criticizes Sorcates that he does not contemplate (σκοπεῖς) the entireties of things (ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων), a critique which Socrates is not its only subject but all those whom Socrates accustomed to talk with (ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). This last phrase, I think, extends this critic beyond this dialogue to other Socratic dialogues. Hippias’ use of the perfect tense of the verb ἔθω (to be accustomed) is a good evidence of this extension. We can get, thus, these ἐκεῖνοι as Socrates’ interlocutors in his other dialogues that hints that this criticism has the epistemological groundings of the previous dialogues as its subject. What ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι points to is that Hippias does not have in mind Socrates’ way of treating things only in this dialogue, but he is also criticizing Socrates’ way throughout his dialogues. At 301b4-5, Socrates and his interlocutors’ way of beholding things is described as such: -/- You people knock (κρούετε) at the fine and each of the beings (ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων) by taking each being cut up in pieces (κατατέμνοντες) in words (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This leads us to our next principle that is parallel to, and the ontological side of, SK, the principle of 'Split Being'(SB): -/- SB Everything (being) is separated from any other thing as if the whole being is split to many beings. -/- Socrates and his interlocutors and thus, as we saw, the Socratic dialogues are accused to regard everything as it is separated from all other things. This separation is en tois logois that, I think, can reasonably be taken as saying that Socratic dialogues (it refers of course to the dialogues before Hippias Major) cut up all things which have the same name/definition from all other things and try to understand them separately, without considering other things that are not in their logos. They, for example in Hippias Major, are cutting up to kalon and try to understand what it and all others inside this logos are by separating it from all other things. This is directed straightly against Socratic question and the way Socratic dialogues follow to find its answer, every time separating one logos. As Meyer (1995, 85) points out, every question 'presupposes that the X in question in a logos is something' and 'every answer to every question aims at unity' (84). The critique of Hippias Major is, therefore, at the same time a critique of SK and SB. It is also a critique of KWX because it is only based on KWX that Socratic dialogues could search for the answer of 'what is X' question supposing that knowing what X is is enough for the knowledge of X. SK and KWX are absolutely interdependent. What Socrates and all his previous interlocutors have neglected in Socratic dialogues, Hippias says, was 'continuous bodies of being' (διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας) (301b6). Either this theory actually belongs to the historical Hippias as it is being said or not, it is strictly criticizing SB. We have the same phrase with changing sūma to logos some lines later at 301e3-4: διανεκεῖ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας. Although this theory that can be observed as both an ontological and an epistemological theory is rejected by Socrates (301cff.), it is still against first Socrates’ onto-epistemological principles and might let us look at what is rejected as Socratic prineple. -/- 6. Knowledge is of Being The sixth principle that I think is presupposed by the first Socrates, is the 'Knowledge of Being' Principle (KB): -/- KB Knowledge is of Being. -/- This principle is obviously the source of the problem of false knowledge, a very important problem throughout Plato’s philosophy. We face this problem maybe for the first time in Euthydemus. In less than 20 Stephanus’ pages, 276-295, we are encountered with different interwoven problems about knowledge , all grounded in the problem of false opinion. Having challenged the obvious possibility of telling lies at 283e, at 284 Euthydemus discusses it saying that the man who speaks is speaking about 'one of those things that are (ἓν μὴν κἀκεῖνό γ᾽ ἐστὶν τῶν ὄντων)' (284a3) and thus speaks what is (λέγων τὸ ὄν) (a5). He must necessarily be saying truth when he is speaking what is because he who speaks what is (τὸ ὄν) and the things that are (τὰ ὄντα) speaks truth (τἀληθῆ λέγει) (a5-6). This is based on Parmenidean principle of the impossibility of being of not being which Euthydemus restates (284b3-4) and we mentioned discussing BO principle above. The things that are not are nowhere (οὐδαμοῦ) and there is no possibility for anyone to do (πράξειεν) anything with them because they must be made as being before anything else can be done, which is impossible (b5-7). The words, then, are of things that exist (εἰσὶν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων λόγοι) (285e9) and as they are (ὡς ἔστιν) (e10). The result is that no one can speak of things as they are not. It is this impossibility of false speach that is extended to thinking (δοξάζειν) at 286d1 and leads to the impossibility of false opinion (ψευδής … δόξα) (286d4). The general conclusion is asserted at 287a extending this impossibility to actions and making any kind of mistake. Not only knowledge is of being but speech, thought and action are of being simply because of the fact that nothing can be of not being. -/- B. First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues Out of what were presupposed or criticized mostly in five dialogues, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Laches and Charmides, we tried to draw the first Socrates’ principles. Our inquiry here is directed to find out the fate of these principles in the three dialogues of the middle period, Meno, Phaedo and Republic. To do this, first we ought to check the situation of Socratic circle in these dialogues. The Socratic circle that was predominant in the early dialogues, does not look like a circle here anymore though they certainly have some features in common. Meno, Phaedo and Republic II-X are not committed to the principles of the circle and the whole circle in disrupted in them. The difference of the two Socrateses towards acquiring knowledge is obvious. The Socrates of Meno, Phaedo and Republic is evidently more self-confident that he can get to some truths during his arguments as he does. They are in their first appearance, as almost all other dialogues, committed to Socrates’ disavowal. All of them try to keep the shape of the Socratikoi Logoi genre, which is committed to the historical Socrates’ way of discussion; a dramatic personage who is to challenge his interlocutors, ask them and refuse the answers. Nevertheless, the fact is that what we have in common between two groups of dialogues is mostly a dramatic structure. Whereas the first group’s arguments are based on Socrates’ disavowal and lead to no positive results, the second group is decisively going to achieve some positive results. The aim of the first Socrates was to show others that they are ignorant of what they thought they knew. The new Socrates of Meno, on the opposite, makes so much efforts to show that the slave boy has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the things that he does not know (οἶδε) (85c6-7). Despite his lack of knowledge, he has true opinions nevertheless. The way from these true opinions to knowledge, as Socrates states, is not so long. These true opinions are now like a dream but 'can become knowledge of the same things not less accurate than anyone’s' (οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἀκριβῶς ἐπιστήσεται περὶ τούτων) (c11-d1), if they be repeated by asking the same questions. The most outstanding text regarding Socrates’ disavowal is Meno 98b where he explicitly claims knowledge: -/- And indeed I also speak as (ὡς) one who does not know (εἰδὼς) but is guessing (εἰκάζων). However, [about the fact] that true opinion and knowledge are different, I do not altogether expect (δοκῶ) myself to be guessing (εἰκάζειν), but if I say about anything that I know (εἰδέναι) -which about few things I say- this is one of the things that I know (οἶδα). (98b1-5) This passage is very significant about Plato’s disavowal of knowledge. There can hardly be found, I think, anywhere else in Plato’s corpus where Socrates speaks about his knowledge of something as such. He says first that he speaks as someone who does not know. This ὡς οὐκ εἰδὼς λέγω comparing with what he used to say in the first group, οὐκ οἶδα, has this added ὡς. Socrates does not claim strongly anymore that he does not know anything but speaks only as someone who does not know. He needs this ὡς not only because he is going to accept that he does know some, though few, things immediately after this sentence, but also because he needs his previous disavowal to be loosened from Meno on. He does not merely say here that he knows something. It is then different from the examples mentioned before which could be taken as idiomatic or at least not emphatic. Socrates’ remarkable emphasis on distinguishing εἰδέναι from εἰκάζειν departs it from all other passages where he says only he knows something. Moreover, he claims definitely that he has knowledge about few (ὀλίγα) things. From the early to the middle dialogues, Socrates’ attitude to knowledge has totally renewed its face. He brings forth a new concept, true opinion, and he does not speak of knowledge as he used to before; the rough, perfect and unachievable knowledge of the first group has turned to something more smooth, realistic and achievable. Comparing with the early dialogues that did not set out from the first to reach positive results, the middle ones are extraordinarily and surprisingly positive and hence destroy the basis of the Socratic circle. The questions and answers are purposely directed to some specific new theories; most of them are not directly related to the topics or the main questions of the dialogues. They are suggested when Socrates draws the attention of the interlocutor away from the main question because of the necessity of another discussion. Even if the main question remains unanswered, we have still many positive theories, prominently of metaphysical type. These theories are so abundant and dominant in these dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, that one might think that they may appear to be arbitrarily sandwiched in there. This helps dialogues to keep their original Socratic structure while they are suggesting new theories. Hence, the Socratic question of 'what is X?', though is still used to launch the discussion, is loosened and is forgotten for most part of the dialogues. Meno that has first a differently formulated question, 'can virtue be taught?', leads finally to the Socratic question of 'What is virtue?'. Phaedo is dedicated to the demonstration of the immortality of soul and the life after death without having a central Socratic question. The case of Republic is more complicated. The first book, on the one hand, has all the criteria of a Socratic circle: its 'what is justice?' question, Socrates’ strong disavowal (e.g. 337d-e), his rejection of all answers and coming back to the first point without finding out any answer. This Book, considered alone, is a perfect Socratic dialogue, as many scholars regard it as early and separated from other books. The books II-X are, on the other hand, far from implementing a Socratic circle. They have still the 'what is justice?' question as their incentive leading question, but they are, in most of the positive doctrines and methods that encompass the main parts, ignoring the question. Even these books that, I believe, are the farthest discussions from the Socratic circle are so cautious not to break the Socratic structure of the dialogue as long as it is possible. What is changed is not the structure of the dialogue but the ontological and epistemological grounds based on which new theories are suggested. -/- 1. Knowledge of the Good We can clearly see in the second group of dialogues that the KWX principle loses the place it had before in our first group. It is not, of course, rejected, but still we cannot say that it has the same situation. KWX that was based on Socratic question, as we discussed before, was the leading principle of the first Socrates’ epistemology and of the highest position. Other epistemological principles, SK directly and BE indirectly, were relying on Socratic question and therefore on KWX. Such a position does not belong to KWX from Meno on. What makes it different in the second Socrates is another principle that is needed it not only as its complementary principle but also as what is more fundamental. Plato, then, does not reject KWX in this period, but, it seems, he transcends to another more basic principle; a principle we shall call the principle of 'Knowledge of the Good' (KG): -/- KG Knowledge of X requires knowledge of the Good. -/- Whereas all the dialogues of our first group are free from any discuscon about KG, it bears a very important role in the second group so as becomes the superior principle of knowledge in Republic. Trying to solve the problem of teachability of virtue, Socrates says that it can be teachable only if it is a kind of knowledge because nothing can be taught to human beings but knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) (Meno 87c2). The dilemma will be, then, whether virtue is knowledge or not (c11-12) and since virtue is good, we can change the question to: whether is there anything good separate from knowledge (εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης) (d4-5). Therefore, the conclusion will be that if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, virtue can be nothing but knowledge (d6-8). What let us discuss KG as an epistemological principle for the second Secrates is the relation he tries to establish between knowledge and the Good which, though is alongside with the mentioned thesis and the idea of virtue as knowledge, goes much deeper inside epistemology asking to regard the Good as the basis of knowledge. The effort of Phaedo cannot succeed in establishing the Good as the criterion of explanation and knowledge since, I think, it needs a far more complicated ontology of Republic where Socrates can finally announce KG. What is said in Republic is totally compatible with Phaedo 99d–e and the metaphor of watching an eclipse of the sun. In spite of the fact that we do not have adequate knowledge of the Idea of the Good, it is necessary for every kind of knowledge: 'If we do not know it, even if we know all other things, it is of no benefit to us without it' (505a6-7). The problem of our not having sufficient knowledge of the Idea of Good is tried to be solved by the same method of Phaedo 99d-e, that is to say, by looking at what is like instead of looking at thing itself (506d8-e4). It is this solution that leads to the comparison of the Good with sun in the allegory of Sun (508b12-13). What the Good is in the intelligible realm corresponds to what the sun is in the visible realm; as sun is not sight, but is its cause and is seen by it (b9-10), the Good is so regarding knowledge. It has, then, the same role for knowledge that the sun has for sight. Socrates draws our attention to the function of sun in our seeing. The eyes can see everything only in the light of the day being unable to see the same things in the gloom of night (508c4-6). Without the sun, our eyes are dimmed and blind as if they do not have clear vision any longer (c6-7). That the Good must have the same role about knowledge based on the analogy means that it must be considered as a required condition of any kind of knowledge: -/- The soul, then, thinks (νόει) in the same way: whenever it focuses on what is shined upon by truth and being, understands (ἐνόησέν), knows (ἔγνω) and apparently possesses understanding (νοῦν ἔχειν). (508d4-6) -/- Socrates does not use agathon in this paragraph and substitutes it with both aletheia and to on. He links them with the Idea of the Good when he is to assert the conclusion of the analogy: -/- That which gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say, is the Idea of the Good: being the cause of knowledge and truth (αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας) so far as it is known (ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ). (508e1-4) Knowledge and truth are called goodlike (ἀγαθοειδῆ) since they are not the same as the Good but more honoured (508e6-509a5). KG, which had been implicitly contemplated and searched in Phaedo, is now explicitly being asserted in Republic. As what was quoted clearly proves, this principle is the very one which we can observe as the most fundamental principle of the second Socrates in Republic, corresponding to the role KWX had in the first Socrates. The Form of the Good in Republic, of which Santas speaks as 'the centerpiece of the canonical Platonism of the middle dialogues, the centerpiece of Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and …' (1983, 256) much more can be said. Plato’s Cave allegory in Book VIII dedicates a similar role to the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is there as the last thing to be seen in the knowable realm, something so important that its seeing equals to understanding the fact that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful (517b). Producing both light and its source in visible realm, it controls and provides truth and understanding in the intelligible realm (517c). -/- 2. Tripartite Epistemology BE is thoroughy rejected in the second Socrates and substituted by its opposite, the principle of 'Tripartite Epistemolgy' (TE): -/- TE Opinion is an epistemological status between knowledge and ignorance. BE of the first Socrates was denying any third way besides knowledge and ignorance which was the foundation of Socratic circle without which Socrates could not reject his interlocutors’ possessing any kind of knowledge. We cannot say, however, that the first Socrates had a third epistemological status in mind but rejected it. Such a status was unacceptable for him so that one can say that he would reject any kind of such status if suggested. There were only two possibilities about knowledge: either one knows something or he does not know it. TE, thus, was not the first Socrates’ discovery and, I think it is not the second Socrates’discovery. All we can see in our second group of dialouges is that he uses this principle as an already demonstrated one. Having examined the slave boy in Meno for the prupose of showing the working of recollection, it truns out that he has some opinions in him while he still does not know. Without trying to prove it, Socrates takes this as the distinction between knowledge and opinion: -/- So, he who does not know (οὐκ εἰδότι) about what he does not know (περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ) has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the same things he did not know (περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε) (85c6-7). -/- The same distinction is set between ὀρθὴν δόξαν and ἐπιστήμην at 97b5-6 ff. (also cf. 97b1-2: ὀρθῶς μὲν δοξάζων … ἐπιστάμενος). He connects then their difference to the myth of Daedalus, the statue that would run away and escape. So are true opinions, not willing to remain long in mind and thus not worthy until one ties them down by αἰτίας λογισμῷ (98a3-4). Socrates says that this tying down is anamnesis. We face, in Phaedo, the same relation is settled between knowledge