This chapter contains sections titled: Pluralistic Ignorance Modal Operator Epistemology Agents and Inquiry Methods Multimodal Systems Knowledge Transmissibility Knowledge Transmissibility and Public Announcement Knowledge Transmissibility and Pluralistic Ignorance References.

The last half-century has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Aristotle's Topics and his theory of dialectic—culminating in J. D. G. Evan's book about Aristotle's concept of dialectic; the decision to devote the entire Third Symposium Aristotelicum to the Topics; and the appearance of a small but steady stream of articles, several of which are now conveniently bound together in the first volume of Articles on Aristotle, edited by Barnes, Schofield, and Sorabji. These studies provide two somewhat incompatible views of (...) Aristotle's dialectic. On the one hand, it is argued that dialectic—as a method parallel but inferior to demonstration—was superseded by the discovery of the scientific method, or that dialectic—as a method of discussing first principles and of eliciting assent during debate—is at best a propadeutic to philosophic inquiry. These assessments are a consequence of the view that, what ever its strengths, dialectic can never transcend the level of opinion with which it begins, so as to achieve knowledge or certainty. At the other side of the spectrum are those who maintain that in addition t o having nonphilosophic uses, for Aristotle dialectical inquiry is often an integral part of philosophic investigation and, on occasion, its most important part. To some, dialectic's role in philosophic investigation is limited to the verification of definitions already discovered and to bringing an investigator to the threshold of discovering first principles, to others, dialectic's last stage comprises part of the philosophic discovery itself. (shrink)

The basic task of the essay is to exhibit science as a rational enterprise. I argue that in order to do this we need to change quite fundamentally our whole conception of science. Today it is rather generally taken for granted that a precondition for science to be rational is that in science we do not make substantial assumptions about the world, or about the phenomena we are investigating, which are held permanently immune from empirical appraisal. According to this standard (...) view, science is rational precisely because science does not make a priori metaphysical presuppositions about the world forever preserved from possible empirical refutation. It is of course accepted that an individual scientist, developing a new theory, may well be influenced by his own metaphysical presuppositions. In addition, it is acknowledged that a successful scientific theory, within the context of a particular research program, may be protected for a while from refutation, thus acquiring a kind of temporary metaphysical status, as long as the program continues to be empirically progressive. All such views unite, however, in maintaining that science cannot make permanent metaphysical presuppositions, held permanently immune from objective empirical evaluation. According to this standard view, the rationality of science arises, not from the way in which new theories are discovered, but rather from the way in which already formulated theories are appraised in the light of empirical considerations. And the fundamental problem of the rationality of science—the Humean problem of induction— concerns precisely the crucial issue of the rationality of accepting theories in the light of evidence. In this essay I argue that this widely accepted standard conception of science must be completely rejected if we are to see science as a rational enterprise. In order to assess the rationality of accepting a theory in the light of evidence it is essential to consider the ultimate aims of science. This is because adopting different aims for science will lead us, quite rationally, to accept different theories in the light of evidence. I argue that a basic aim of science is to explain. At the outset science simply presupposes, in a completely a priori fashion, that explanations can be found, that the world is ultimately intelligible or simple. In other words, science simply presupposes in an a priori way the metaphysical thesis that the world is intelligible, and then seeks to convert this presupposed metaphysical theory into a testable scientific theory. Scientific theories are only accepted insofar as they promise to help us realize this fundamental aim. At once a crucial problem arises. If scientific theories are only accepted insofar as they promise to lead us towards articulating a presupposed metaphysical theory, it is clearly essential that we can choose rationally, in an a priori way, between all the very different possible metaphysical theories that can be thought up, all the very different ways in which the universe might ultimately be intelligible. For holding different aims, accepting different metaphysical theories conceived of as blueprints for future scientific theories will, quite rationally, lead us to accept different scientific theories. Thus it is only if we can choose rationally between conflicting metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories that we will be in a position to appraise rationally the acceptability of our present day scientific theories. We thus face the crucial problem: How can we choose rationally between conflicting possible aims for science, conflicting metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories ? It is only if we can solve this fundamental problem concerning the aims of science that we can be in a position to appraise rationally the acceptability of existing scientific theories. There is a further point here. If we could choose rationally between rival aims, rival metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories, then we would in effect have a rational method for the discovery of new scientific theories! Thus we reach the result: there is only a rational method for the appraisal of existing scientific theories if there is a rational method of discovery. I shall argue that the aim-oriented theory of scientific inquiry to be advocated here succeeds in exhibiting science as a rational enterprise in that it succeeds in providing a rational procedure for choosing between rival metaphysical blueprints: it thus provides a rational, if fallible, method of discovery, and a rational method for the appraisal of existing scientific theories—thus resolving the Humean problem. In Part I of the essay I argue that the orthodox conception of science fails to exhibit science as a rational enterprise because it fails to solve the Humean problem of induction. The presuppositional view advocated here does however succeed in resolving the Humean problem. In Part II of the essay I spell out the new aim-oriented theory of scientific method that becomes inevitable once we accept the basic presuppositional viewpoint. I argue that this new aim oriented conception of scientific method is essentially a rational method of scientific discovery, and that the theory has important implications for scientific practice. (shrink)

