Psychology's tendency to focus on confirmatory analyses before ensuring constructs are clearly defined and accurately measured is exacerbating the generalizability crisis. Our growing use of digital behaviors as predictors has revealed the fragility of subjective measures and the latent constructs they scaffold. However, new technologies can provide opportunities to improve conceptualizations, theories, and measurement practices.

Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part, because they seem so basic or obvious that it (...) would be time badly spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of sexuality.An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality, a collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexuality is characterized by a diversity of methodological and historiographical approaches—social history, intellectual history, cultural history , historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective virtually absent from this collection is the history of science, and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the history of sexuality is also an area in which one’s historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually irrevocably, one’s first-order historical writing. It is an arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run into one another. 1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times . Arnold I. Davidson, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is assistant professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” appeared in the Winter 1987 issue. (shrink)

I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in the history of science, these issues have a special status and urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second, in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of Freud’s (...) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, one whose specificity is a function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number of pages that have been written on Freud’s Three Essays, it is very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues.In raising question about the historiography of the history of science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think of the works of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very distinctive perspective about how to write the history of science. In the English-speaking world, perhaps only the work of Ian Hacking both shares this perspective and ranks with its French counterparts in terms of originality and quality. No brief summary can avoid eliding the differences between Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hacking, and Foucault; indeed, the summary I am going to produce does not even fully capture Foucault’s perspective, which he called “archaeology.”1 But this sketch will have to do for the purposes I have in mind here, whose ultimate aim is to reorient our approach to the history of psychoanalysis. 1. The sketch that follows reproduces, with some omissions and additions, the beginning of my “Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy , pp. 221-34. Arnold I. Davidson is assistant professor in the department of philosophy, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on the history and epistemology of nineteenth-century psychiatric theories of sexuality. (shrink)

Through the thickets of recent debates, I take two facts as clear enough starting points. The first is that Heidegger’s participation in National Socialism, and especially his remarks and pronouncements after the war, were, and remain, horrifying. The second is that Heidegger remains of the essential philosophers of our century; Maurice Blanchot testifies for several generations when he refers to the “veritable intellectual shock” that the reading of Being and Time produced in him.5 And Emmanuel Levinas, not hesitating to express (...) his reservations about Heidegger, can nevertheless bring himself to say that a person “who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century cannot not have gone through Hiedegger’s philosophy, even to escape it.”6 In this century, perhaps only Ludwig Wittgenstein has had a comparable impact and influence on philosophy. I do not mean to deny that one can reject the over seventy volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe as worthless, that one can, as with Wittgenstein, find that his work is obscure, indulgent, impossible to read, that nothing in it contributes to philosophy. But both Heidegger and Wittgenstein write in anticipation of this reaction, recognizing that their desires, differently articulated, to overcome philosophy will help to determine how their writing is received. Stanley Cavell’s characterization of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations describes Heidegger as well:Philosophical Investigations, like the major modernist works of the past century at least, is, logically speaking, esoteric. That is, such works seek to split their audience into insiders and outsiders ; hence they create the particular unpleasantness of cults ; hence demand for their sincere reception the shock of conversion.7When combined with Heidegger’s political engagement, the particular unpleasantness of cults and indifference are more than joined. Thus it can seem as though one must either exculpate Heidegger, explain away his relation to Nazism as an aberration from the outside, or reject his thought entirely, declare that his books should no longer be read. In an attempt to begin to confront these issues, Critical Inquiry is publishing this symposium. 5. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David,” trans. Paula Wissing, p. 479 of this issue.6. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen , p. 42. See also the last line of Gadamer, “ ‘Back from Syracuse?’ “ p. 430.7. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy , p. xvi; hereafter abbreviated CR. Arnold I. Davidson, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality”. (shrink)