as the process of being tied down and getting the capability to give an account, on the one hand, and anamnesis, on the other hand. When a man knows, he must be able to give an account of what he knows (Phaedo 76b5-6) and since not all people are able to give such an account, those who recollect, recollect what once they learned (76c4). Although the distinction between knowledge and opinion is not explicitly used in Phaedo, referring to the parallel link between knowledge plus account and anamnesis in Phaedo and Meno, one can say that those who cannot recollect are not able to give account and, thus, are in a state of opinion. What is said at Phaedo 84a, though not yet a definite distinction between knowledge and opinion, makes a distinction between their objects so as we can agree that it is presupposed. The soul of the philosopher, Socrates says, follows reason, stays with it forever and contemplates the divine, which is not the object of opinoin (ἀδόξαστον) (84a8, cf. Meno 98b2-5). The distinction of knowledge and belief in Republic has a significant difference with what we discussed in Meno and Phaedo since the distinction of Meno was based on anamnesis and thus more an epistemological distinction. Even in Phaedo that we do not have any elaborate discussion about the distinction, the only hint to the matter at 76 is bound to the theory of anamnesis. In addition to the relation of the distinction with this theory, there is another evidence that does not permit us to consider the distinction as an ontological distinction. Let’s see Meno 85c6-7: -/- So, he who does not know about what he does not know has within himself true opinions about the same things he did not know (τῷ οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ ἔνεισιν ἀληθεῖς δόξαι περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε). (85c6-7) -/- This last sentence persists that the objects of knowledge and true opinion are the same. What Socrates is to say here is that whereas he does not know X he has true opinion about the same X. I think Socrates’ sentence that the slave boy οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ and his restatement of it by saying περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε is because he wants to emphasize that the slave boy who does not know, has true opinion about the same thing. Socrates could say this just with using τούτων and there would be no necessity to bring περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ for οὐκ εἰδότι if he did not want to emphasize. -/- 3. Tripartite Ontology The distinction between knowledge and true opinion in Republic, on other side, has nothing to do with recollection, but is based on an ontological principle, 'Tripartite Ontology' (TO): -/- TO There are things that both are and are not. -/- This principle I confine, among our three dialogues of the second group, to Republic not extended to Meno and Phaedo, is obviously the opposite of BO. Speaking about the lovers of sights and sounds in the fifth book, Socrates distinguishes them from philosophers because their thought is unable to understand the nature of beautiful itself besides beautiful things (476a6-8) and hence they can only have opinions. The philosopher who, on the contrary, believes in beautiful itself and can distinguish it from beautiful things (476c9-d3), has knowledge because he knows, contrasting others who have opinion because they only opine (d5-6). Since those whose knowledge were degraded as opinion will complain about Socrates’ such calling their thought, he provides them the following argument (476e7-477b1): -/- - Does the person who knows, knows (γιγνώσκει) something (τὶ) or nothing (οὐδέν)? - He knows something (τί). - Something that is (ὂν) or is not (οὐκ ὄν)? - Something that is (ὂν) for how could something that is not be known (πῶς γὰρ ἂν μὴ ὄν γέ τι γνωσθείη)? - Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what completely is (παντελῶς ὂν) is completely knowable (παντελῶς γνωστόν) and what is in no way (μὴ ὂν δὲ μηδαμῇ) is in every way unknowable (πάντῃ ἄγνωστον). - A most adequate one. - Good. Now, if anything is such as to be and also not to be (ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι), won’t it be intermediate (μεταξὺ) between what purely is (εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος) and what in no way is (μηδαμῇ ὄντος)? - Yes, it’s intermediate. - Then as knowledge (γνῶσις) is set over what is (τῷ ὄντι), while ignorance (ἀγνωσία) is of necessity set over what is not (μὴ ὄντι) mustn’t we find an intermediate between ignorance (ἀγνοίας) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to be set over the intermediate, if there is such a thing? -/- From the third status of being we must reach to the third status of knowledge. The simple reading of this text can be an existential reading, taking the "is" of the mentioned sentences as existence. The problem is that when it is said that there is something that both is and is not reading "is" existentially, it sounds too bizarre to be acceptable. It cannot easily be understandable to have something as both existent and non-existent at the same time. This problem arose so many debates and led many scholars to reject the existential reading of "is" and suggest some other readings like predicative or veridical readings. I think though Plato’s complicated ontology of Republic cannot be correctly understood by a simple existential reading, this "is" cannot be free from existential sense of being and, thus, cannot be reduced to just a predicative or veridical sense of being. -/- 4. Bound Knowledges In addition to KG, the Good is also the basis of another principle in the second Socrates, namely the principle of 'Bound Knowledge' (BK): -/- BK Knowledge of everything is bound to the knowledge of the Good. -/- We distinguished BK from KG because we want to insist, in BK, on what had not been insisted upon in KG, that is, the binding role that the Good plays in the second Socrates, contrasting the absence of such a role in the first Socrates. Socrates remembers, in Phaedo, his wonderful keen on natural philosophers' wisdom when he was young. The origin of this enthusiasm was Socrates’ hope to know the cause of everything as they used to claim. When he was searching the matters of his interest on their basis, Socrates says, he became convinced he can get no acceptable answer from them and found himself blind even to the things he thought he knew before. One day he hears Anaxagoras’ theory that 'it is Mind that arranges and is the cause of everything (ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος)' (Phd. 97c1-2 cf. DK, Fr.15.8-9, 11-12, 12-14) and thinks that he can finally find what he has always expected, i.e. something which can explain all things. What I intend to show here is that what makes Socrates hopeful is that Anaxagoras’ theory tries 1) to explain all things by one thing and 2) this explanation is understood by Socrates as if it is based on the concept of the Good. That Socrates was searching for one explanation for all things can be proved even from what he has been expecting from natural philosophers. The case is, nonetheless, more clearly asserted when he speaks about Anaxagoras’ theory. In addition to διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος of 97c2 mentioned above, we have τὸ τὸν νοῦν εἶναι πάντων αἴτιον (c3-4) and τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν (c4-5) all emphasizing on the cause of all things (πάντα) which can clearly prove that one of the reasons which caused Socrates to embrace it delightfully was its claim to provide the cause of all things by one thing. Another reason was that Anaxagoras’ Mind, at least in Socrates’ view, was attempting to explain everything by the concept of the Good. This connection between Mind and Good belongs more to the essential relation they have in Socrates’ thinking than Anaxagoras’ theory because there are almost nothing about such a relation in Anaxagoras. The reason for Socrates’ reading can be that Mind is substantially compatible with Socrates’ idea of the relation between good and knowledge. Both the thesis 'no one does wrong willingly' and the theory of virtue as knowledge we pointed to above are evidences of this essential relation. Nobody who knows that something is bad can choose or do it as bad. The reason, when it is reason, that means when it is as it should be, when it is wise or when it knows, works only based on good-choosing. In this context, when Socrates hears that Mind is considered as the cause of everything, it sounds to him like this: good should be regarded as the basis of the explanation of all things. We see him, thus, passing from the former to the latter without any proof. This is done in the second sentence after introducing Mind: -/- I thought that if this were so, the arranging Mind would arrange all things and put each thing in the way that was Best (ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ). If one then wished to find the cause of each thing by which it either perishes or exists, one needs to find what is the best way (βέλτιστον αὐτῷ ἐστιν) for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is the most excellent (ἄριστον) and best (βέλτιστον). The same man must inevitably also know what is worse (χεῖρον), for that is part of the same knowledge. (97c4-d5) This passage is a good evidence of Socrates’ leap from Anaxagoras’ Mind to his own concept of the Good that can explain why Socrates found Anaxagoras theory after his own heart (97d7). Mind is welcomed because of its capability for explanation on the basis of good to 'explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better (ἄμεινον), and that it was better (ἄμεινον) to be so' (97e1-3). What Socrates thought he had found in Anaxagoras can indicate what he had been expecting from natural scientists before. Socrates could not be satisfied with their explanations because they were unable to explain how it is the best for everything to be as it is. It can probably be said, then, that it was the lack of the unifying Good in their explanation that had disappointed him. We must insist that we are discussing what Socrates thought that Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind should have been, not about Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. Phaedo 97c-98b, is not about what Socrates found in Anaxagoras but what he thought he could find in it. On the contrary, it should also be noted that it was not this that was dashed at 98b, but Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. It was Anaxagoras’ fault not to find out how to use such an excellent thesis (98b8-c2, cf. 98e-99b). Socrates gives an example to show how not believing in 'good' as the basis of explanation makes people be wanderers between different unreal explanations of a thing. His words δέον συνδεῖν (binding that binds together) as a description for the Good we chose as the name of BK principle: They do not believe that the truly good and binding binds and holds them together (ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδεῖν καὶ συνέχειν οὐδὲν οἴονται). (99c5-6) -/- Having in mind Plato’s well-known analogy of the sun and the Good at Republic 508-509, we can dare to say that his warning of the danger of seeing the truth directly like one watching an eclipse of the sun in Phaedo (99d-e) is more about the difficulty of so-called good-based explanation than its insufficiency, a difficulty which is precisely confirmed in Republic (504e-505a, 506d-e). Moreover, BK is asserted in a more explicit way in the Republic, where the Good is considered not only as a condition for the knowledge of X, as was noted above discussing KG, but also as what binds all the objects of knowledge and also the soul in its knowing them. At Republic VI, 508e1-3, when Socrates says that the Form of the Good 'gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower (τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν)', he wants to set the Good at the highest point of his epistemological structure by which all the elements of this structure are bound. This binding aspect of the Good is by no means a simple binding of all knowledges or all the objects of knowledge, but the most complicated kind of binding as it is expected from the author of the Republic. The kind of unity the Good gives to the different knowledges of different things is comparable with the unity which each Form gives to its participants in Republic: as all the participants of a Form are united by referring to the ideas, all different kinds of knowledge are united by referring to the Good. If we observe Aristotle's assertion that for Plato and the believers of Forms, the causative relation of the One with the Forms is the same as that of the Forms with particulars (e.g. Metaphysics 988a10-11, 988b4), that is to say the One is the essence (e.g., ibid, 988a10-11: τοῦ τί ἐστὶν, 988b4-6: τὸ τί ἢν εἶναί) of the Forms besides his statement that for them One is the Good (e.g., ibid, 988b11-13) the relation between the Good and unity may become more understandable. Since the quiddity of the Good (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀγαθὸν) is more than discussion (506d8-e2), we cannot await Socrates to tell us how this binding role is played. All we can expect is to hear from him an analogy by which this unifying role is envisaged, the sun. The kind of unity that the Good gives to the knowledge and its objects in the intelligible realm is comparable to the unity that the sun gives to the sight and its objects in the visible realm (508b-c). The allegory of Line (Republic VI, 509d-511), like that of the Sun, tries to bind all various kinds of knowledges. The hierarchical model of the Line which encompasses all kinds of knowledge from imagination to understanding can clearly be considered as Plato’s effort to bind all kinds of knowledges by a certain unhypothetical principle. The method of hypothesis starts, in the first subsection of the intelligible realm, with a hypothesis that is not directed firstly to a principle but a conclusion (510b4-6). It proceeds, in the other subsection, to a 'principle which is not a hypothesis' (b7) and is called the 'unhypothetical principle of all things' (ἀνυποθέτου ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν) (511b6-7). This παντὸς must refer not only to the objects of the intelligible realm but to the sensible objects as well. Plato does posit, therefore, an epistemological principle for all things, a principle that all things are, epistemologically, bound and, thus, unified by. -/- 5. Bound Beings The ontological aspect of BK we shall call the principle of 'Bound Beings' (BB): -/- BB Being of all things are bound by the Good. -/- We saw in our principle of Split Being (SB) how the first Socrates was criticized because of his approach to split being and separate each thing from other things. The principle of Bound Beings intends to make the things more related, a duty which is done again by the Good. In the allegory of Sun, there are two paragraphs that evidently and deliberately extend the binding role of the Good to the ontological scene: -/- You will say that the sun not only makes the visible things have the ability of being seen but also coming to be, growth and nourishment. (509b2-4) -/- This clearly intends to remind the ontological role the sun plays in bringing to being all the sensible things in order to display how its counterpart has the same role in the intelligible realm (b6-10): -/- Not only the objects of knowledge (γιγνωσκομένοις) owe their being known (γιγνώσκεσθαι) to the Good, but also their existence (τὸ εἶναί) and their being (οὐσίαν) are due to it, though the Good is not being but superior to it in rank and power. That the Good is here represented as responsible for being of things in addition to their being known means, in my opinion, that Plato wants to posit BB in addition to BK. The allegory of Cave at the very beginning of the seventh Book (514aff.) can be taken as another evidence. The role of the Good, one might say, is confined to the intelligible realm because it is asserted that the role the Good plays in this realm is corresponding to that of the sun in the visible realm. The fact that Plato wants to observe the Good also as the ontological cause of the sensible things is obvious from his saying, in the allegory of Cave, that the Form of the Good 'produces light and its source (τὸν τούτου κύριον) [i.e. the sun] in the visible realm' (517c3). We can conclude, then, that the ontological function of the Good is not confined to the intelligible realm in which it is the lord and provides truth and understanding (c3-4) because it is also responsible to produce τὸν κύριον of light. 6. Proportionality of Being and Knowledge Insofaras BE and BO principles of the first Socrates gave way to TE and TO principles of the second Socrates, we cannot expect him to preserve KB in the same way as it was in the first Socrates. The new tripartite ontology and epistemology necessitates some modifications in KB which results in the principle of 'Proportionality of Being and Knowledge' (PBK): -/- PBK To every class of being there is a proportionate category of knowledge. -/- This principle, of course, does not entail the refutation of KB and thus is not kind of rejecting PBK but only a more complicated version of it. Based on PBK, we can still agree that knowledge is of being (KB) but the issue is that since none of the concepts of knowledge and being in the second Socrates are as simple as they were for the first Socrates, we need a more complicated principle for their relation here. Although from Meno 97a where the distinction of knowledge and true opinion is drawn out in the second group of the dialogues, we can expect a new relation, it is articulated in its most complete way in Republic and specifically in the allegory of Line. All the beings are divided there hierarchically to four classes, to each of them belongs a class of knowledge: imagination to images, belief to the sensible things (more correctly: the things of which they[in previous class] were images (ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν)), thought to mathematical objects (?) and understanding to the Forms and the first principle. The degree of clarity that each of the classes of knowledge shares in (σαφηνείας ἡγησάμενος μετέχειν) is proportionate to the degree that its object shares in truth (ἀληθείας μετέχει). (511e2-4) -/- Conclusion From the six onto-epistemilogical principles of the first Socrates, four principles turn to their opposite in the middle period dialogues. While bipolar epistemology and ontology of the early dialogues give place to tripartite epistemology in the middle period dialogues and tripartite ontology in Republic, the split knowledge and being of the first Socrates are inclined to be substituted by bound knowledges and bound beings in the second Socrates and specifically in Republic. Not all our system of principles in this article is necessarily determinative. Either they are rightly formulated or not, our result would not be vulnerable if we accept that 1) making the distinction of knowledge and belief, 2) accepting the being of not being and 3) trying to bind both being and knowledge by the concept of the Good happens only in middle period dialogues, having been absent in the early ones. These are the favourite results all those somehow arbitrary and even oversimplified principles were to illustrate; that there is kind of a development in the epistemological as well as the ontological grounds of Plato’s philosophy. -/- Notes . (shrink)