The basic task of the essay is to exhibit science as a rational enterprise. I argue that in order to do this we need to change quite fundamentally our whole conception of science. Today it is rather generally taken for granted that a precondition for science to be rational is that in science we do not make substantial assumptions about the world, or about the phenomena we are investigating, which are held permanently immune from empirical appraisal. According to this standard (...) view, science is rational precisely because science does not make a priori metaphysical presuppositions about the world forever preserved from possible empirical refutation. It is of course accepted that an individual scientist, developing a new theory, may well be influenced by his own metaphysical presuppositions. In addition, it is acknowledged that a successful scientific theory, within the context of a particular research program, may be protected for a while from refutation, thus acquiring a kind of temporary metaphysical status, as long as the program continues to be empirically progressive. All such views unite, however, in maintaining that science cannot make permanent metaphysical presuppositions, held permanently immune from objective empirical evaluation. According to this standard view, the rationality of science arises, not from the way in which new theories are discovered, but rather from the way in which already formulated theories are appraised in the light of empirical considerations. And the fundamental problem of the rationality of science--the Humean problem of induction--concerns precisely the crucial issue of the rationality of accepting theories in the light of evidence. In this essay I argue that this widely accepted standard conception of science must be completely rejected if we are to see science as a rational enterprise. In order to assess the rationality of accepting a theory in the light of evidence it is essential to consider the ultimate aims of science. This is because adopting different aims for science will lead us, quite rationally, to accept different theories in the light of evidence. I argue that a basic aim of science is to explain. At the outset science simply presupposes, in a completely a priori fashion, that explanations can be found, that the world is ultimately intelligible or simple. In other words, science simply presupposes in an a priori way the metaphysical thesis that the world is intelligible, and then seeks to convert this presupposed metaphysical theory into a testable scientific theory. Scientific theories are only accepted insofar as they promise to help us realize this fundamental aim. At once a crucial problem arises. If scientific theories are only accepted insofar as they promise to lead us towards articulating a presupposed metaphysical theory, it is clearly essential that we can choose rationally, in an a priori way, between all the very different possible metaphysical theories that can be thought up, all the very different ways in which the universe might ultimately be intelligible. For holding different aims, accepting different metaphysical theories conceived of as blueprints for future scientific theories will, quite rationally, lead us to accept different scientific theories. Thus it is only if we can choose rationally between conflicting metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories that we will be in a position to appraise rationally the acceptability of our present day scientific theories. We thus face the crucial problem: How can we choose rationally between conflicting possible aims for science, conflicting metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories? It is only if we can solve this fundamental problem concerning the aims of science that we can be in a position to appraise rationally the acceptability of existing scientific theories. There is a further point here. If we could choose rationally between rival aims, rival metaphysical blueprints for future scientific theories, then we would in effect have a rational method for the discovery of new scientific theories! Thus we reach the result: there is only a rational method for the appraisal of existing scientific theories if there is a rational method of discovery. I shall argue that the aim-oriented theory of scientific inquiry to be advocated here succeeds in exhibiting science as a rational enterprise in that it succeeds in providing a rational procedure for choosing between rival metaphysical blueprints: it thus provides a rational, if fallible, method of discovery, and a rational method for the appraisal of existing scientific theories--thus resolving the Humean problem. In Part I of the essay I argue that the orthodox conception of science fails to exhibit science as a rational enterprise because it fails to solve the Humean problem of induction. The presuppositional view advocated here does however succeed in resolving the Humean problem. In Part II of the essay I spell out the new aim-oriented theory of scientific method that becomes inevitable once we accept the basic presuppositional viewpoint. I argue that this new aim oriented conception of scientific method is essentially a rational method of scientific discovery, and that the theory has important implications for scientific practice. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures (...) to effectively organize increasingly ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish four methods of empirical inquiry in eighteenth century natural philosophy. In particular, I distinguish among what I call, the mathematical-experimental method; the method of experimental series; the method of inspecting ideas; the method of natural history. While such a list is not exhaustive of the methods of inquiry available, even so, focusing on these four methods will help in diagnosing a set of debates within what has come to be known (...) as ‘empiricism’; throughout the eighteenth century there was a methodological reaction against the hegemonic aspirations of mathematical natural philosophy associated with the authority of Newton.In particular, I argue that the methods of inspecting ideas and natural history remained attractive to ‘empiricist’ thinkers with reservations about aspects of Newtonianism. Moreover, I show that the language of experimentalism meant different things to researchers with different attitudes toward Newton’s legacy. In order to illustrate and make more precise these claims, I embed my taxonomic treatment of the four methods within a narrative in which I primarily focus on Colin Maclaurin, Isaac Newton, David Hume, and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. (shrink)

_In Perception, Empathy, and Judgment_ Arne Johan Vetlesen focuses on the indispensable role of emotion, especially the faculty of empathy, in morality. He contends that moral conduct is severely threatened once empathy is prevented from taking part in an interplay with cognitive faculties in acts of moral perception and judgment. Drawing on developmental psychology, especially British "object relations" theory, to illuminate the nature and functioning of empathy, Vetlesen shows how moral performance is constituted by a sequence involving perception, judgment, and (...) action, with an interplay between the agent's emotional and cognitive faculties occurring at each stage. In the powerful tradition from Kant to present-day theorists such as Kohlberg, Rawls, and Habermas, reason is privileged over feeling and judgment over perception, in such a way that basic philosophical questions remain unasked. Vetlesen focuses our attention on these questions and challenges the long-standing assertion that emotions are damaging to moral response. In the final chapter he relates his argument to recent feminist critiques that have also castigated moral theorists in the Kantian tradition for their refusal to recognize a role for emotion in morality. While the book's argument is philosophical, its method and scope are interdisciplinary. In addition to critiques of such philosophers as Arendt, MacIntyre, and Habermas, it contains discussions of specific historical, ideological, and sociological factors that may cause "numbing"—selective or broad-ranging, pathological insensitivity—in humans. The Nazis' mass killing of Jews is studied to illuminate these and other relevant empirical aspects of large-scale immoral action. (shrink)

The current study compared the effectiveness of two methods in biology teaching that are based on the science-as-inquiry approach: visits to authentic university laboratories and analyzing adapted primary literature. The methods’ effectiveness was measured in terms of high-school students’ increased understanding following a 6-week intervention that emphasized five major aspects of the nature of science : the tentativeness of scientific understanding, the cooperative nature of the scientific process, methodological diversity, the sociocultural embeddedness of scientific knowledge, and the (...) aims of scientific inquiry. A quasi-experimental, pre-post control design was applied, utilizing quantitative evaluation methods. Findings indicate that teaching NOS in biology high-school classes using science-as-inquiry methods is an effective approach for enhancing NOS understanding. Both of the proposed methods appear to be promising; however, the AUL method was found to be more effective for enabling advanced-level high-school biology students’ understanding of these NOS aspects. In conclusion, both AUL and APL are potentially effective methods that can be adapted for teaching various biology subjects in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

The traditional evaluation methods of foreign language communication skills cannot deal with emotional information in the process of communication. Psychologists believe that a real personalized evaluation system should be smart. Based on the emotion network technology of artificial emotion intelligence, aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional evaluation system, this paper puts forward a new language ability evaluation system with certain emotion judgment function. The system can easily obtain and identify emotions in foreign communication, and can also carry out (...) individual learning at the cognitive and emotional levels on the basis of comprehensive analysis of emotions and communication effects. (shrink)