Pierre Hadot, whose inaugural lecture to the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Through at the Collège de France we are publishing here, is one of the most significant and wide-ranging historians of ancient philosophy writing today. His work, hardly known in the English-reading world except among specialists, exhibits that rare combination of prodigious historical scholarship and rigorous philosophical argumentation that upsets any preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and philosophy proper. In addition to being the translator (...) and author of monographs on Plotinus, Vitorinus, Porphyry, and many others, Hadot’s most important general philosophical work is entitled Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique.1 Combined with detailed studies of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, this work presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have companied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises. Hadot’s “Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy” provides an overview of his major themes and preoccupations, and gives some indication of the historical scope of his work. This lecture also illuminates the methodological problems one faces in studying the history of thought, especially problems concerning the evolution, reinterpretation, and even misunderstanding of the meaning and significance of philosophical terminology. In this brief introduction, I can do no more than attempt to provide a context for Hadot’s inaugural lecture, by way of summary of his major work, and, more specifically for reader’s of Critical Inquiry, to sketch the profound importance that Hadot’s writings had for the last works of Michel Foucault. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism” . He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. (shrink)

Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current technical means, it will (...) be possible to compile a complete lexicon of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning that take place in the movement from one language to another. In the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by substantia, for example, is justly famous and has again recently inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word philosophia, and which we will encounter throughout the present discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and significance. Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard, Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, and Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism” . He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. Paula Wissing, a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks . She also contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism.”. (shrink)

Without access to Michel Foucault’s courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucault’s passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his (...) published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault’s thought. Indeed, it is Foucault’s analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. It is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucault’s work and more generally. (shrink)

Extending the work of Davidson and Worrell, we further investigate the stock market''s reaction to announced corporate illegalities. We examine a sample of 535 announcements of corporate crime and obtain an overall insignificant stock market reaction. However, when the sample is divided by type of crime, we find that the stock market reacts significantly to announcements of bribery, tax evasion, and violations of government contracts. We also find a significantly negative reaction to announcements of corporate crime when the company (...) had been previously accused of other illegal activity. For companies accused of crime in the 1970s, 51% of them were accused again in the 1980s. (shrink)

During the last several years, we have witnessed a reopening of questions concerning National Socialism whose full scope and implications have yet to be determined. The Historikerstreit has provoked new discussions of the problem of the specificity or uniqueness of Auschwitz. While raising general methodological issues about the nature of historical explanation and understanding, the Historikerstreit has also revolved around specific questions concerning the role of moral concepts and memory in assessing National Socialism.1 Disclosures about Paul de Man’s wartime writings (...) and further examination of Martin Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism have led to broader consideration of the relations among philosophy, theory, and politics, and have forced us to rethink the problem of intellectual responsibility with renewed urgency.2 These and related topics were at the center of a major international conference, “Nazism and the Final Solution,” organized by Saul Friedländer last April, which took as its organizing theme the limits of ethical, aesthetic, and historical representation of the Final Solution.3In light of these continuing discussions, we are publishing two remarkable essays written during the early years of National Socialism. To the often-posed challenge, how could one be expected to respond lucidly to Nazism in the early 1930s?, these essays by Robert Musil and Emmanuel Levinas constitute, by the sheer power of their insights, decisive answers. Although significantly different in approach, these essays show not only that one could recognize the reality of National Socialism as it was coming to power, but indicate further that analyses of permanent value could be formulated virtually from the beginning. Musil and Levinas serve to remind us concretely of the capabilities of the human mind and of its responsibilities—capabilities and responsibilities that even the most severe political circumstances need not overwhelm. 1. For documents from and discussion of the Historikstreit, see the special issue of New German Critique 44 .2. On Paul de Man, see Critical Inquiry 14 : 590-652, and Critical Inquiry 15 : 704-44, 764-873. On Martin Heidegger, see Critical Inquiry 15 : 407-88.3. The proceedings of this conference are forthcoming. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines. Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the disciplines in recent years has given rise to a series of controversies about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science, the critical legal studies movement, (...) and so on. Unfortunately, these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative function of such notions as “self-evidence,” “experience,” “test,” “testimony,” and “textuality” in various academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked “rules of evidence” are themselves the products of historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation and reformulation. James Chandler, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature . He is currently completing England in 1819, studies in and of romantic case history. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy and the history of science at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and National Socialism. Harry Harootunian, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa and editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan. (shrink)