It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided: -/- If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A (...) concept of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation. -/- Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.” -/- …it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism. -/- According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism. (shrink)

The trend to centralization of the Mizrahi narrative has become an integral part of the nationalistic, ethnic, religious, and ideological-political dimensions of the emerging, complex Israeli identity. This trend includes several forms of opposition: strong opposition to "melting pot" policies and their ideological leaders; opposition to the view that ethnicity is a dimension of the tension and schisms that threaten Israeli society; and, direct repulsion of attempts to silence and to dismiss Mizrahim and so marginalize them hegemonically. The Mizrahi Democratic (...) Rainbow [The Keshet], the most prominent proponent and representative of this trend, was established in the 1990s with the intention of being a leading civic and political body in Israeli society. While it was the Mizrahi worldview that led to selection of the organization's name and aims, their vision was to be involved in social struggle on behalf of other groups in Israeli society. Since it was established, The Keshet has aimed to function as an assertive, long-term alternative coalition exerting influence, power, and pressure on the Israeli narrative network. And, indeed, the organization has succeeded in disrupting Israeli discourse, principally, by challenging the ideological foundations of the Zionist meta-narrative. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and nearly a decade since it was established, The Keshet not only represents the most current wave of Mizrahi discourse, it has changed it to such a great degree that it is impossible to ignore its influence. Further, this alternative narrative may have significant potential to advance the internal Jewish discourse so fundamental at this time given the changing Israeli situation and regional conditions. And, while it is possible to view The Keshet and this new narrative as a continuation of the Mizrahi struggle, as a narrative The Keshet's agenda represents a post-colonial perspective and multi-cultural alternative to Zionism as a social vehicle. Amidst all of this, The Keshet continues to offer concrete proposals to change the Jewish character of the state as well as its internal and external relations. One of the primary goals of this study was to examine the rise of the Mizrahi narrative over the last two decades and the new Mizrahi discourse in Israeli society. More specifically, the study sought to attain an in-depth understanding of the central narrative created and represented by The Keshet. An additional goal was to investigate the influence of The Keshet's activity and the narrative it constructed in regard to other narratives. In particular, the study focused on The Keshet's opposition to the central Zionist narrative that infuses civic, political, and academic frameworks in Israel. Accordingly, the primary research questions investigated in the study sought to determine: What has been the influence of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow on the Mizrahi narrative in Israel? And, what are implications of such influence for the central Zionist narrative? Methodologically, the study was based on narrative and comparative analyses of texts from different periods of the older and newer Mizrahi narratives. The corpus included two types of texts: First, academic texts and opinion pieces, both philosophical and programmatic in nature, published in magazines, journals, books, as well as position papers; second, all of the texts published by prominent and influential figures who charted the path of The Keshet or led it organizationally and/or intellectually over the last twenty years (e. g., Yehudah Shenhav, Yossi Yona, Moshe Krief among others). All texts were examined by means of philosophical, historical and critical hermeneutic tools. This analysis revealed different levels of Mizrahi and civic discourse in Israel as well as among The Keshet's founders and leading ideologues. The study was based on a three stage process model, developed for purposes of this study, for investigation and analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative as well as other oppositional narratives, in particular opposition to the hegemonic meta-narrative. The stages are: issuing the challenge, dissolution and, liberation; that is, liberation is the measure of the ultimate success of the struggle for narrative change. Such change is not based on success in the field, but rather on a radical, fundamental reversal of thought, discourse patterns, stylistic structures, as well as forms of questioning - in this case of taken-for-granted racist mechanisms. However, the principal change is in achieving a deep, inner de-legitimization of the signifiers, categories, and reproductions of all manner of mockery that are based on immoral colonialist processes that are reinforced by regimes of fear and intimidation whose self-destruction began upon their very creation. This three stage model charts the course of the oppositional Mizrahi narrative from: accounting for the past (passing judgment on the so-called historic colonialist Zionism) to writing a new (pure Mizrahi) history and creation of a Mizrahi-Arab identity separate from the Ashkenazic, identified as Zionist. Contemporary post-colonialist discourse is integral in these stages. Such a perspective has been transformed by transitions from - binarism to hybridity, Orientalism to Occidentalism, the politics of "liberation" to "constructive" politics, from the history of consciousness to the history of change, as well as from nationalist to post-nationalist questions. Fundamentally, according to this approach, political and other struggles for the emerging narrative of Mizrahi (or Arab) history seek to centralize it in society and weave it amidst the models of multiculturalism. Undertaken in parallel, the central characteristics of all these stages are borrowed from countries in which the need for national reconciliation led to renunciation of apartheid and racist policies and historical judgment of the hegemony supported by racist leaders. In addition, these three moves were undertaken in Keshet and its ideologues by means of substantive symbolic violence directed at the hegemonic Ashkenazic discourse, which included creation of hatred of it, use of stereotypes the opposite of oppressive discourse, and adoption of an arrogant point of view toward it. This stands in stark contrast to the claims of the self-proclaimed new Mizrahi stance of a discourse established on purely ethical grounds that sought to cleanse itself of these very same oppressive elements. The model developed for and demonstrated in this study allows for analysis of oppositional narratives in which the libratory stage evolves into a form of entrapment, as appears to be occurring to the new Mizrahi discourse. This conclusion is based on the observations shared by many Keshet proponents including leading intellectuals who worked on the manifestos that were the subject of criticism from the Zionist camp. The study identified and defined the following six interwoven strata, which for purposes of explication are each discussed in a separate chapter: The first chapter presents a general theoretical discussion of the issue of the narrative and the inter-narrative struggle that has become central and applicable in various ways in the latest generation (e. g., anthropologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically). The analysis surveys different discussions in the inter-narrative struggle and locates them in the contexts, relations, and meanings derived from, representing, and indeed reproducing the narrative of national identity. The second chapter includes a historical survey of the older Mizrahi struggle that existed prior to the ascendance of the new Mizrahi narrative. Initially, Mizrahi discourse focused on expressing the ethnic protest that grew in years to follow. These feelings of discrimination and social distancing of the immigrants from Islamic countries gave birth to expressions of protest, the most prominent of which were Wadi Salib and the Black Panther Movement's various activities. The research literature contains many explanations for the exacerbation of the ethnic problem and creation of a situation that could not be ignored. The consensus academic view reached at the end of the 1970s identified a number of primary factors for this situation: the existence and extensive numbers of different ethnic groups; the relative or absolute segregation of frameworks within which members of these ethnic groups lived and acted; and the significant overlap between socio-economic status and feelings of discrimination retained by members of the Mizrahi group due years of neglect by the Ashkenazic establishment, the strengthening of Mizrahi social, cultural, and political power, as well as the emergence of a Mizrahi elite that identified with Mizrahi problems. The severe consequences of feelings of discrimination were expressed in a long series of events, such as: rioting by residents of the Rehovot Sharayim neighborhood in 1956; events of Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959; and a chain of activities involving the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Protest was also an aspect of the "tent movement" in the 1970s and 1980s. Political activities were advanced by the Tami Movement that competed in the election for the 10th Knesset in 1981 and the Shas Movement that has continued to garner political power since being found in 1984. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized as the era of radical consciousness of Mizrahi discourse as well as by the rise to power, in consecutive order, of the political parties – Tami, Shas, and the Mizrahim HaHadashim [the New Mizrahi]. The latter party laid the foundations of the new radical Mizrahi discourse from which emerged such cultural activities as: Iton Aher [A Different Newspaper]; Bimat Kivon Aher [Another Direction Forum]; Efir'yon journal; the Halah Organization for Education in Neighborhoods, Development Towns, and Villages; Kedma; the newspaper – Patish [Hammer]; and, eventually the establishment of Keshet. The third chapter presents an examination of the materialization of the inter-narrative struggle in the case of Israel, with a specific focus on The Keshet and the new Mizrahi narrative advanced by it and intellectuals. The Keshet ideology is examined in the context of its grounding in post-colonial thought, especially that of Edward Said; the directions proposed by Ella Shohat and her followers; the central thinkers of the narrative in Israel in the last decade; and the harsh critique leveled at the Ashkenazic-Zionist narrative. The practical steps proposed for implementation within the multicultural model are also examined. Here the effort to reduce the centrality of Zionism while revealing its oppressive mechanisms was undertaken in parallel with use of these mechanisms in order to create a Mizrahi space with broad margins inclusive of alternative forms of Israeli identity in the Middle East and in conjunction with Arabs within and beyond Israel. Mizrahi traditionalism is examined in the fourth chapter in two particular respects. First, the criticism of the new Mizrahi narrative leveled by the renewed view and, second, the implications of the alternative in terms of creating a Mizrahi space that does not oppose Zionism. Rather, in opposing the post-colonialist perspective, this renewed traditionalist perspective criticizes as well as values Zionism. This space seeks to be both Jewish and Mizrahi. It does not detach itself from nationalist Zionism but rather views itself as a continuation of this tradition and, accordingly, is an effort to develop a next stage in its development. For example, an essential dimension of the traditionalist perspective, "commitment," is considered in this stage to be a fertile basis for dialogue with the past and as an anchor for contemporary interpretation of Mizrahi and other Jews' identities in Israel. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with all of the vectors of criticism directed at the new Mizrahi narrative, including its ideological foundations, philosophical stance, as well as intellectual and practical basis in the Israeli sphere in the face of Palestinian nationalism. These vectors of criticism from within and beyond The Keshet deal with issues, such as, the meaning of the movement's activities and the narrative that it offers regarding questions of Israeli identity, Israeli collective memory, and Mizrahi self-perception. At the same time, it must confront the capitalist neo-liberal narrative in a global world and thrive in a context in which it must make itself manifest amidst oppositional narratives. The final chapter presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative. It does so by means of a theoretical model that examines it as an oppositional narrative – one that seeks to challenge the hegemonic meta-narrative, to dissolve the boundaries of the narrative discourse, and to propose liberation and redemption that may led to entrapment amidst a changing, a-dichotomous realities (e. g., global economic development in the face of Zionist nationalisms that display ideological strength as well as development of the sense of being an Israeli that maintains its vitality and continuity while being constituted by sectors that challenge being a Mizrahi, such as co-ethnic subjects. The Keshet's influence is dramatic and extends in a number of central directions. Its political activity and non-entry into the domains of the Israeli parliament granted the movement significant power in civic discourse and contributed to changing the persona of the Mizrahi discourse; for example, from political-party struggles over budgets and obtaining shares of the regime to changing the face of Israeli society and the centrality of the Mizrahi narrative. This change included deconstructing the Ashkenazic narrative and constructing comprehensive Ashkenazic-Zionist guilt, as evident in the Ehud Barak's request for collective forgiveness. This was accomplished through the participation of leading members of Keshet who appeared in prominent intellectual forums and engaged in lively discourse - principally in academic, social, and media domains. Such participation gave new meaning to various aspects of Israeli society while establishing different models of multiculturalism. The rise of the new Mizrahi narrative is a significant marker in the inter-narrative struggle as it represents a desire for separate or hybrid identities. And, the deep probing of the narrative constructed by leaders of The Keshet and those who identify with the movement produced a number of clear ways to distinguish it from the old Mizrahi struggle, whose history was portrayed through social protests, in a manner similar to linear vectors marked with wars and elections. The old Mizrahi struggle selected the traditional tactical struggle identified usually with social and political movements that seek to change political, social, and economic reality - from the bottom up. Their primary demand was to change decisions as well as the division of social goods and resources. Hence, this older period of struggle was not aimed at opposing the ideological foundations of the hegemonic narrative nor did it seek to undermine in a radical manner the unique nature of the state of Israel as a revolutionary solution for the problems of the Jews according to the Zionist approach, as a national home for the Jewish people, and recognition of the right to an preferred and meta-definition of Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the top down struggle advanced by the new narrative is part of an ideological movement led by the educated that is assertive and ground in post-colonialist theory. Accordingly, it was critical of the techniques and mechanisms of oppression as well as sought to attack the Zionist ideological foundations and to reveal its racist operations and the regimes that have preserved it so efficiently for many years. The uniqueness of this narrative is the intellectual offensive that continues to be advanced and, in parallel, development of the discourse struggle in Israel concerning the justification for Zionism and the concrete political proposal that Jews reject the taken-for-granted status of it as an ideology. This new narrative recognizes the historic difficulties of subversion as an emancipatory and, principally, moral effort. In addition, the new Mizrahi narrative shares the foundations and narrative of Palestinian victimization. In its radical version, the new Mizrahi narrative seeks to connect to the Palestinian narrative in order to create a new space here. According to this