Many healthcare agencies are producing evidence-based guidance and policy that may determine the availability of particular healthcare products and procedures, effectively rationing aspects of healthcare. They claim legitimacy for their decisions through reference to evidence-based scientific method and the implementation of just decision-making procedures, often citing the criteria of ‘accountability for reasonableness’; publicity, relevance, challenge and revision, and regulation. Central to most decision methods are estimates of gains in quality-adjusted life-years, a measure that combines the length and quality of (...) survival. However, all agree that the QALY alone is not a sufficient measure of all relevant aspects of potential healthcare benefits, and a number of value assessment frameworks have been suggested. I argue that the practical implementation of these procedures has the potential to lead to a distorted assessment of value. Undue weight may be ascribed to certain attributes, particularly those that favour commercial or political interests, while other attributes that are highly valued by society, particularly those related to care processes, may be omitted or undervalued. This may be compounded by a lack of transparency to relevant stakeholders, resulting in an inability for them to participate in, or challenge, the decisions. The makes it likely that costly new technologies, for which inflated prices can be justified by the current value frameworks, are displacing aspects of healthcare that are highly valued by society. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time in depression has been described to be altered in complex ways, with sensations of particular slowness, delay or stillness being the most often named articulations. However, the attempts to provide empirical evidence to the phenomenon of “time slowing down in depression” have resulted in inconsistent findings. In consequence, the overall claim that depressive time somehow differs from ordinary time has often been discarded as unfounded. The article argues against such conclusion, contending that the described ambiguity (...) might be caused by the methods employed to assess the phenomenon under observation. In the first part of the article, a reconceptualization of the experience of time in depression is proposed on the grounds of classic and contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. This leads to identify the essential features of depressive time as described both in clinical and philosophical contexts. In the second part, a critique of the existing methods of time perception assessment is conducted, with a specific focus on duration estimation and time passage perception tasks. The above-mentioned core features serve as guidelines in discussing to what degree such methods fit the phenomenon at stake. Finally, an alternative and innovative method is put forward, that might not only help to explore the scope of existing methods but might itself present an alternative to such: the micro-phenomenological interview. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 473-492 [Access article in PDF] Sainte-Beuve between Renaissance and Enlightenment Paul Nelles For a period of eight years in the 1840s Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve held a post of conservateur at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. 1 Each day he traversed the gallery of hommes illustres which decorated the reading room. This held busts of major figures from history and literature. In one of (...) his portraits littéraires from these years Sainte-Beuve pretended to derive inspiration from this legion of intellectual heroes. Among the busts stood one of Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's first librarian in the 1640s. Sainte-Beuve dreamt, he wrote at the time, of placing Naudé's bust beside that of Charron, or even better, between those of Montaigne and Bayle. Through Naudé, Sainte-Beuve avowed to discover the genius loci of the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yet whatever local reasons there were for the presence of Naudé's bust at the Mazarine, Sainte-Beuve set out in this essay to find a place for Naudé among the pantheon of French thinkers on his own merits. Such playfulness with a biographical conceit of both the literary and visual arts belied serious purpose. If it fuelled Sainte-Beuve's claim to have found in the seventeenth-century thinker "un sceptique moraliste sous masque d'érudit," 2 it was also expressive of a critical campaign devoted to the revision of a received tradition of French thought and learning. Sainte-Beuve [End Page 473] juxtaposed a seventeenth-century tradition of "literary" skepticism independent of formal philosophy with an Enlightenment inheritance he was eager to disown. Central to this task was a disciplinary turn away from philosophical inquiry and the history of philosophy to literary history. This in turn entailed a full embrace of the shadowy inhabitants of the margins of pre-Enlightenment thought from the late Renaissance to Bayle.Sainte-Beuve's discovery of seventeenth-century precursors, as he clearly regarded them, was first sketched in a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the 1830s and 1840s. Naudé was thus somewhat more than a random sighting in Sainte-Beuve's critical galaxy. Together with Bayle and a handful of other figures Naudé occupied a key position within the constellation of thinkers Sainte-Beuve charted in plotting a course for the practice of literary history and criticism in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The context of the development of Sainte-Beuve's enterprise illuminates an intriguing aspect of the historiography of skepticism in modern intellectual history. While functioning in part to legitimize literary history as a discipline, the circumstances of Sainte-Beuve's undertaking are rooted in wider contemporary currents of historiography and the philosophy of history. There is, then, a crucial disjuncture between the tradition Sainte-Beuve set out to describe and that established in the twentieth century under the rubric of libertinage. Sainte-Beuve did not seek to establish seventeenth-century origins for Enlightenment free thought. Rather, he turned to the seventeenth century in an effort to exhume a tradition of criticism and literary skepticism with which, on his account, the Enlightenment had openly broken. 3Sainte-Beuve's interest in Naudé, Bayle, and other figures derived from a need to differentiate the orientation and method of literary history from contemporary mechanisms for assessing the significance of France's intellectual and cultural heritage. For all concerned this was a heritage unquestioningly viewed through the prism of the political events of 1789 and their aftermath. According to Sainte-Beuve, la critique emerged in the seventeenth century with thinkers such as Charron, Naudé, and Bayle. From his standpoint, the significance of such figures inhered entirely in their pre-Enlightenment status. They vividly illustrate how the Enlightenment had deviated from a well-established tradition of la critique. The degree to which they served as a foil to the Enlightenment becomes evident when contrasted with Sainte-Beuve's characterization of mainstream Enlightenment figures. [End Page 474]For Sainte-Beuve and his contemporaries literature was not yet restricted to a narrow canon... (shrink)

This methodological discussion invites critical reflection about the procedures used to analyze the contribution of qualitative and mixed methods research to nursing trials by mounting an argument that these should rest on multiple publications produced about a project, rather than a single article. We illustrate the value‐added of this approach with findings from a qualitative, cross‐case analysis of three critical case exemplars from nursing researchers that each used a qualitative approach with a mixed method phase. The holistic lens afforded (...) by a case‐based approach informs nursing inquiry by documenting that the critical case exemplars presented evidence of (a) a sustained commitment of resources and expertise for the qualitative methods that extended across more than one phase of the trial, (b) the impact of the qualitative methods on the trial or its aftermath, (c) deploying a theoretical or conceptual framework for a variety of purposes, and (d) integrating qualitative and quantitative data for purposes of extending explanatory power. Findings challenge the practice of linking purposes served by qualitative and mixed methods to a single trial phase. (shrink)

Whether educational research should employ the ‘scientific method’ has been a recurring issue in its history. Hence, textbooks on research methods continue to perpetuate the idea that research students ought to choose between competing camps: ‘positivist’ or ‘interpretivist’. In reference to one of the most widely referred to educational research methods textbooks on the market—namely Research Methods in Education by Cohen, Manion, and Morrison—this paper demonstrates (1) the misconception of science in operation and (2) the perversely false (...) dichotomy that has become enshrined in educational research. It then advocates a new approach, and suggests that the fixation with ‘science’ versus ‘non-science’ is counterproductive, when what is actually required for good inquiry is a critical approach to knowledge claims. (shrink)

The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico-transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone (...) de Beauvoir did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico-transcendental method of phenomenology. (shrink)

The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico-transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone (...) de Beauvoir did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico-transcendental method of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper, we will examine the role that intuitions and responses to thought experiments play in confirming or disconfirming theories of reference, using insights from both debates as our starting point. Our view is that experimental evidence of the type elicited by MMNS does play a central role in the construction of theories of reference. This, however, is not because such theory construction is accurately characterized by "the method of cases." First, experimental philosophy does not directly collect data about (...) intuitions, but rather about peoples responses to thought experiments, which may reflect their intuitions but may well not. Second, unusually in the case of the theory of reference, experimental prompts involve elicitation of the phenomenon under investigation—that is, referring—and it is the reference facts rather than the intuitions that a theory of reference should capture. Finally, "best fit" models like the method of cases are inconsistent with the actual practice of semantic theorists, who appeal to general principles of theory construction as well as considerations native to the theory of reference, often in the service of rejecting intuitions. Indeed, Kripke himself viewed several claims of his theory as unintuitive, but felt no pressure to alter them on that account. These facts, we'll argue, suggest that the relevance of experimental methods in the theory of reference cannot be straightforwardly extended to other fields: an experimental prompt containing Newtons two rocks tied together in empty space may elicit referring, and may also elicit intuitions, but it doesn't also elicit the phenomenon under investigation. Furthermore, the considerations native to the theory of reference are not part of physics, which has its own distinct set of principles and considerations. This suggests that an evaluation of the centrality of intuitions/ responses to thought experiments in philosophical methodology must proceed in a piecemeal fashion. We conclude that the potential contributions of experimental philosophy will take different forms in different sub-fields of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

This book contains the systematic results of the authors work with the methods of Goethe and Steiner (whom he knew personally). In this unique study, Lehrs addresses himself to anyonewith or without a specialized scientific trainingconcerned with developing the human power of cognition in the present time.