version, this action will take place gradually. The first stage will be characterized by opposition to Western European, Ashkenazic Zionism. The Eurocentric Zionism will surrender in the second stage, to be followed in the last stage by creation of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that will be establish through concrete actualization of the refugee status and victimization that is shared by both Palestinians and Mizrahim (whether as Mizrahim or Jewish-Arab). Not a speculative academic exercise, the goal sought by this narrative is delineate and to achieve a multicultural model in which equality, liberty, and social justice will overcome the nationalism and colonialism of either side; that is it will be neither Zionist nor Jewish. Thus, this approach stresses what is shared (e.g., acceptance of the Arab space and not a rejection of it; the legitimacy of the Arab language and culture). This is part of detachment from and historic judgment of the colonialist Zionist enterprise. This possibility includes moral elements that remove the evil and harm caused by Zionism for many years as well as inner cleansing – primarily among Ashkenazim – of attitudes towards Jews and non-Jews. Though, in this regard, it should be noted that, to date, the new narrative has not made similar claims that Palestinians undergo a similar process. The assumption seems to be that this should be tested, that the coalition proposed is a possibility that will be recognized by the Palestinians, and that they are prepared to undergo a similar, shared moral process that involves negating the state of Israel as a Jewish, Western state, a state of the Jewish people, and not only for those who live within it. These Mizrahi thinkers conducted a significant move through deconstruction and substitution of the Eurocentric narrative with a multi-cultural proposal that is optimistic and even attractively naïve. Today, they acknowledge that they did not take into account Palestinian nationalist violence directed to citizens, the traditionalist alternative, and widespread opposition within the Mizrahi community toward what is perceived to be Mizrahi seclusion. They also did not take into account the harsh criticism rendered by young and educated Mizrahim who claim that they were born into a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-layered identity that includes internalization of the language of the West and rules of the game of this complex identity. And, though they are critical of some of its values, this makes it difficult to mount internal emotional opposition to the West and to the globalization contained within this world. Hence, this more familiar world is preferred over the values of the Mizrahi-Arab alternative, particularly in regard to problems in the domains of democratic citizenship, stance taken toward women, and freedom of speech. Further, educated Mizrachim reject the post-colonialist perspective and are stridently critical of its dichotomization. They claim that such a division is irrelevant in a world in which older ideologies have collapsed and new spheres – such as cyberspace and others – are open to them in which they can present themselves with an Israeli identity that is not categorized as necessarily Mizrahi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SPLENDOR OF ACCURACY.· HOW ACCURATE? WILLIAM E. MAY Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family Washington, D.C. I N THE introduction to the collection of essays published under the title The Splendor ofAccuracy: An Examination of the Assertions made by Veritatis Splendor,1 Joseph Selling and Jan Jans write that the "central question that needs to be posed to the text of Veritatis Splendor" (...) concerns the audience and situation its author has in mind (p. 9). They maintain that it appears to be addressed to "universal pastors (priests trained in seminaries) who (should) have one set of universal solutions to every conceivable pastoral problem one might face, anywhere, anytime" (p. 9). Assuming that this is indeed the case, they then say that the "best way to interpret what Veritatis Splendor says" is "from the point of view of the pastors and their educators" and that the Encyclical finds serious problems here (p. 9). Notwithstanding the unmistakable implication of the book's title, the subtitle, and, as we shall see, several of its main essays, the editors claim that neither they nor the contributors to the volume "wish or intend that this study be understood as a challenge or a rebuke to the teaching of the magisterium in the encyclical" (p. 10). Rather, they wish to "respond to the assertions made in the encyclical that give the impression of pointing to serious problem areas in contemporary Roman Catholic moral 1 Joseph Selling and Jan Jans, eds., The Splendor of Accuracy : An Examination of the Assertions made by Veritatis Splendor (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994). 465 466 WILLIAM E. MAY theology as it is being researched and taught in any number of seminaries, universities and institutions of higher learning" (p. 10). I believe that Selling and Jans seriously misconstrue the purpose of Veritatis Splendor. It is surely not intended to equip priests trained in seminaries with "one set of universal solutions to every conceivable pastoral problem one might face, anywhere, anytime." Rather its stated purpose is to set forth clearly "certain aspects of doctrine which are of a crucial importance in facing what is certainly a genuine crisis" (VS, n. 4) and to address this crisis by presenting "the principles of a moral teaching based upon Sacred Scripture and the living apostolic Tradition, and at the same time to shed light on the presuppositions and consequences of the dissent which that teaching has met" (n. S). In particular, the "central theme" of the Encyclical, as identified by John Paul II himself, is to reaffirm the Church's teaching that there are "intrinsically evil acts" prohibited "always and without exception" by universally valid and immutable moral prohibitions (n. 115). John Paul II likewise emphasizes that the "morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the 'object' rationally chosen by the deliberate will" (n. 78) and that "reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature 'incapable of being.ordered' to God because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image" (n. 80). Human acts specified by objects of this kind are the intrinsically evil acts prohibited by absolute moral norms, the teaching which constitutes, as has been noted, the "central theme" of the Encyclical. Thus the pope repudiates, as incompatible with Catholic teaching, those moral theories which deny that one can judge an act immoral because of the kind of "object" freely chosen and consequently deny that there are intrinsically evil acts of this sort and, corresponding to them, absolute moral norms (cf. nn. 74-77, 79). While repudiating these theories, John Paul II does not name any contemporary Catholic theologians who espouse them. Some contemporary moral theologians who advocate the proportionalist method of making moral judgments are among the THE SPLENDOR OF ACCURACY 467 contributors to this volume, namely, Joseph Selling himself, Louis Janssens, and Bernard Hoose. In their contributions, Selling and Hoose name other theologians known for their advocacy of this moral theory, e.g., Joseph Fuchs and Richard A. McCormick. The purpose of the essays by Selling, Janssens, and Hoose seems to be, as shall be seen... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ROLE OF AN ULTIMATE AUTHORITY IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: A GIRARDIAN ANALYSIS Sara Osborne I. Restorative or Retributive Justice South African Episcopal Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu's account of the gritty practicality of reconciliation versus retribution in his book, No Future Without Forgiveness, focuses long overdue attention on Restorative Justice, a law reform movement probably better known in international than in American legal circles. A persuasive assertion of Restorative Justice (...) advocates in their critique of increasingly retributive practices such as mandatory minimum sentencing, mandatory arrest, death penalty, juvenile incarceration, "three strikes" legislation, no parole, diminished prisoner services, to name a few, is that reintegrating offenders back into a community is a much more effective deterrence to anti-social violence than punishment alone. They have also observed that communitarian ideals and practices, more visible in traditional cultures1 are more conducive to Restorative goals ofreconciliation and reintegration than are practices of retributive justice rooted in ideals of individual rights. Therefore, such adjudicatory practices should serve as models for preferable alternatives. 1An examination ofrestorative justice under code-based systems of law (European, Roman Law) might also reveal more affinities since the focus ofthese systems is to define the permissible, rather than the impermissible. Code-based law begins with the commons; rightsbased law begins with the individual. 80Sara Osborne However, Western-style retributive justice remains the primary model for international law and Restorative Justice is the prophetic "outsider" voice. So, it is appropriate to ask to what extent and under what conditions are Western retributive justice systems able to incorporate or accommodate adjudicatory practices ofnon-Western or traditional cultures? How critical a factor is religion? These questions will appear wherever Western Law struggles to bring more cultural diversity under a unifying umbrella and they deserve close scrutiny. René Girard's insights into the relationship between law, religion, culture and violence are helpful in identifying practical implications ofthe restorative vision and systemic weaknesses ofretribution, and perhaps illuminating a third way. The metaphor of an organ transplant may be useful: without a genetic match between host and donor both risk destruction. It is the thesis of this paper that that genetic material is a very inclusive conceptualization of "religion" which I have named "Ultimate Authority," drawing on Girard's mimetic theory for the theoretical analysis. In other words, "religion" is indeed, always and everywhere, a critical factor in culture-specific institutions ofjustice. A Girardian understanding ofthe relationship between Ultimate Authority and criminaljustice systems indicates that while there are valuable lessons to be learned from trans-cultural dialogue, wholesale transplants may not be possible, or even advisable because conditions essential for comparable success do not exist in Western legal culture. This paper first presents some background about Restorative Justice, followed by an outline ofRené Girard's mimetic theory to define "Ultimate Authority." The second half of the paper describes alternative adjudicatory processes which have attracted the attention of Restorative Justice advocates and concludes with suggestions about future directions for criminal justice policy discussion. Restorative Justice is a movement which drew its initial energy from Civil Rights era non-violent social action. It has found avid supporters among those whose activism for socialjustice is faith-based as well as those whose activism is rooted in more secular communitarian ideologies. Perhaps because of its international following, a significant contribution ofthe movement has been to initiate trans-cultural dialogue about criminal justice, fostering an increased use of alternative dispute resolution techniques, primarily mediation. Restorative Justice doctrine insists that all crime is personal, evidence ofa broken relationship between victim, offender, and community. Restoring "right relationship" between all parties is both a moral and legal obligation; "justice" to be just must go well beyond addressing the specifics of the act which effected the break. In contrast, the focus of The Role ofAn Ultimate Authority81 retributive justice appears abstract, procedural, and narrow in pursuit of impartiality or neutrality, the ideal of Blind Justice.2 Howard Zehr, a consultant on criminal justice and a Canadian Mennonite who wrote the classic Restorative Justice primer, Changing Lenses: A New Focusfor Crime andJustice, describes the retributive criminaljustice process as "a drama between two abstractions," meaning a criminal and a victim, where the "victim" is even further abstracted... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and AngerKenneth S. Zagacki and Patrick A. Boleyn-FitzgeraldSince most believe anger can be either good or bad, rhetors face a moral problem of determining when anger is appropriate and when it is not. They face a corresponding rhetorical problem in deciding when and how to express anger and determining the role that it might play in public discourse, with specific audiences and in particular rhetorical situations. (...) Rhetorical scholars have catalogued whole genres of angry rhetoric—apocalyptic genres, jeremiads, the demonizing rhetoric of religious and political leaders—wherein the rhetorical display of anger is explained in terms of situational conventions and cultural norms.1 Yet these scholars have not easily resolved the moral problems associated with angry rhetoric. Aristotle suggested the earliest and most obvious solutions to these problems. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he outlines a typology for discerning the moral limits of anger and, by implication, angry rhetoric. And in Book II of the Rhetoric he asserts that the orator needs to know the structure of emotions like anger and how to intensify and dissipate them. Or, in other words, the orator must know how to make it reasonable to be angry. Some contemporary philosophers have gone further, suggesting that a failure to feel and express anger in public betrays an insufficient concern for justice and self respect.In this essay, we follow Aristotle in arguing that anger is sometimes the emotion we expect people to feel or the rhetorical response we expect them to display and evoke in others. But we also challenge part of Aristotle's argument by asking: "Even when angry rhetoric would appear to be a reasonable, morally appropriate response, is there a way in which rhetors might manage anger in their public discourse in order to achieve ends which are both morally and pragmatically productive?" The answer, we propose, lies in what we call "non-angry" rhetoric, which involves transforming and reflecting upon anger in public discourse. Because such rhetoric often promotes noble ends such as reconciliation and forgiveness, it is at least morally permissible and more likely morally virtuous.2 In order to establish these claims, our analysis focuses on the case of Nelson Mandela and his "Address to the Interfaith Commissioning Service for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."3 In this speech, Mandela, as our [End Page 290] analysis demonstrates, managed anger and turned it into an object of reflection, thereby illustrating what opportunities for reconciliation and democratic deliberation would look like during the difficult period attending the political transition in South Africa in general and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in particular. His "Address" exemplified a unique moment when the rhetoric and the ethics of anger came together in a public performance. While acknowledging the understandable anger of blacks, Mandela (who may in fact have harbored considerable anger himself) simultaneously suggested that by engendering a less hostile social-political context, in which participants maintained their self-respect without necessarily sacrificing justice, a new democratic community could emerge. This would be a community where, as he described it, individuals began to reconcile with and no longer persecute one another. As Aristotle might explain, the purpose of Mandela's speech was to manage the anger of blacks, so that they would then be able to deliberate properly about the issues before the TRC and about the larger democratic transition. As the philosopher Eugene Garver says, the particular passions Aristotle chooses to explore in the Rhetoric serve a role necessary for the kind of public, political decision making he assigns to rhetoric. These emotions serve to integrate—or segregate, as the case may be—"distinct individuals into a deliberative or judging body, or demos" (1994, 131).What we are recommending, then, is that rhetoric encompasses both considerations of moral desert as well as broader moral concerns. While there are times when individuals seem to deserve our angry rhetoric, it may not be justified from a broader moral perspective, especially when the goal is the good of the state or the community—viz., if angry rhetoric leads to the violent dissolution of democratic community. Ultimately, we argue that the moral constitution of political, deliberative communities must be viewed in terms... (shrink)