Objective We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme. Methods This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity. Results (...) Of the 123 participants surveyed, 72% and 84% of nurses and physicians fully/somewhat agreed with an overall positive ethical climate, respectively. 69% of participants reported encountering daily or weekly ethical challenges. Participants expressed the greatest need for additional support to address moral distress, conflict management with patients or families and resource issues. Of the 23 reported occurrences of moral distress, 61% were associated with paediatric mental health cases. When asked how the ethics consultation service could be used in the ED, providing education to teams was the most desired method. Conclusions Nurses report a greater need for ethics education and resources compared with their physician colleagues. Ethical challenges in paediatric EDs are more prevalent than adult EDs and nurses voice specific moral distress that are different than adult EDs. These results highlight the need for a suitable educational strategy, which can be developed in collaboration with the leadership of each ED and team of hospital ethicists. (shrink)

A method of reflective equilibrium is adumbrated and then used to test the adequacy of moral conceptions appealing to fundamental human rights against Nietzschean conceptions of morality which would reject such an appeal. There is an attempt here both to articulate and critically probe a distinctive moral methodology (the method of reflective equilibrium) and to examine skeptical challenges to a foundationalism which would ground morality in fundamental rights claims. I attempt a partial testing of such a moral methodology by examining (...) its ability to meet such skeptical challenges to the rational grounding of human rights, and I assess (and this is plainly a reciprocal process) the depth of such skeptical challenges by the ability of such challenges to survive such an application of a method of reflective equilibrium. If that method is applied with discrimination and understanding, is it sufficient to defuse skeptical challenges to the pervasive belief that either rationality or the very taking of the moral point of view requires the acceptance of the belief that the design of morally acceptable social institutions and practices must be such that they aim at achieving a state of affairs in which all human beings are to be afforded equal consideration? Can a method of reflective equilibrium establish that a good society must embody such a commitment to an equality of human rights? (shrink)

I I set out my view that all inference is essentially deductive and pinpoint what I take to be the major shortcomings of the induction rule.II The import of data depends on the probability model of the experiment, a dependence ignored by the induction rule. Inductivists admit background knowledge must be taken into account but never spell out how this is to be done. As I see it, that is the problem of induction.III The induction rule, far from providing a (...) method of discovery, does not even serve to detect pattern. Knowing that there is uniformity in the universe is no help to discovering laws. A critique of Reichenbach's justification of the straight rule is constructed along these lines.IV The induction rule, by itself, cannot account for the varying rates at which confidence in an hypothesis mounts with data. The mathematical analysis of this salient feature of inductive reasoning requires prior probabilities. We also argue, against orthodox statisticians, that prior probabilities make a substantive contribution to the objectivity of inductive methods, viz. to the design of experiments and the selection of decision rules.V Carnap's general criticisms of various estimation rules, like the straight rule and the ‘impervious rule’, are seen to be misguided when the prior densities to which they correspond are taken into account.VI Analysis of Hempel's definition of confirmation qua formalization of the enumerative (naive) conception of instancehood. We show that from the standpoint of the quantitative measure P(H/E):P(H) for the degree to which E confirms H, Hempel's classificatory concept yields correct results only for sampling at large from a finite population with a two-way classification all of whose compositions are equally probable. We extend the analysis to Goodman's paradox, finding cases in which grue-like hypotheses do receive as much confirmation as their opposite numbers. We argue, moreover, the irrelevancy of entrenchment, and maintain that Goodman's paradox is no more than a straightforward counter-example to the enumerative conception of instancehood embodied in Hempel's definition.VII We rebutt the objection that prior probabilities, qua inputs of Bayesian analysis, can only be obtained by enumerative induction (insofar as they are objective). The divergence in the prior densities of two rational agents is less a function of subjectivity, we maintain, than of vagueness.VIII Our concluding remarks stress that, for Bayesians, there is no problem of induction in the usual sense. (shrink)

Despite Aristotle’s claim in Topics I that all dialectical argument is either syllogism or epagōgē, modern scholars have largely neglected to assess the role of epagōgē in Platonic dialectic. Though epagōgē has no technical use in Plato, I argue that the method of collection (which, along with division (diairēsis), is central to many of the dialogues’ accounts of dialectic) functions as the Platonic predecessor to Aristotelian epagōgē. An analysis of passages from the Sophist and Statesman suggests that collection is a (...) purificatory practice. I argue that collection is not only Plato’s account of generalization from a sensible many to an intelligible many, as suggested by the Phaedrus, but also functions as a method of diacritical selection that allows inquiry to move from the intelligible many produced by division to the intelligible unity of a definition. This reading contributes a deeper understanding of the mutual relationship of division and collection within Platonic dialectic as well as a way of unifying the accounts of dialectic in the Sophist and Statesman with the otherwise idiosyncratic account of dialectic in the Republic. Finally, this analysis of Platonic epagōgē sheds light on the connection between inquiry and argument present in Aristotle’s use of epagōgē. (shrink)

A philosophic tradition makes its mark through the growth and extension of the vocabulary it develops, the categories it articulates, the distinctions it illuminates, and the connections it draws. The power of a philosophical tradition is revealed in the recurrence of its problems and themes, the fecundity of its methods, the durability of its structures and insights. It may be that such power is shown not by generating academic approval and attention, but by a tradition's ability to reconstruct: through (...) persistent inquiry to create the conditions for its own relevance; by its discoveries to open the way to its own rediscovery. Rediscovery in this sense may be recognized by the emergence, after a period of eclipse, of: a vocabulary, a set of categories, a concern with particular distinctions and connections, a focus on problems and a development of themes which had been previously articulated in a powerful philosophic tradition. I shall argue that this emergence may be viewed as “rediscovery” even if those articulating the new positions are unaware of their direct or indirect debt to the earlier tradition; and I shall argue that just such a rediscovery of the American Tradition is apparent in the work of contemporary feminist philosophers. (shrink)

Despite Aristotle’s claim in Topics I that all dialectical argument is either syllogism or epagoge, modern scholars have largely neglected to assess the role of epagoge in Platonic dialectic. Though epagoge has no technical use in Plato, I argue that the method of collection functions as the Platonic predecessor to Aristotelian epagoge. An analysis of passages from the Sophist and Statesman suggests that collection is a purificatory practice. I argue that collection is not only Plato’s account of generalization from a (...) sensible many to an intelligible many, as suggested by the Phaedrus, but also functions as a method of diacritical selection that allows inquiry to move from the intelligible many produced by division to the intelligible unity of a definition. This reading contributes a deeper understanding of the mutual relationship of division and collection within Platonic dialectic as well as a way of unifying the accounts of dialectic in the Sophist and Statesman with the otherwise idiosyncratic account of dialectic in the Republic. Finally, this analysis of Platonic epagoge sheds light on the connection between inquiry and argument present in Aristotle’s use of epagoge. (shrink)