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would (...) have been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

What is the significance of asserting that certain agents, be they individual or collective ones, have a duty to create just institutions at a global level? It might appear none. For many agree that there is no global authority to coordinate compliance with the duty. Hence, it is up to individual agents to decide how to comply. If this is the correct account of the duty to create just institutions, then one can say that significant global justice (...) projects depend on insignificant duty to realize them. The state’s duty is indeterminate, however, only on the supposition that authoritative institutions are necessary to secure coordination among different agents. The dissertation challenges this fundamental assumption in two steps. First, I investigate the practical relevance of conventions for solving coordination problems. By building on the works of Hume and Lewis, I show how individuals in the state of nature could have coordinated their actions by conventions up until a point when a government could have emerged. I argue that similar considerations apply to relations among states. I identify relevant similarities between conventions creating a government and international customary law. Moreover, I argue that international customary law is a global governing convention since it prescribes how rules that bind all states are to be made. The second step in my argument concerns the normative assessment of conventions. I argue that conventions are essential for the demands of justice as long as they enable compliance with the demands. Not all conventions, however, do so. I put forward the principle of salience to identify those practices that play such a role. The salient practices determine the state’s duty to create a just world order. Ceteris paribus, the duty is not indeterminate after all. Consequently, current coordination problems that arise among states should not be seen as a normal consequence of states’ rational and self-interested behavior in the absence of a global authority; instead, the coordination problems amount to the violation of the duty to create a just world order. The major implication of the argument is that we should replace the Hobbesian framework for thinking about the nature of states as well as how they relate to one another by the Humean one. Thus, instead of insisting on states’ consent and necessity of a centralized authority to coordinate actions, we should pay more attention to the habitual behavior of states as well as the role conventions play in solving coordination problems among them. Importantly, the relevance of conventions to compliance with moral demands does not make authoritative institutions obsolete. The argument of this dissertation is modest – it only asserts that conventions can coordinate actions in the process of transitioning toward more centralized forms of global authority. As opposed to the pessimistic outlook of the Hobbesian framework, the Humean one makes room for hope that the change of the present unjust conditions is possible. (shrink)

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

This paper argues that ‘dirty hands’ (DH) scenarios, where an agent is forced to do wrong in order to do right, are conceptually coherent. The charge of incoherence is a widespread and common criticism made by deontologists and consequentialists alike. They argue that DH theorists erroneously assume the existence of real moral dilemmas and then compound this error by claiming that it is possible to engage in justified moral wrongdoing. However, such critics argue that there are only (...) _prima facie_ moral dilemmas and hence it is not only irrational and obtuse to argue for DH scenarios, but also undermines our search for sound moral judgments in very difficult situations. Given the gravity of these charges, surprisingly little has been written in defence of DH as a coherent and necessary part of our moral vocabulary. If there can be no successful defence of the possibility of DH, then all talk of such scenarios become futile. This paper responds to two influential and what initially appear to be strongly plausible arguments used by critics of DH. I call these the ‘Arguments from Deontic Logic’ and the ‘All-Things-Considered Argument’. I present three responses which seek to raise serious doubts about their efficacy. I then support the possibility of DH by exploring what we can learn about our moral reality from the moral emotion of ‘tragic remorse’. This approach endorses the role of emotions in determining moral knowledge. It also rejects the view that ethical theories ought to dismiss DH experiences as incoherent in favour of questionable theoretical a priori assumptions, which seek a reductionist account of our moral reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Narcissists Are Morally ResponsibleAleksandar Fatic, PhDIn his insightful commentary of ‘Narcissism as a moral incompetence,’ Professor Pies proposes several principal objections to my line of argument. First, Pies mentions that I embrace a Platonic essentialism and a ‘binary’ view of narcissism, whilst in fact narcissistic traits present themselves in degrees, within a continuum of pathology.Let us clarify the meaning of essentialism. When applied to the phenomenology of (...) narcissism, Platonic essentialism would imply that there is an idea, or ideal, of ‘pure’ narcissism, which governs our cognition of narcissistic phenomenology. Without an ‘essentialist’ understanding of what narcissism as a more or less pure phenomenon would look like, it would make no semantic or logical sense to speak of various ‘types’ or ‘degrees’ of narcissism. In the 1940s, in The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle offered the now infamous logical analysis of ‘false’ and ‘true coins’: if there were not true coins of which we had some idea, it would be logically impossible to speak of counterfeit coins (McDermid, 2004; Ryle, 1949, pp. 94–99). There are shoddily produced coins that bear only a vague resemblance to the original idea or mint of the real coin, however, for each we would ultimately have to decide whether the resemblance is sufficient for it to be considered a real coin. Shoddily produced coins represent various ‘degrees’ of resemblance of the idea, or form, of a coin, but to call them coins, and to decide whether they are true coins or not, it is a logical presupposition that we must first have an ‘idea’ of what an ‘ideal’ real coin is like. This, at its core, is essentialism.There is no escape from this type of essentialism in any rigorous argument, because Platonic essentialism is the foundation of the very meanings of the concepts we use. Plato’s ideas are paradigms, where the particular instantiations of their qualities are called ‘phenomena’ (Sedley, 2016; Taylor, 2016). Thus, the nuanced expression of ideas or forms in their various phenomena is the very substance of the essentialist theory of ideas. It appears that Professor Pies is also a Platonic essentialist, as am I.So why is it often impossible in clinical practice to ascribe necessary and sufficient conditions to narcissism? Well, let us remember Rosenhan’s experiments (1973). Rosenhan illustrates how the same individuals were diagnosed with very different disorders by different clinicians at roughly the same time, and how healthy individuals, once they had been instructed to ‘fake’ psychotic symptoms, remained under the same or more serious [End Page 177] diagnoses even when they stopped pretending and behaved completely normally. The reason for the arbitrariness of psych-diagnoses is the insufficiency of the psych-diagnostic language, including the actual diagnostic criteria, a kind of Lacanian ‘lack’ that is built into the very structure of psychodiagnostics (Ruti, 2008), and not a metaphysics behind such use of diagnostic language, whether it is essentialist or non-essentialist. Whether a particular patient actually has NPD or not in practice comes down to a consensual judgement—one that has been notoriously lacking in the history of psychiatry (Verhaeghe, 2008, pp. 71–125).Second, Pies suggests that empathy is ‘a complex, multidimensional construct comprising cognitive and affective components.’ I do not think this is a correct understanding of empathy. In fact, it is a conceptual revision of the original concept of empathy, which is one of a moral emotion (Kauppinen, 2014). What Pies calls ‘cognitive empathy,’ namely the ability to recognize and influence the emotions of others is an entirely different quality capacity that has recently been called ‘emotional intelligence’ (e.g., Conte, 2005). Many Cluster B personality disorders are characterized by an exceptionally high emotional intelligence and an almost complete lack of empathy, which allows them to use their emotional intelligence to manipulate and mistreat others. Surely such emotionally intelligent, but highly malignant strategies would not be considered ‘empathy.”Relatedly, Pies objects to Slote’s alleged view that only actions arising from factual empathy are morally justifiable. This is a ‘naturalist fallacy’ in reading Slote. The natural fallacy is a confusion between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Slote actually argues that only actions that are consistent with... (shrink)

This paper enquires into the nature and the extent of the obligations of nurses. It is argued that nurses appear to be obliged to undertake supererogatory acts if they take clause one of the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting (UKCC) Code of Professional Conduct seriously (as, indeed, they are required to do). In the first part of the paper, the nature of nursing obligations is outlined, and then the groups and individuals to (...) whom nurses have obligations are identified. Following a brief discussion of the moral foundation of the nurse's obligations to her/his employer, a common conflict of obligations is identified. Then a distinction is drawn between ordinary and extraordinary moral standards. Appreciation of this is necessary for an understanding of the criterion of what constitutes a supererogatory act. By the definition of supererogatory acts proposed below, it is suggested that actions such as whistleblowing satisfy that definition. (shrink)

The physicalist credo is that the world is physical. But some phenomena, such as minds, morals, and mathematics, appear to be nonphysical. While an uncompromising physicalism would reject these, a conciliatory physicalism needn’t if it can account for them in terms of an underlying physical basis. Any such account must refer to the nonphysical. But won’t this unavoidable reference to the nonphysical conflict with the physicalist credo? This essay aims to clarify this problem and introduce a novel solution that (...) relies on a distinction between “circumstantial” facts that are based in the circumstances and “acircumstantial” facts that are not. This is used in two ways. First, physicalism is restricted to circumstantial facts: only they must have a physical basis that does not refer to the nonphysical. Second, facts accounting for the nonphysical are not restricted to the circumstantial: they may refer to the nonphysical if they are acircumstantial. Facts about how the physical accounts for the nonphysical therefore do not conflict with the physicalist’s credo. This provides a credible answer to what physicalism could be. (shrink)