Modern business judgment is mostly faced with complex, unclear nature, and not fully confirmed research objects and needs a lot of relevant data investigation, inherent contradiction retrieval, and the discovery and extraction of potential laws. Formulation of rules and evaluation of system uncertainty: Appropriate decisions can be made based on this. Rough set theory is a new mathematical tool to deal with uncertain knowledge. Therefore, the theory of rough set is helpful for decision-makers to solve the decision problems of (...) complex systems. The simplification of knowledge of information systems and incomplete information systems and the theoretical and methodological study of rule acquisition are the central issues of rough set theory and applied research. A variety of simplified theories and methods have been proposed from a variety of viewpoints. However, there are still many theoretical problems that need to be investigated and solved in these aspects. In addition, the investment environment is a complex organic system that includes economic environment, social environment, resource environment, infrastructure, and other factors. There are a variety of data to measure these factors, which are mutually restrictive and interdependent. At present, domestic and foreign scholars have basically formed a series of assessment methods and models of investment environment assessment, but most of these assessment methods are affected by the differences in the degree of subjective factors of evaluators and the establishment of index weights in the assessment process. In most cases, more reliance is placed on subjective, artificial assignments and scoring loops. Therefore, it is an appropriate and reasonable method to evaluate the investment environment through data to evaluate all the factors affecting the investment environment and reach a comprehensive evaluation conclusion, which can effectively avoid human subjective factors to a certain extent. (shrink)

By way of a close reading of Boole and Frege’s solutions to the same logical problem, we highlight an underappreciated aspect of Boole’s work—and of its difference with Frege’s better-known approach—which we believe sheds light on the concepts of ‘calculus’ and ‘mechanization’ and on their history. Boole has a clear notion of a logical problem; for him, the whole point of a logical calculus is to enable systematic and goal-directed solution methods for such problems. Frege’s Begriffsschrift, on the other (...) hand, is a visual tool to scrutinize concepts and inferences, and is a calculus only in the thin sense that every possible transition between sentences is fully and unambiguously specified in advance. While Frege’s outlook has dominated much of philosophical thinking about logical symbolism, we believe there is value—particularly in light of recent interest in the role of notations in mathematics and logic—in reviving Boole’s idea of an intrinsic link between, as he put it, a ‘calculus’ and a ‘directive method’ to solve problems. (shrink)

Phenomenon of transdisciplinarity was put into the fore of analysis rather recently. In the article an attempt is made to find out whether it is possible to attribute this phenomenon not only to a science of the 21st century, or we have here the case where some scientific realities come to the attention of researchers with certain delay and has its value for the culture in general? It is possible to judge even the emergence of a kind of cognitive revolution (...) affecting both science culture. We need to find out what is meant by a transdisciplinarity, and how it differs from the inter- or multiransdisciplinarity. In the study the method of historical reconstruction, combining elements of presentism and antiqurism, was implemented. This method allows us to interpret historical events in the context of a specific level of knowledge, and at the same time to evaluate them in terms of modern ideas related to transdisciplinarity, inter- and multidisciplinarity. System-structural method, focused on an integrated analysis of the dynamics of development of cognitive processes in culture was implied as well, and the method of comparative analysis, which is aimed at comparing different but conceptually similar processes in various areas of conceptual art practice. It is in the framework of paradigm adopted a tacit agreement among scientists about the validity and effectiveness of research methods and techniques of inquiry. Within the paradigm, which presupposes certain fundamental principles, goals, and certain values shared by the scientific community, the novel sprouts of radical ideas once emerge. The scientific revolution here means a radical revision of the admissibility of accepted and proven methods, goals and values that are common to the members of the scientific community. Typically, new theories and concepts proposed and already mastered new scientific community, which is gradually replacing its representatives on the key command altitudes. The kernel of scientific community in fact is a style of thinking that is emerged in the context of a particular discipline, and then experience expansion in the form of discursive practices at a wide space of science and culture due to the novel cognitive schemes open the way to synthesize various research domains into a certain integrity. There is no question of the scientific revolution in the sense of Kuhn, since any significant goals and values of the scientific communities are not affected. Nevertheless, in some sense cognitive revolution taking place, the revolution of transdisciplinary type. The adoption of a new style of scientific thinking often gives rise to new types of objects and directions of cognitive activity, a new type of explanation that require new types of research proposals and cultural activities. Thus, the main idea of this article is that along with the Kuhn type scientific revolutions, transdisciplinary type scientific revolutions are conceivable, and even transdisciplinary cognitive types. This revolutions manifests in a change in style of reasoning, and it results in the expansion of this style to wide space of science and culture through the cognitive schemes and techniques, which enables to synthesize research and art activity in some integrity. Adoption of a new way of reasoning and the transition to new discursive practices generates new types of research facilities, new mechanisms of explanation, new cultural blueprints and instruments. Cognitive activity, based on a new style of thinking, involves multidisciplinarity, formation of new scientific and cultural institutions, and, therefore, causes a noticeable social change. Based on an analysis of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary processes in modern science and culture the authors claim that it is namely transdisciplinarity would determine the face of science and culture in the medium term, and will form the basis for the convergence of science, technology, art, and consciousness studies in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Method in Ancient PhilosophyDavid K. GliddenJyl Gentzler, editor. Method in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 398. Cloth, $72.00.The fifteen papers in this collection constitute revisions of conference proceedings and reflect the varied interests of participants. The ensemble exhibits a thoroughly modern methodology. Whatever and however various ancient methods of philosophy may have been, in Anglo-American scholarship it is standard practice to first address (...) established scholarly interpretations as the primary entry point to critical discussionóoften displacing antiquity with a critical vocabulary of philosophical modernity. Scholars may come to understand each other better, but at the risk of asking the wrong questions or sacrificing ancient texts themselves as mere means of producing papers.Most scholars are progressives. They believe philosophy has advanced past the comparatively primitive wisdom of antiquity, and so such scholars feel perfectly entitled to make better sense of ancient texts, by patiently explaining what the ancients would have meant had they only been able to get it right. There are, of course, exceptions. And some papers in this collection suggest deeper faith in our philosophic fathers. So, the battle between the ancients and the moderns is joined once more, between those who would adorn their papers with footnotes for their peers and those who would attempt more anthropological an inquiry into ancient philosophic practices.Ian Mueller and Robert Bolton each address the same passage in Plato's Phaedo, both beginning with an article from Vlastos, first published in 1969. Mueller thoughtfully explores three different yet related accounts of what we might call scientific method in explaining Plato's views on natural change. Bolton wonders whether scholars are asking the wrong questions. Patricia Curd attempts a progressivist account of Eleatic thought, notwithstanding her recognition of the paucity of ancient sources. Complete with elaborately numbered sentences, Gail Fine focuses primarily on Burnyeat (1976) on Plato on Protagoras. Constance Meinwald presents a rather near-sighted account of two passages in the Philebus that employ the peras-apeiron distinction, with a view toward Plato's allegedly modernist mathematization of understanding. Lesley Brown revisits five pages of the Sophist that were hotly debated in the 1960s. With charity and elegance, she offers several plausible solutions to puzzles posed by previous scholars. Sometimes time smoothes over differences.A. A. Long's essay on Plato's presentation of Socrates in the Theaetetus might appear more philosophically anthropological. Yet Long reveals progressive sympathies, suggesting that Plato dispatches Socrates in the Theaetetus, so as to prepare the way for a more rigorously academic form of philosophizing, such as that exhibited in the Sophist. [End Page 111] In this way, Long speculates, Plato abandoned practical ethics for the academic life of research, so familiar to university professors and conference participants. It might be hard to square such speculation with Plato's Laws and the reception of Plato's writings among his own contemporaries. Still, Socrates' shifting role in Plato's dialogues is well worth pondering.By comparison, T. H. Irwin's contribution is wonderfully old-fashioned. His paper addresses the background knowledge to be presumed by ancient readers of Plato's dialogues and how that knowledge is artfully put to use in Plato's depiction of Socrates' reflections on the unity of virtue. By speculating on Plato's relation to his ancient readers, Irwin displaces many modernist preoccupations, though not without himself falling victim to that peculiar scholarly obsession of dating Plato's dialogues by their doctrines.With characteristic conservatism, Gisela Striker cautions scholars not to over-read Aristotle's Prior Analytics. While that extraordinary work may have deep implications for the history of formal logic, it probably was instead intended to be part of a general account of argument. In a similar vein, Charlotte Witt attempts to rescue Aristotle from scholars who would delimit Aristotle's multifarious uses of the "for the sake of" explanation, which altogether pervade his metaphysics, physics, biology and ethics. Yet, Witt soon finds herself competing in a contest over interpretive distinctions, a sport that will certainly never capture Aristotle's own authorial intentions.Facing another mass of scholarship, in this case on Aristotle's dialectic, C. D. C. Reeve sensibly attempts to... (shrink)