It appears to be a feature of our ordinary understanding of morality that we ought not to act in certain ways at all. We ought not to kill, torture, deceive, break our promises (say)—exceptional circumstances apart. Many moral duties are thought of in this way. Killing another person would be wrong even if it achieved a great good, and even if it led to preventing the deaths of several others. This feature of moral thinking is at the core (...) of deontological ethics. But while it is also part and parcel of ordinary moral thought, it seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating the duty she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. If the explanation of the duty not to kill were that it preserves human life it would be hard to understand why killing is not morally permitted when it leads to preserving a greater number of lives. Moreover, why should we not violate a restriction if doing so leads to fewer violations of that very restriction? There are two questions here. (1) Why not violate a restriction whose point it is to preserve lives, if doing so leads to preserving a greater number of lives? (2) Why not violate a restriction if doing so minimizes the violation of that very restriction? The latter question concerns what is sometimes called ‘the paradox of deontology’ or the problem of ‘minimizing violations’. The former may concern the so-called trolley cases, for instance. After all, a trolley hurtling towards a number of innocent people is not about to violate the moral restriction on killing innocent people, as it is not the kind of thing that can be subject to such a restriction. In this paper I am concerned only with (2): the paradox of deontology. To put it in Nozick’s terms: ‘How can a concern for the nonviolation of C [i.e. some deontological constraint] lead to refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C? -/- Samuel Scheffler, puzzled by the same idea, put it in terms of ‘agent-centred restrictions’ (ACR), because the restriction requires an agent (not) to act in certain ways, contrasting thereby with a requirement that certain actions not be done. The restriction is thus an agent-relative rather than an agent-neutral one. Scheffler ended up rejecting the idea of agent-centred restrictions, as even on close investigation the puzzle would not dissolve. Scheffler maintains that ACRs have ‘an air of paradox’ to them, as they violate what he calls maximizing rationality. ACRs appear to clash with the idea of maximizing rationality, because they require an agent to choose the option that worse achieves her goal of not harming people. I call this, following common parlance, the paradox of deontology, even though it is not strictly speaking a paradox. Exploring whether there is really a problem here, and how it might be solved, is the main objective of this paper. I begin by explaining the puzzlement about agent-centred restrictions in more detail. I then discuss promising as an example of a kind of action which is thought to be subject to agent-centred restrictions. It turns out that they are surprisingly easy to explain. The difficult case is killing—and that should put us on guard. I argue that the problem is not with the very idea of deontological restrictions, but with puzzling aspects of the ethics of killing. (shrink)

According to many theorists, discrimination either requires a better treated comparator or can occur only if the discriminator belongs to a socially salient group different from that of the discriminatee. Both claims are philosophically important since they have important implications for which account of the moral wrongness of discrimination is correct, e.g., if no comparator is required, the wrongness of discrimination cannot result from treating different people as unequals since the unequal treatment of persons is not an essential (...) feature of discrimination. Most theorists who have written on the topic see their account as articulating the folk concept of discrimination. However, none have subjected their putative articulations thereof to experimental testing. This is what the present study does. Its results are mixed, interesting, and call for further studies. Regarding comparativity, surprisingly, respondents are more disposed to classify a situation as discriminatory when there is no comparator than when there is one. Regarding reflexivity, respondents are more likely to classify our vignettes as involving discrimination when the discriminator is from another socially salient group than the discriminatee as to ethnicity but not when it comes to gender. Hence, non-reflexivity does not appear to be a conceptual requirement on discrimination. Remarkably, our study also shows that the mere reference to a majority, outgroup person in our vignettes makes respondents more likely to classify the vignette as involving discrimination against a minority person, even when the majority group person does not play the role of a comparator. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Streminger: "Religion a Threat to Morality" Joseph Ellin The question posed by Gerhard Streminger is, "What did Hume think of the effect of religion on morality?" Professor Streminger makes an important contribution to our understanding of Hume's views. Streminger demonstrates that, in addition tohis critique ofthe rational basis ofreligion, and his perhaps less well-known critique ofthe origins ofreligion in what we may call the dark side ofhuman (...) nature, Hume strongly objected to religion on moral grounds. Religion is a threat to morality, Hume thinks. There is no doubt that this is Hume's view; in fact, as I shall show, Hume's opposition to religion is even more far-reaching than Streminger acknowledges. Though Hume did not write systematically on the subject, Streminger has ingeniously brought some order to Hume's views by arranging them under three heads. I shall, in turn, continue this clarification by summarizing Streminger's report of Hume's criticisms into sixteen propositions, as follows: 1.Because "fear of the unknown is the origin of religion," clergy have an incentive to limit knowledge. 2.Religious devotion arises from sorrow and terror (terror is the primary principle ofreligion [D 225-6]), so clergy have an interest in increasing human misery. 3.Clergy are necessarily hypocrites, who sometimes feign more devotion than they possess, and guard against the natural, cheerful sentiments. 4.The God of common religion is no moral authority because, among His other faults, He is malevolent, vengeful and wicked. 5.Due to His omnipotence and omniscience, He is an object offear, from whom nothing can be hidden. 6.This dominating God evokes flattery and adulation. 7.Because He is the product of human prejudices, God embodies discordant elements. 8.He unjustly inflicts excessive punishments and contradicts our natural human generosity. 9.False religion leads to an unnatural life and threatens our natural moral sentiments, in that superstitious terror evokes the monkish virtues ofmortification and humility. 10.Monotheism especially leads to intolerance, Volume XV Number 2 295 JOSEPH ELLIN 11.and to the suppression of the love ofknowledge and liberty. 12.In order to produce amazement and wonder, and to give value to service to the deity by provoking opposition and ridicule, religion deliberately promulgates absurdities. 13.The product of this is an obstinate, dogmatic spirit, guided by the rule that the greater the absurdity, the more zealous the advocacy. 14.Absurdities are also promulgated to assure that religious acts are done, not for morality, which, since itis natural and rational cannot be done for God, nor be an object offavour in God's eyes, but for God's sake alone. 15.The consequence of this is that superstition, rites and ceremonies, and not morality, are made the essence ofreligious observance. 16.By encouraging attention to eternal salvation, religion is likely to extinguish the benevolent affections, rendering its devotees untrustworthy. These are the criticisms. They are rather an odd catalogue of horrors, reflecting, no doubt, Hume's deep dislike of conventional religion as well as his unsystematic treatment ofthe subject. But what exactly are they criticisms of? Streminger thinks that Hume's target is "common religion," "established churches," religion "found in the world," "corruption," "popular," "vulgar" beliefs and practices, etc. Hume's target is thus not religion itself, but a certain degenerate or false form of it, not "true" but "false" religion. Thus for Hume there is a form of religion, "true religion," which escapes the criticisms, Streminger seems to suggest. But this is a distortion of Hume's views, based on a misreading of Hume's text. There is no evidence that for Hume there is any form of religion which can be identified as "true religion." What is supposed to be the distinction between true and false religion? Streminger quotes Hume on the "proper office of religion," whichis toinculcate goodmoral order. He quotes a passage, ultimately excised from the History ofEngland, but appearing in the Dialogues: The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit oftemperance, order, and obedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of mortality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded... (shrink)

Karl Marx argued that the preferable starting point for influencing social practices is to understand their workings—not to simply moralize social systems through idealization. This thread in Marx informs contemporary critical social theories such as feminism and critical race theory. Such work attempts to diagnose and analyze internal contradictions, limitations, and dysfunctions in social structures as they actually are in order to connect them to normative dissatisfactions in lived experience. This critical theoretical methodology thus embodies what Charles Mills (...) calls for in nonideal explanatory models that abstract without idealizing. In this chapter I argue that Marx’s theory of society, which informs his critique of political economy in Capital, offers bioethics a nonideal framework through which to analyze normative dissatisfactions in health care practice. What may appear to be moral problems or dilemmas in health care can be the result of, or significantly influenced by, structural patterns in health care’s material production—not its abstract moral content. Therefore, understanding health care structurally, as a set of productive practices within a larger systematic whole of capitalist production, can help diagnose systemic dysfunctions in health care’s material production that produce or make worse normative dissatisfactions of concern for bioethics. I call such morally significant structural dysfunctions social pathologies of health care, and contend that a Marx-informed bioethics can descriptively theorize structural bases of moral discontent and conflict in health care, and therein inform its social and political transformation for the better. (shrink)

One of Kant’s central central claims in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This claim has been regarded as problematic in a number of ways: whether Kant is entitled to assert both that there are things in themselves and that we cannot have knowledge of them, and, more generally, what Kant’s commitment to things in themselves amounts to. A number of commentators deny that Kant is committed (...) to there actually being an aspect of reality which we cannot cognise; they argue that he is committed merely to the idea that we cannot avoid the concept of things as they are in themselves. I will argue in this paper that while transcendental idealism is partly an epistemological position, it is also partly a metaphysical position, and in specific, that Kant is committed to the claim that the things we cognise have, in addition to the way they appear to us, a nature that is independent of us, which we cannot cognise. (shrink)

If a speaker selflessly asserts that p, the speaker has good evidence that p is true, asserts that p on the basis of that evidence, but does not believe that p. Selfless assertions are widely thought to be acceptable, and therefore to pose a threat to the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. Advocates for the Knowledge Norm tend to respond to this threat by arguing that there are no such things as selfless assertions. They argue that those who (...) appear to be selfless asserters either: believe what they assert, perform a speech act other than assertion, or assert a proposition other than the one that they seem to. I argue that such counterarguments are unsuccessful. There really are selfless assertions. But I also argue that they are no threat to the Knowledge Norm. There is a good case to be made that knowledge does not require belief. And if it does not, then the fact that some selfless assertions are appropriate does not tell against the Knowledge Norm. Indeed, I argue that selfless asserters know the propositions that they assert to be true. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the impact of Darwinism in metaethics and dispel some of the confusion surrounding it. While the prospects for a Darwinian metaethics appear to be improving, some underlying epistemological issues remain unclear. We will focus on the so-called Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (EDAs) which, when applied in metaethics, are defined as arguments that appeal to the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs so as to undermine their epistemic justification. The point is that an (...) epistemic disanalogy can be identified in the debate on EDAs between moral beliefs and other kinds of beliefs, insofar as only the former are regarded as vulnerable to EDAs. First, we will analyze some significant debunking positions in metaethics in order to show that they do not provide adequate justification for such an epistemic disanalogy. Then, we will assess whether they can avoid the accusation of being epistemically incoherent by adopting the same evolutionary account for all kinds of beliefs. In other words, once it is argued that Darwinism has a corrosive impact on metaethics, what if its universal acid cannot be contained? (shrink)

I can, given the right conditions, transmit my knowledge to you by telling you some information. If I know the time, and if all goes well, I can bring it about that you know it too. If conditions are right, all I have to do is assert to you what time it is. Paradigmatically, speakers use assertions to transmit what they know to their hearers. Clearly, assertion and testimony are tightly connected. The nature of this connection, (...) however, is not so clear. According to many accounts, assertion has an epistemic constitutive norm. This norm appears to be able to account for some important features of testimony: first, testimonial knowledge transmission, second, the reliability of testimony, and third, the epistemic rights exchanged in cases of testimony. In this paper, however, I argue against this apparent ability. The constitutive norm of assertion, I argue, plays no role in accounts of testimonial knowledge transmission, or of the epistemic rights that testimony confers. This is especially clear whe.. (shrink)

This dissertation argues for a metaethical theory I call "Expressive-Assertivism." Expressive-Assertivism is a distinctive, substantial refinement of dual-use metaethical theories traditionally associated with R. M. Hare, C. L. Stevenson, and, more recently, with David Copp. If true, Expressive-Assertivism clarifies, resolves, or dissolves---without, in turn, raising additional difficulties---a number of philosophical problems, including what Michael Smith calls "The Moral Problem," which many consider to be the central organizing problem in contemporary metaethics. The following are the three most important features (...) of Expressive-Assertivism. ;1. The central tenet. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence, such as 'Donating to charity is right', is the performance of a direct expressive illocutionary act and a direct assertive illocutionary act. Recognizing that ethical sentences can be used to both directly express a speaker's attitude and directly assert something about the world captures what is intuitively compelling about "expressivist" theories---namely, that there is some strong connection between a speaker's sincere moral utterance and his or her motivations to act---and what is intuitively compelling about "descriptivist" theories---namely, that moral utterances appear to have descriptive or cognitive content and, therefore, are truth-evaluable. The Central Tenet is the feature of Expressive-Assertivism that dissolves The Moral Problem. ;2. The generality principle. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence directly expresses an attitude, not toward the subject of the sentence, but toward things of a more general kind, namely, things that have the property picked out by the ethical predicate . ;3. The extensionality principle. A speaker directly expresses an attitude toward things that have the property picked out by an ethical predicate whenever that predicate appears in any extensional context. Together, the Extensionality and Generality Principles shield Expressive-Assertivism from many objections to traditional expressivist theories, including "The Embedding Objection," which many consider to be the most difficult problem faced by expressivists. (shrink)