In all disciplines there are specifiable basic concepts, our universes of discourse, which define special areas of inquiry. Semiotics is that 'science of sciences' which inquires into all processes of inquiry, and which seeks to discover methods of inquiry. Peirce held that semiotics was to be the method of methods. An account of semiotic method should distinguish between the way the term 'sign' is used in semiotics and the various ways this term was meant in (...) nearly all the traditional disciplines. In this monograph Roberta Kevelson minutely explores Charles S. Peirce's method of methods. (shrink)

This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in (...) both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy. (shrink)

This study’s objective was to understand Colombian adolescents’ experiences and preferences regarding access to sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS), either alone or accompanied. A mixed-method approach was used, involving a survey of 812 participants aged eleven to twenty-four years old and forty-five semi-structured interviews with participants aged fourteen to twenty-three. Previous research shows that adolescents prefer privacy when accessing SRHS and often do not want their parents involved. Such findings align with the longstanding tendency to frame the ethical principle (...) of autonomy as based on independence in decision-making. However, the present study shows that such a conceptualization and application of autonomy does not adequately explain Colombian adolescent participants’ preferences regarding access to SRHS. Participants shared a variety of preferences to access SRHS, with the majority of participants attaching great importance to having their parents involved, to varying degrees. What emerges is a more complex and non-homogenous conceptualization of autonomy that is not inherently grounded in independence from parental involvement in access to care. We thus argue that when developing policies involving adolescents, policymakers and health professionals should adopt a nuanced “relational autonomy” approach to better respect the myriad of preferences that Colombian (and other) adolescents may have regarding their access to SRHS. (shrink)

The crisis of our times is science in a world without wisdom. The immense intellectual success of modern science and technology have given some of us unprecedented powers to act, which has led to all the great benefits of the modern world, and to the grave global crises we now face. Before modern science, we lacked the power to do too much damage to ourselves or the planet; now we have science, wisdom has become, not a private luxury but a (...) public necessity. Unless we learn to become a bit wiser, sooner or later we will destroy ourselves. But how can we learn to become wiser? We can learn from the last place many would look - namely science! We can learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a wiser world. This is in fact an old idea. It goes back to the 18th century French Enlightenment. But, in developing the idea, the philosophes of the Enlightenment made three gross blunders. They failed to capture correctly the nature of the progress-achieving methods of science; they failed to generalize these methods properly; and, most disastrously of all, they applied their misconstrued scientific method, not to the social world directly, not to the task of making social progress towards an enlightened world, but instead to the task of improving knowledge of social phenomena, to the task of developing social science. This botched version of the profound Enlightenment idea was developed throughout the 19th century, and built into universities in the early 20th century with the creation of disciplines of social science. As a result, academic inquiry today is a botched version of what we need. Instead of giving priority to problems of living, and devoting itself to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom, academia today devotes itself to the pursuit of knowledge. That is the key disaster of our times. Our institutions of learning seek knowledge, but fail disastrously to devote themselves to helping humanity acquire a bit more wisdom. If the world is to acquire global wisdom, it needs institutions of learning rationally devoted to the task. As a matter of supreme urgency, we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes, not just to acquire knowledge, but to seek and promote social wisdom. (shrink)

Current economic ontology development has failed to confront two important errors associated with historicism. Embracing the linearity of economic value being directly attributed to the labor applied to natural resources taken together with efficiency arguments used to justify monetary policy on both the microlevel (transaction) and macrolevel (global trade), we know these legacies of the scientific method applied to economic systems have left the G-20 paralyzed to deal with structural failings evidenced from banking to business to economic policy. An exploration (...) of the structural modalities that impair our current capacity for adaptation and alternative methods for accounting for value is the basis for this inquiry. Integral accounting is proposed as a more suitable method to transition from scarcity-based market models to abundance-based modes of sustainable engagement. (shrink)

Children with developmental dyslexia and at its risk have difficulties in the acquisition of foreign languages, especially non-transparent English. The problems of such pupils concern various aspects of the language system but in particular relate to the ability to read and spell. The research literature dedicated to effective preventative methods and dyslexia treatment suggests that both children with dyslexia and at its risk need phonological awareness training and multi-sensory learning. It is also known that prevention and early treatment is (...) more effective than therapeutic intervention used in older students. Experts in foreign language acquisition recommend that children have contact with longer oral texts and live language. A recently-published report on the methods of English language teaching in Polish primary schools shows that the lessons conducted there do not realise the majority of the aforementioned recommendations. As a consequence, they do not serve any pupils including those with dyslexia and at its risk. A method which meets most of the demands mentioned above is “The Good Start Method for English”. It is a new program of teaching the English language designed for five to seven-year-olds, which at the same time ensures support for the psychomotor development of children, leading to acceleration in learning progress. (shrink)

After decades of epistemological inquiry on the social construction of science, we have observed a renewed consensus on empiricism in application-oriented social sciences and a growing trust in evidence-based practice and decision-making. Drawing on the long-standing debate on value-ladenness, evidence and normativity in sciences, this article theoretically discusses and empirically illustrates the Life-World origins of methods in a domain of inquiry strongly characterized by an empiricist epistemic culture and a normative stance: Children and Media Studies. Adopting a (...) reflexive approach to their own research in such an epistemologically underexplored field, the authors analyze a standard research instrument and two procedures. The analysis illustrates how background assumptions shape the research method and how the procedures routinely conceal this work of shaping. In the discussion the authors cast light on the role scientific procedures play in the naturalization of a given moral order, and put forward the question of whether and how this “morality-building” feature of methods should be taken into account in the assessment of their appropriateness. In the conclusion the authors advance that the situated nature of scientific knowledge, rather than discrediting its relevance, is what makes it relevant, here and now, for the larger community the research may impact on. The authors discuss the risks of such a pragmatic outcome and propose the adoption of an oscillating epistemic stance as a way to cope with them. (shrink)