Moral sceptics appear to be as common outside of philosophy as they are within philosophy. And moral scepticism, unlike some philosophical issues, is very widely felt to be important, troubling, and persistent. My aims in this paper are to draw together some ideas from the recent philosophical literature, and to use these ideas as the basis for one kind of response to the moral sceptic. For reasons that will soon become clear, some anti-sceptical moral (...) philosophers may feel that this response to the sceptic is nothing but a form of concession. Yet my position represents an attempt to defend a kind of moral objectivity, to demonstrate at least the possibility of a certain sort of moral universality, and most especially to do justice to the very central role of morality in our lives. Thus I expect that many sceptics, too, will regard my position as unsatisfactory. It might be thought foolhardy to advance a position that seems likely to alienate so many parties to the dispute it addresses. But popular solutions to the problem of moral scepticism are in short supply, and I hope to show that my position can capture what is compelling in the sceptical argument, while at the same time doing justice to the dignity and importance of morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the HumanAmanda Anderson (bio)Satya P. Mohanty. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.It is arguably a peculiar fact that a book announcing itself as a defense of objectivity and realism would begin by assuring readers of the political efficacy (...) of its theories. After all, the critique of objectivity and realism within progressive cultural criticism of the past several decades has taken for granted that claims to objectivity and realism are suspicious in part because of their pretense to value-neutrality. But Satya P. Mohanty’s ambitious and wide-ranging Literary Theory and the Claims of History joins with other recent attempts to lay claim to a refurbished realism that not only overcomes variously construed limitations of postmodernism but fully answers to the charges leveled against “traditional” objectivity or “naïve” realism [see Alcoff; Livingston]. Such a project can in part be analyzed against a broader critique of postmodernism and poststructuralism advanced through reconsideration of Enlightenment ideals, including, most prominently, the ideals of universalism and its less abstract cousin, cosmopolitanism [see Anderson]. The reconstructions of both universalism and realism have claimed a greater intellectual integrity and coherence than the forms of postmodernism that they challenge and a more promising ethico-political vision, one that more convincingly acknowledges the place and claims of marginalized others. These reconstructive projects thus fundamentally challenge the familiar postmodernist idea that claims to universalism or objectivity themselves enact forms of privilege or exclusion that inherently disable any properly egalitarian or nonviolent relation to others.Mohanty would appear to combine the universalist and realist ambitions, insofar as he asserts a moral position based on Kantian notions of autonomy and dignity at the same time that, in epistemological terms, he elaborates a “postpositivist realist alternative.” Maintaining that the critique of objectivity within postmodernism is propped up by an outdated understanding of scientific method and theory, he argues that the more sophisticated theories within current philosophy of science elaborate epistemological models that are fully compatible with a generalized hermeneutical method, precisely because they acknowledge both the theory-laden nature of all inquiry and the larger social and historical contexts of knowledge and experience. Before elaborating this realist alternative, however, Mohanty situates his project by forwarding a number of critiques of “constructivist postmodernism,” critiques that enable us to better gauge the motivations behind his work. Foregrounded at the start are what Mohanty sees as the [End Page 3] harmful political and ethical consequences of relativism, skepticism, and constructivism. According to Mohanty, while the claims for diversity and difference in the 1960s “had a political edge,” at this historical moment they are used primarily for conservative ends, via a state-sponsored bland multiculturalism that diverts attention from the blunt material issues of race politics [17]. In broader ethico-political terms, moreover, relativist arguments that display skepticism toward the possibilities for rational exchange between variously construed collectivities and cultures lead not to a proper respect for the other but rather to indifference. As Mohanty puts it, to deny the possibility of “general criteria” for “interpretive validity” is “to assert that all spaces are equivalent, that they have equal value, that since the lowest common principle of evaluation is all that I can invoke, I cannot—and consequently need not—think about how your space impinges on mine or how my history is defined together with yours. If that is the case, I may have started by declaring a pious political wish, but I end by denying that I need to take you seriously” [131; Mohanty’s emphasis].Beyond these harmful consequences, however, lies a more fundamental problem. In its monolithic assault on Western Reason and the unified subject of humanism, constructivist postmodernism has deprived itself of any coherent account of human agency and rationality. Without a philosophical anthropology establishing the “capacities, tasks, and limits that might make up a specifically human existence,” Mohanty argues, it becomes impossible to account properly for cultural practices and historical agency, for the self-understanding of cultures and the historical transformations they enact [138... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authenticity in Robert Musil’s Man Without QualitiesKelly CobleIHow is a man without qualities even possible? The question, also a translation of the title of a recent essay mining the philosophical sources of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, has been a perennial one. The Austrian novelist's portrayal of an existence without the density of particularity has been an object of interminable conjecture.1 In the search for an interpretive foothold, (...) the bulk of Musil's commentators has identified Ernst Mach's "doctrine of elements," with its implication of the anonymity of perception, as the chief inspiration of Musil's portrait of a dispossessed inner life.2 Against this view Cambridge philosopher G. H. von Wright has asserted that Mach's influence was "incidental and without deeper significance to the content of Musil's later thoughts."3 Von Wright notes that Musil rejected Mach's skeptical and phenomenalist theses in his 1908 dissertation on Mach's theories, defending instead a realist position in the philosophy of physics. Yet another commentator has adduced evidence of Musil's persistent engagement in the sort of act-object analysis of states of consciousness that one would expect from a follower of Franz Brentano.4In the following pages I will show that Musil's literary masterpiece rests on a synthesis of Machian and Brentanist motifs. But the main impetus of Musil's presentation of an interior with substitutable qualities was not one or another claim in the domain of modern epistemology, "realism" versus "idealism," "phenomenology" versus "phenomenalism," but a crisis in moral reflection ensuing from a commitment to the standpoint of value-neutral objectivity. This standpoint gains its [End Page 337] appeal when both of the known pathways to moral certainty—both the conservative-traditional one of allegiance to enduring practices and institutions and the liberal-enlightenment one of deference to the universal requirements of reason—appear as blind alleys, as they did to inhabitants of Central Europe after the turn of the century and especially in the aftermath of the Great War. To exist without qualities is to abandon oneself to the purely theoretical outlook, and so to be unable to construct a narrative rendering the episodes of one's life as parts of a process with cumulativeness and direction. To live "without qualities" is to live the loss of moral narrative. Accordingly, the intent of Musil's literary investigations is both to illuminate the conditions of this loss and to assay the conditions of ethical life regained.IIAccording to Mach's doctrine of elements, the isolable sensations that constitute the ultimate points of psychological analysis are the very elements with which the physical sciences also have to deal, albeit the physical sciences deal with these elements in abstraction from their relations to our sense physiology. The core thesis of the doctrine is thus that the "sensations" isolated in psychological analysis are not mental events, ontologically speaking, but rather points of perfect convergence of the domains of psychology and physics. What psychologists call "sensations," namely "colors, tones, warmths, pressures, spaces, times, and so on," constitute "the actually real elements of the world"—albeit before the world has been banished to a shadowy realm of pure substances beyond the limits of perception.5 The ultimate, irreducible constituents of reality are not unanalyzable substances and subjects but associations and complexes of elements that compose the luminous fabric of experience.Mach's doctrine of elements replaces substance dualism with a brand of monism that analytical philosophers have tagged "ontological phenomenalism." Mach believed that widespread subscription to phenomenalism would have a liberating effect on the sciences, enabling empirical researchers to get on with the business of subjecting relatively permanent, relatively stable complexes of perceptual elements to the mathematical formalism that is the goal of the exact natural sciences.There is a widespread assumption that Mach was a sense-datist—an epistemological "pointillist" who replaced substances with dots of pure sensation that, in their aggregation, compose our perceptions. The [End Page 338] assumption is false. In Mach's view the sensations of which we can possibly be conscious are irreducibly features of wholes: "The single sensation is neither conscious nor unconscious. It... (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate (...) for a moral judge to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