The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise particularly strong reservations about any critical method as preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media within which the same techniques (...) for verifying competence and correctness of usage can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is, through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a more general and a more particularized level of a system and observing each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris and of Noam Chomsky ; interestingly these methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments by single individuals, especially by individual "experts." · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation in Raw and Cooked differs from standard accounts such as André Martinet's and John Lyons' in Noam Chomsky , pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of meaning which is both semantic and morphemic. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

There are distinctive methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event (RSE) forecast verification, that is, in the assessment of the quality of forecasts of rare but severe natural hazards such as avalanches, landslides or tornadoes. While some of these challenges have been discussed since the inception of the discipline in the 1880s, there is no consensus about how to assess RSE forecasts. This article offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the many different measures used to capture (...) the quality of categorical, binary RSE forecasts – forecasts of occurrence and non-occurrence – and argues that of skill scores in the literature there is only one adequate for RSE forecasting. We do so by first focusing on the relationship between accuracy and skill and showing why skill is more important than accuracy in the case of RSE forecast verification. We then motivate three adequacy constraints for a measure of skill in RSE forecasting. We argue that of skill scores in the literature only the Peirce skill score meets all three constraints. We then outline how our theoretical investigation has important practical implications for avalanche forecasting, basing our discussion on a study in avalanche forecast verification using the nearest-neighbour method (Heierli et al., 2004). Lastly, we raise what we call the “scope challenge”; this affects all forms of RSE forecasting and highlights how and why working with the right measure of skill is important not only for local binary RSE forecasts but also for the assessment of different diagnostic tests widely used in avalanche risk management and related operations, including the design of methods to assess the quality of regional multi-categorical avalanche forecasts. (shrink)

A central theme in western philosophy was to find formal methods that can reliably discover empirical relationships and their explanations from data assembled from experience. As a philosophical project, that ambition was abandoned in the 20th century and generally dismissed as impossible. It was replaced in philosophy by neo-Kantian efforts at reconstruction and justification, and in professional statistics by the more limited ambition to estimate a small number of parameters in pre-specified hypotheses. The influx of “big data” from climate (...) science, neuropsychology, biology, astronomy and elsewhere implicitly called for a revival of the grander philosophical ambition. Search algorithms are meeting that call, but they pose a problem: how are their accuracies to be assessed in domains where experimentation is limited or impossible? Increasingly, the answer is through simulation of data from models of the kind of process in the domain. In some cases, these innovations require rethinking how the accuracy and informativeness of inference methods can be assessed. Focusing on causal inference, we give an example from neuroscience, but to show that the model/simulation strategy is not confined to causal inference, we also consider two classification problems from astrophysics: identifying exoplanets and identifying dark matter concentrations. (shrink)

Writing Politics is a methods book designed to instruct on politically focused literary inquiry. Exploring the political sensibilities that arise from the way literary fiction re-textualizes historical periods and events, the book features a series of violence-themed inquiries that emphasize forms of writing as the vehicles for politically attuned historiography. Each investigation treats the way the literary genre, within historiographic metafiction, enables political inquiry. It's a form of writing that inter-articulates history and fiction to rework a textual (...) past and unsettle dominant understandings of events and situations. Central to the diverse chapters are fictional treatments of authoritarian, fascist, or zealous mentalities. Featured, for example, are Radovan Karadzic, Reinhard Heydrich, and the Trotsky assassin Ramon Mercader. Michael J. Shapiro has produced another original and sophisticated bookshelf staple; the only contemporary investigation in Political Studies that instructs on method in this way. (shrink)

Having been neglected or maligned for most of this century, Newton's method of 'deduction from the phenomena' has recently attracted renewed attention and support. John Norton, for example, has argued that this method has been applied with notable success in a variety of cases in the history of physics and that this explains why the massive underdetermination of theory by evidence, seemingly entailed by hypothetico-deductive methods, is invisible to working physicists. This paper, through a detailed analysis of Newton's deduction (...) of one particular 'proposition' in optics 'from the phenomena', gives a clearer account than hitherto of the method - highlighting the fact that it is really one of deduction from the phenomena plus 'background knowledge'. It argues, that, although the method has certain heuristic virtues, examination of its putative accreditational strengths reveals a range of important problems that its defenders have yet adequately to address. (shrink)

Traditionally, comparative literature has focused on the study of influences between texts and it is only recent work that has explored the analogies and affinitiesof historically independent cultures. In this spirit, this paper develops methods for a structured poetic analysis and applies them to a systematic comparison of thepoem “Niǎo Mǐng Jiàn” from the 8th-century Chinese poet Wáng Wéi and the program piece of Paul Celan’s Atemwende: “Du Darfst,” based upon a detailed analysis of their poetics. The analysis and (...) translation reveals how both poems employ words and images as signs without reference, and create dialogical gaps through ambiguity and impersonality. Thus, despite their cultural and historical separation, both poetic texts become “hermetic,” and both poets apply the “hermetic” as a method of inquiry into truth, a truth that cannot be simply pronounced, but needs to be cowitnessed, or heard in silence. It is through this meaningful “silence” that their poetry invites readers and translators all the more perceptively to engage in meaningful conversations. These results entail encouraging perspectives for the question of the limits of translation, especially with regard to east-western studies and for crosscultural comparative literature. Thus, the paper supports Prof. Li Qingben’s and Prof. Guo Jinghua’s claim for a multi-dimensional framework in the study of East-West cultural influences. (shrink)

This book systematically creates a general descriptive theory of scientific change that explains the mechanics of changes in both scientific theories and the methods of their assessment. It was once believed that, while scientific theories change through time, their change itself is governed by a fixed method of science. Nowadays we know that there is no such thing as an unchangeable method of science; the criteria employed by scientists in theory evaluation also change through time. But if that (...) is so, how and why do theories and methods change? Are there any general laws that govern this process, or is the choice of theories and methods completely arbitrary and random? Contrary to the widespread opinion, the book argues that scientific change is indeed a law-governed process and that there can be a general descriptive theory of scientific change. It does so by first presenting meta-theoretical issues, divided into chapters on the scope, possibility and assessment of theory of scientific change. It then builds a theory about the general laws that govern the process of scientific change, and goes into detail about the axioms and theorems of the theory. (shrink)

Virginia Held, in How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence, proposes a method by which moral theories can be "tested" by moral experience. Building on her previous work, she considers here how to utilize this method in the moral assessment of terrorism. Held's method is morally pluralistic; it encompasses a variety of moral theories and principles, including care ethics. Held's evolving account of how to test moral theories in terms of real-world moral experience remains an important and welcome (...) contribution of hers to moral theory. Anyone who thinks rational intuition is not enough to determine which moral principles are justified, or who distrusts the moral "tests" that involve bizarre hypothetical examples devised by philosophers in armchairs, should consider Held's experiential moral method. If daily lived experience really matters to moral theorizing—and how could it not?—then we need an account of how to interpret our experiences morally, how to "test" moral judgments in terms of those experiences, and how best to revise our moral convictions in light of further experiences. (shrink)

The purpose of cognitive diagnostic modeling is to classify students' latent attribute profiles using their responses to the diagnostic assessment. In recent years, each diagnostic classification model makes different assumptions about the relationship between a student's response pattern and attribute profile. The previous research studies showed that the inappropriate DCMs and inaccurate Q-matrix impact diagnostic classification accuracy. Artificial Neural Networks have been proposed as a promising approach to convert a pattern of item responses into a diagnostic classification in some (...) research studies. However, the ANNs methods produced very unstable and unappreciated estimation unless a great deal of care was taken. In this research, we combined ANNs with two typical DCMs, the deterministic-input, noisy, “and” gate model and the deterministic-inputs, noisy, “or” gate model, within a semi-supervised learning framework to achieve a robust and accurate classification. In both simulated study and real data study, the experimental results showed that the proposed method could achieve appreciated performance across different test conditions, especially when the diagnostic quality of assessment was not high and the Q-matrix contained misspecified elements. This research study is the first time of applying the thinking of semi-supervised learning into CDM. Also, we used the validating test to choose the appropriate parameters for the ANNs instead of using typical statistical criteria. (shrink)

Finding meaning in our lives is a central tenet to the human experience and a core contributor to mental health. Individuals tend to actively seek the sources of meaning in their lives or consciously enact efforts to create or “craft” meaning in different life domains. These overall “Life Crafting” behaviors refer to the conscious efforts individuals exert to create meaning in their lives through cognitively framing how they view life, seeking social support systems to manage life challenges, and actively seeking (...) challenges to facilitate personal growth. Specifically, these behaviors are actioned to better align life goals, personal needs, values, and capabilities. However, no psychological assessment instrument currently exists to measure overall life crafting. As such, the purpose of this paper was twofold: to conceptualize life crafting and to develop, validate and evaluate a robust measure of overall life crafting. A mixed-method, multi-study research design was employed. First, nine participants were interviewed to determine the methods or techniques used to craft meaningful life experiences. These methods/techniques were used as indicators to create an initial item pool which was then reviewed by a panel of experts to ensure face validity. Second, in Study 1, the factorial structure of the instrument was explored by gathering data from a convenience sample, with the results showing support for a three-factor structure of life crafting, consisting of cognitive crafting, seeking social support, and seeking challenges. Finally, in Study 2, the aim was to confirm the factorial structure of the Life Crafting scale and to determine its level of internal consistency, partial measurement invariance across genders, and criterion validity [meaning in life, mental health, work engagement, and job burnout ]. The results supported a second-order factorial model of Life Crafting, which comprised of three first-order factors. Therefore, the Life Crafting Scale can be used as a valid and reliable instrument to measure- and track the effectiveness of life crafting interventions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 1-18 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Inquiry in Education:Community,Transcendence, and the Meaning of Pedagogy Hanan A. Alexander What does it mean to understand education as an art, to conceive inquiry in education aesthetically, or to assess pedagogy artistically? Answers to these queries are often grounded in Deweyan instrumentalism, neo-Marxist critical theory, or postmodern skepticism that tend to fall prey to (...) the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism. 1 This essay offers an alternative, communitarian account of education as an art and a neo-Kantian approach to aesthetic inquiry in education that avoids these difficulties.I begin by examining the emergence of aesthetic inquiry in education in the context of the larger qualitative revolution in educational research. The struggle to justify the qualitative turn in educational thought was initially framed in terms of two influential doctrines: that cognition and affect on the one hand, and truth, beauty, and goodness on the other, can be clearly distinguished from one another. Qualitative methods were conceived as an alternative research paradigm — a new epistemology — in keeping with Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2 Qualitative research, on this account, is a cognitive endeavor aimed at discovering a form of knowledge no less valid and reliable than that produced by quantitative methodologies. This way of framing the discussion led to the dichotomizing of positivist and postpositivist epistemologies, one embracing absolutism, objectivism, and rationalism, the other relativism, subjectivism, and romanticism. 3 This approach succeeded in pointing to some serious flaws in the prevailing positivist account of social research, yet it left qualitative inquiry dependent on versions of epistemological relativism and subjectivism that philosophers of knowledge have shown to be self-contradictory and incoherent. 4 [End Page 1]Conceiving of pedagogy in aesthetic terms challenges the prevailing positivist epistemology on a deeper level because it questions the accepted distinctions between thinking and feeling, and between truth, beauty, and goodness. If art can be conceived as a form of cognitive inquiry in addition to affective expression, then the appreciation and assessment of education as art requires not merely a new research paradigm or an alternative epistemology. Rather, it entails a reshuffling of our very conception of the relations between science, art, and ethics.These concepts can be reconceived to avoid the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism if we recognize with Iris Murdoch that sovereignty belongs to communal conceptions of a transcendent good. Educational arts empower people to express, appreciate, and critique collective conceptions of goodness, and artistic criticism of pedagogy celebrates a sacred dimension in educational thought and practice. 5 This approach occasions a fresh look not only at the practice, appreciation, and assessment of pedagogy, but also at the very meaning of the concept of education and the sorts of inquiry that can fruitfully inform its practice. Two Dogmas of Educational Research Two dogmas have dominated educational research for most of this century: the idea that there exists a clear disjunction between the cognitive and affective domains; and the supposed radical independence from one another of truth, beauty, and goodness. 6 According to a popular view rooted in these doctrines, the search for truth is a cognitive affair governed by science, while ethics and the arts are tied to the emotions and the humanities. Inquiry into the former is objective — reliability depends on method not researcher — and into the latter, subjective — results can vary according to interpreter. In this attitude, the cognitive domain dominates the public arena through the influence and prestige of science and measurement. 7Until the middle 1970s, behavioral and social research in education expressed these dichotomies in the distinction made between quantitative and qualitative research. The former was thought to be scientific and objective, the latter, humanistic and subjective. As qualitative inquiry came into its own in the 1980s, its proponents sought justification and legitimization in accord with cognitive dominance. 8 First, they argued that qualitative research methods had checks against error as rigorous as its quantitative counterparts. 9 Later, the cognitive domain... (shrink)

School leaders are constantly challenged by diverse students and conflicting interests between faculty and staff. They are often called upon to make sense of ethical quagmires, where rules might conflict with desired outcomes or personal values clash with professional obligations. Negotiating these dilemmas can be challenging, but democratic ethics can offer an effective process to work through them. Drawing from the writings of John Dewey, Leading Through the Quagmire advocates his notion that democracy is an appropriate response to the multitude (...) of conflicting interests, needs, and values in educational settings. Moreover, Enomoto and Kramer propose an inquiry method to harness democratic ethics for engaging in fair deliberation and conflict resolution. This book provides the foundation for understanding tensions, as well as the methods and applications to navigate through them. Stories and examples are provided to enable readers to understand such terms as utilitarianism, ethical tensions, religious attitudes, and eco-feminism in meaningful ways. (shrink)