My hope has been to persuade readers that Hobbes's mighty thought experiment of the state of nature distorts our conceptual learning because it ignores the second morality. Instead, it inflates the first morality as the whole of morality. This inflation arises from Hobbes's exclusive preoccupation with universalizable reason. As important as universal reason undeniably is, it does not encompass the whole of moral reality. To suppose that it does is to distort moral reality. Like so many Enlightenment figures, (...) Hobbes would have political theory be more like logic than life.To refer once again to the Enlightenment allows me to observe that the drive to universality through reason is a distinctive feature of European civilization. To proceed along this line might lead to the conclusion that the pursuit of the universal is a cultural artifact. It is itself culturally relative. I am in no position to argue that point here at the end of the day, but did not the universal criteria propounded by the Enlightenment prove serviceable in the justification of European imperialism? By the universal standards of the Enlightenment only Europe was civilized.Reason is often a weapon. Alasdair MacIntyre has termed the search for rationality in moral philosophy a masquerade. MacIntyre sees the quest for rationality to be a quest for authority. He cites John Maynard Keynes's observations that “in practice, victory [in moral argument] was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility.” Rationality is a weapon. “In moral argument the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 9, 17, and 19. Seasoned participants in academic conferences and learned seminars realize the intensity of involvement in what Sheila Ruth has called “The Hunt.”Sheila Ruth, “Methodocracy, Misogyny, and Bad Faith,” Men's Studies Modified, Dale Spender (ed.) (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), p. 48. The speaker is the quarry. The others, the auditors are the hunters. Some are accomplished, others are not yet blooded. They wait for the weak point. It's blood. They attack. The inexperienced hunters are enthusiastic. The seasoned hunters take their time. The quarry defends. An arbitrary time limit ends the combat, and after tea it is someone else's turn. Can anyone say that this is the best way to search out alternatives, weigh experience, assess implications, evaluate assertions? My title “The Government of Reason” is deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand it might mean governing according to the light of reason. This was, of course, the avowed aim of the Enlightenment. The conduct of political life would follow the bright line of reason. On the other hand, the title could mean governing reason, taking control of reason and using it as a weapon. Here we may be forgiven for thinking of Michel Foucault on the use of knowledge as power. The ambiguity of the title is meant to reflect the ambiguity of reality where both alternatives have occurred. Only half of the moral realm has been made the subject of political theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reason m Seneca JOSIAH B. GOULD MAx POHLENZ,in his last great work on the Stoa,1 maintained that Logos is the central concept of Stoic philosophy (I, 34). Neither Mette2nor Edelstein,3each of whom reviewed Pohlenz's study, notes the author's frequent reminders that Stoicism is "eine Logosphilosophie" and his contention, set forth early in Volume I, that the concept of Logos has in Stoic philosophy "pushed wholly to one side the (...) Aristotelian J,o~sin doctrine as well as in terminology." One who is familiar with the fragments of the writings of the early Stoics hardly needs to be told that for Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, Logos is a fundamental notion. Help is needed when one tries to make clear to himself the content of this notion. An example is the moral philosophy of Chrysippus as we have reconstructed it from the fragments of his writings. For Chrysippus the basic expression in Stoic moral philosophy, "life in accordance with nature" (zb ~arh ~b~Lu~'~u) becomes "life in accordance with reason" (r~ KaTh~,bTou~'~). I have, however, found it difficult to render an account of what, for Chrysippus, it would be to live in accordance with Logos or reason. On one hand, it would appear that to live in conformity with reason is to be guided by cumulative experience or generalizations from past experience about what would or would not be advantageous. It seems, that is, to be assent to reason when it passes from experience of this benefit following on that action to judgments such as "that kind of action issues in this kind of advantage." On the other hand, reason or Logos, in a fully developed state, we are informed, is the knowledge of genuinely good and genuinely bad things; and such knowledge is obviously not the kind of thing to be induced from particular experiences. In the first place a judgment that a particular consequence of a particular deed is of value presupposes the knowledge which Chrysippus describes as the "knowledge of things really good or really advantageous." For example, given that one has a relatively clear notion as to what health is, he with some experience, can judge whether or not this food and that activity contribute to health. But, on Chrysippus' view, it would seem that reason or Logos in order to come to conclusions about the value of health-inducing foods or activities has to possess a relatively clear notion about the value of something else in whose acquisition health is instrumental. The assertion that actions leading to health or wealth have value could not follow from some special insight by Logos into the intrinsic worth of health or wealth, for it is explicitly denied that they are unqualifiedly good. The question then arises whether Logos has an insight into 1Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. 2nd. ed. (GSttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupreeht, 1959). H. J. Mette, Max Pohlenz: Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. 2 Bde. (G6ttingen : Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht). Review, GnomonXXIII (1951),27-39. Ludwig Edelstein, Max Pohlenz. Die Stoa. Geschichte einer geistigen Bewegung. (GSttingen : Yandenhoeck und Ruprecht, I [1948},490 pp.; II [1949],230 pp.). Review,American Journal of Philology, LXXII (Oct., 1951),426--432. [13] 14 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY something else which is genuinely good by reference to which judgments can be made about the value of health and wealth under certain conditions. The suspicion that this is so is heightened by the exalted status assigned to the wise man. The ideal of the wise man does not fit snuglywith Chrysippus' conception of Logos as a generalizing instrument for determining what things and activities are useful. The wise man is too contemptuous of or, at least, too indifferent toward the "goods" of the world. It is unthinkable that he should attend to them with a view to determining which of them is useful. He knows already; his wisdom comes from other parts. He is sure of what is really good because an unobfuscated reason or Logns has declared this to him in an immediate way; he has not had to wait for the verdict of reason's generalizations on experience. It is difficult to ignore either of... (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and (...) the three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summaries and CommentsElizabeth C. Shaw, Staff*, and James ChamberlainBAGGINI, Julian. The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 319 pp. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $19.95Throughout this engaging and accessible book, Julian Baggini encourages his readers to treat the life and works of David Hume as a "model of how to live." Baggini presents summaries of Hume's (...) most famous philosophical arguments, along with biographical details about Hume's life, but always with the aim of learning from Hume about living well. He also discusses his own visits to several locations of importance to Hume.Over the course of The Great Guide, Baggini suggests many "Humean maxims and aphorisms" related to the good life. Some are drawn from Hume's own writings, such as the maxim that "the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue." Others are arrived at by considering aspects of Hume's own life and character, including his failings. For example, after considering Hume's racism, Baggini clearly has his own admiration for Hume in mind when he suggests the maxim "never slavishly follow even the greatest minds, for they too have prejudices, weaknesses, and blind spots."Baggini begins by describing those parts of Edinburgh and southern Scotland that Hume would have known in his youth. He recounts the young Hume's rejection of religious belief and of the Stoic project of attempting to find happiness by making oneself independent of others. However, Baggini notes, Hume never rejected the racist views he expressed in his essay "Of National Characters." Baggini argues that, although we should condemn Hume's views, we should treat his possession of these views primarily as evidence of the extent to which we are all socially conditioned. In Baggini's view, Hume's empiricist commitments are such that, were he to be alive today, experience would lead him to reject racism. Baggini thus aims to excuse Hume, at least somewhat, without excusing his racism.In chapter 2, Baggini follows Hume to La Flèche, in France's Loire valley, where Hume wrote most of his Treatise of Human Nature. As well as providing an account of Hume's time there, Baggini summarizes Hume's arguments about miracles, reason, and causation. He approvingly [End Page 809] notes Hume's skeptical conclusions concerning miracles, which he takes to demonstrate Hume's insistence on philosophizing only about the world as it really is. Baggini treats Hume's conclusions about cause and effect as significantly less skeptical. Although he observes that some scholars deny this, Baggini understands Hume to assert that causation is a "real power." His is a clear and helpful introduction to Hume's arguments concerning cause and effect, but readers of the relevant passages might hope for a little more discussion of what certainly appear to be Hume's skeptical claims about causal powers.Chapter 3 examines Hume's arguments about free will and personal identity, via a discussion of the complex factors which shaped his identity as a man of letters. Baggini observes Hume's sociability and his satisfaction in his success. He also commends Hume's broad-minded approach to philosophy and his willingness to write a wide variety of essays and, eventually, historical works.In chapter 4, Baggini discusses Hume's relationship with Paris. Returning to the topic of Hume's broad understanding of philosophy, Baggini argues that many of Hume's greatest insights were psychological ones. By comparing Hume's views on religion with the fervent atheism of the French philosophes, Baggini admiringly stresses Hume's moderation and his denial of any knowledge about "the ultimate ground of being." Since Hume believed he knew no more about the origins of the universe than anyone else, Baggini argues, he was able to develop friendships with and respect for moderate religious thinkers, as many philosophes were not. However, Baggini also suggests that Hume's "conservative instincts" sometimes led him astray, as where he "broadly endorsed the patriarchal attitudes of his time."Chapter 5 begins with an account of the dispute between Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which then forms the background for a discussion... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 397-404 [Access article in PDF] The Sexist Sublime in Sade and Lyotard Caroline Weber In this case the masculine returns to haunt the place of the feminine like a ghost...., bloody and inhuman, in order to manifest and to root unforgettably in us the idea of a perpetual conflict and a spasm in which life is constantly being cut short. Antonin Artaud, The Theater (...) and Its Double"VIOLENCE," JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD ASSERTS in a recent article on Kantian aesthetics, "is necessary to the sublime." 1 More precisely, the sublime, held to transport an individual beyond his or her "ordinary" register of aesthetic responses, may do violence to a person's faculty of imagination, by shattering the accepted limits of sensory experience. Lyotard explains: In the sublime, the imagination must be subjected to violence, because it is by way of its suffering, the mediation of its violation, that the joy of seeing—or almost seeing—the law can be obtained.... This "joy" [here Lyotard cites The Critique of Judgment] "is only possible by the mediation of pain." 2Indeed, students of Kant's work have long been familiar with the exclusion of sentiment, pathos, and personal interest that he posits as a requirement for exalted status in the aesthetic and the moral sphere. For Kant, the law is precisely about the painful suppression of pleasure-seeking impulses for the sake of a disinterested, higher good. To achieve the transcendental perfection of the law, typically understood to be the domain of God alone, one must, godlike, overcome the [End Page 397] limitations of human nature and human feeling. And this effort—of which the Passion is just one vivid example—can be extraordinarily painful. In this context, Lyotard's formulation of the problem may not strike us as particularly startling. In contending that the Kantian experience of the sublime requires the mediation of pain, the French poststructuralist appears simply to be reminding us that the law, whether aesthetic or moral in nature, always demands some sort of discomfort, some kind of sacrifice.We might be more inclined to accept this last statement if Lyotard's own work hadn't already taught us to think otherwise. For as he demonstrates admirably in The Differend, his 1983 meditation on testimony and the Holocaust, there is always a winner and a loser under the law; its attendant pains are always selectively applied. From a discursive point of view, this asymmetrical relationship manifests itself in a differend, a situation where two parties find themselves in dispute, and "the 'regulation' of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties, while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom." 3 According to Lyotard, the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis exemplifies this pattern. In a strict juridical sense, any attempted protests by concentration camp prisoners had no meaning, and no right to mean anything, in Third Reich Germany: In the differend, something "asks" to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong (tort) of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain... to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase.... 4Here Lyotard reveals that an encounter with the law, mediated by pain, inevitably creates injustices and wronged parties. In this paper, I will draw on this insight from The Differend to point up the ethical deficiencies or torts inherent in his own ruminations on the Kantian sublime—and in those of another philosopher whose thinking closely resembles Lyotard's on the subject, the notorious Marquis de Sade. To limit the scope of my inquiry, I shall focus in this brief essay on the differend to which each thinker's writings subject the figure of the mother.For Lyotard and Sade alike, the mother represents first and foremost the capacity to reproduce. With this capacity... (shrink)

If a speaker selflessly asserts that p, the speaker (1) has good evidence that p is true, (2) asserts that p on the basis of that evidence, but (3) does not believe that p. Selfless assertions are widely thought to be acceptable, and therefore to pose a threat to the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. Advocates for the Knowledge Norm tend to respond to this threat by arguing that there are no such things as selfless assertions. They argue (...) that those who appear to be selfless asserters either: believe what they assert, perform a speech act other than assertion, or assert a proposition other than the one that they seem to. I argue that such counterarguments are unsuccessful. There really are selfless assertions. But I also argue that they are no threat to the Knowledge Norm. There is a good case to be made that knowledge does not require belief. And if it does not, then the fact that some selfless assertions are appropriate does not tell against the Knowledge Norm. Indeed, I argue that selfless asserters know the propositions that they assert to be true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Emotional Responding Is to Blame It Might Not Be to ResponsibilityR. J. R. Blair (bio)Keywordsblame, responsibility, emotional responses, psychopathyIn this interesting paper, Levy argues that by failing the moral/conventional distinction task (Blair 1995), individuals with psychopathy show a fundamental inability to categorize moral harms and as such their moral responsibility for their actions is reduced. He argues that, although we might still wish to (...) incarcerate such individuals to prevent them inflicting further harm on others, we should be less enthusiastic to blame them for their actions.In many respects, I agree with much of Levy's treatise. I certainly do not regard ascriptions of blame as useful in my own work with this population. I believe that our goal should be to fully understand the nature of their emotional deficit to be able to treat it similarly to other researchers who work to treat other emotional disorders. To me, Levy's argument appears sound.However, I offer three considerations and raise questions within these considerations that might further the debate. First, not all rules involve care-based emotional responses to victims. As Levy notes, this is the origin of the moral/conventional distinction. The problem here is that we do consider someone responsible if they break a conventional transgression. The student talking in class is generally considered blameworthy for this action as long as they knew that the rule of not talking during the lesson applied to that classroom. Yet, there is no victim and no care-based emotional response. Here, the only thing necessary to ascribe blame and responsibility is that the individual knew that a rule exists. Given this holds for conventional transgressions, why must we necessarily make a special case, with respect to responsibility, for moral transgressions?I believe that Levy is fully aware of this concern. He specifically makes reference to moral responsibility and writes that:the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, which attaches to infringements of the rules [against double parking or line-jumping] is very different, and usually much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs. For psychopaths, all offences are merely conventional, and therefore—from their point of view—none of them are all that serious.(2007, p. 132)But the danger here is that issues of blame and responsibility may become highly relativistic and hinge on the strength of the emotional reaction. This is a problem because, although we might judge someone as more blameworthy if he intentionally [End Page 149] runs over five people rather than one, do we really consider that there is a distinction in moral responsibility between these two cases? If not, might not responsibility relate to factual knowledge of the existence of the rule against the transgression rather than the emotional response to the transgression?Second, there is considerable debate regarding whether psychopathy represents a taxon or a continuum (e.g., Vasey et al. 2005; Edens et al. 2006). Assuming it does represent a continuum, then we have an additional concern. How little of an emotional response to the transgression reduces one's moral responsibility and blame? Is it only the very reduced (although usually not absent) levels of emotional response that are shown by individuals with psychopathy? Or should we consider moral responsibility and blame proportional to the level of the emotional response? If this latter option is adopted, then what should we do about individuals who show heightened emotional responses, for example, patients with specific anxiety disorders (Rauch, Shin, and Wright 2003)? There are already some data that inhibited children (a developmental precursor to some anxiety disorders; Kagan and Snidman 1999) show heightened conscience development (Asendorpf and Nunner-Winkler 1992). If such children commit moral transgressions, should we regard them as more morally responsible and more blameworthy than regular folks?Third, the issue of intention received little attention in this paper. I have been considered to show a similar lack of attention to intention in the past (Nichols 2002) and, moreover, in some respects the issue was of limited concern given Levy's main goals. However, I mention it because so much of whether we consider someone responsible for their actions and... (shrink)

In summary, the question of how to construe the procedure called reversibility cannot be given an absolute answer. No one moral interpretation of the principle is universally applicable, that is, applicable to all moral issues. The decision concerning which to apply cannot be made a priori, but only in context - that is, only when we are faced with a particular moral problem. Moreover, there appears to be no rule which would enable us to choose which version (...) is correct in a particular case. It is a matter of judgment.That the various versions represent a moral progression from lower to higher constructions is debatable. We have seen that the altruism of reversibility3 - the ethic of care - may recommend itself in some personal relations to the point of making either version of reversibility4 irrelevant. Similarly, it is not clear that reversibility3 is always higher than reversibility2. For example, parents in trying to decide what is morally best for a young child should often - in the spirit of the second construction - substitute the judgment of their mature selves for the judgment of the immature self of the child. Moreover, this substitution may not be justifiable in terms of either utility or autonomy.If I seem to have ignored reversibility1 in this discussion that is because I consider it outside morality: it is, if anything, a principle of self-interested calculation. If Baier is correct in holding that we teach children to think morally when we get them to take the standpoint of others, that requires, I believe, getting them beyond the stage of crude reciprocity. If Piaget and Kohlberg are correct in their developmental claims, we cannot immediately teach children reversibility4 but must help them progress through the other two versions. There is some basis for thinking that children can transcend egoism and sympathize with others much earlier than Kohlberg allows - an important consideration in the development of a system of moral education. That point has been pursued by Michael Pritchard in his critique of Kohlberg. Pritchard, p 44. My point is a different one: even granting Kohlberg's theory of development (which asserts, for example, that a particular cognitive ability is required to think like a Kantian), it does not follow that the moral thinking which accompanies the highest cognitive stage is morally superior to the moral thinking which accompanies the lesser cognitive stages. That it is cognitively easier to master reversibility3 than reversibility4 does not settle the question of which is morally superior. Rather than arguing about which moral version of reversibility is morally best- a pointless debate if the desirability of a version is understood as contingent upon appropriateness with respect to context - we should instead celebrate the richness of the concept of reversibility. In teaching students the moral point of view by getting them to put themselves in another's place, we would not be asking them to master a rigid formula, but rather to be sensitive to the decisional context and to make a thoughtful judgment about which version of reversibility is most appropriate to that context. We would not be teaching them either moral relativism or moral absolutism, but the complexity of trying to make a moral decision by applying an ancient and philosophically rich ethical principle. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to develop Aquinas’s view of the passions’ contribution to moral reasoning by discussing the role he sees the passions as playing in each of practical reason’s three acts. I begin by outlining why, on Aquinas’s account, the passions are capable of contributing to moral reasoning. I then turn to his proposal in Summa Theologica I-II, q. 44, a. 2 that certain passions can improve the act of counsel. I also address what appears (...) to be a contradiction in his account. Next, I explain why Aquinas allows the passions to contribute to the act of counsel, but claims in De malo q. 3, a. 11 that they should not be given weight in our moral judgments. I end by briefly exploring whether Aquinas allows the passions to contribute to the act of command. I suggest that he does. (shrink)