Recent interpretations of Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction have tended to emphasize Locke's relationship to the corpuscularian science of his time, especially to that of Boyle. Although this trend may have corrected the unfortunate tendency to view Locke in isolation from his scientific contemporaries, it nevertheless has resulted in some over- simplifications and distortions of Locke's general enterprise. As everyone now agrees, Locke was attempting to provide a philosophical foundation for English corpuscularianism and one must therefore look not only at the (...) current scientific hypotheses but also at the nature of the philosophical foundation Locke was attempting to erect. In particular, Locke made an attempt, based on epistemological principles, to give a philosophical justification of atomistic corpuscularianism. Moreover, he was not content to give this justification post hoc—the epistemological foundation was prior to, and determined the framework for, the details of the correct scientific theory. Locke's epistemology made legitimate an atomistic theory, one making crucial use of the notion of solidity in the definition of the elementary particles, although it did not prejudge the details of this theory. (shrink)

Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme-content dualism. He argues that such dualism is untenable since: not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence but also the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of (...) a theory ”fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non-intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability : if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ”there is no ground for speaking of two.’. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers interested in value theory appear to be largely concerned with questions of the following sort:What is value?What is the meaning of the word ‘good’?Does the attribution of value to an object have a cognitive, or merely an emotive, significance?The first question is metaphysical; to ask it is analogous to asking in physics:What is matter?What is electricity?The others are generally treated as semantical questions; to ask them is analogous to asking in statistics:What is the meaning of the word ‘probable’?Does (...) an attribution of probability express an objective fact, or merely a subjective attitude? (shrink)

Là où on peut dater les commentaires d'Averroès sur Aristote, le Commentaire Moyen d'une œuvre donnée peut être considéré comme antérieur au Commentaire Long. En accompagnement de sa belle édition du Commentaire Moyen d'Averroès sur leDe anima, A. Ivry a soutenu que dans ce cas-ci les choses sont inversées et que le Commentaire Moyen duDe animaest “une version abrégée et révisée” du Commentaire Long de la même œuvre. Ivry développe sa thèse avec le plus de détails dansArabic Sciences and Philosophy, (...) 5. Là, il soutient que deux passages dans le Commentaire Moyen duDe animase rapportent nominalement au Commentaire Long, qu'un troisième passage fait allusion au Commentaire Long, et que dans d'autres passages le Commentaire Moyen et le Commentaire Long utilisent une phraséologie semblable et qu'on peut considérer que le premier a été la version abrégée du second. Le présent article répond à cette thèse de la manière suivante: les deux passages dans le Commentaire Moyen qui semblent selon d'lvry se rapporter explicitement au Commentaire Long peuvent vraisemblablement être compris comme des references a l'intérieur du Commentaire Moyen lui-même. Le passage qu'il comprend comme faisant allusion au Commentaire Long ne fait pas réellement allusion à cette œuvre, mais constitue une référence non-equivoque à une section ultérieure du Commentaire Moyen. II n'y a rien qui justifie le fait de regarder les passages dans le Commentaire Moyen cités par Ivry et utilisent une phraséologie semblable à celle du Commentaire Long comme des emprunts faits à ce dernier. Au cours de son argumentation, Ivry mentionne la position d'Averroes sur la nature de l'intellect materiel de l'homme, question qui a donne a Averroes le plus de peine dans ses commentaires sur le De anima d'Aristote et qui, depuis lors, a le plus intrigue ceux qui etudient Averroes. Le présent article souligne que sur le sujet de l'intellect materiel de l'homme, ni le Commentaire Moyen, ni le Commentaire Long sur leDe animan'empruntent I'un a l'autre, car les conceptions de l'intellect matériel qu'ils embrassent sont différentes et incompatibles. (shrink)

The aim of the My Character project was to develop a better understanding of how interventions designed to develop character might enhance moral formation and futuremindedness in young people. Futuremindedness can be defined as an individual’s capacity to set goals and make plans to achieve them. Establishing goals requires considerable moral reflection, and the achievement of worthwhile aims requires character traits such as courage and the capacity to delay gratification. The research team developed two new educational interventions – a website (...) and a hard-copy journal – with the specific aim of developing future-mindedness. After development, the website and journal were piloted over a one-year period by over 1,000 11–14 year olds in six schools across England. Various research methods, including group interviews and case studies, were implemented to assess impact. In addition, a pilot RCT was conducted to assess the feasibility of using experimental methods to measure character. The main findings from the research are that: - Students benefit from opportunities in school to think about future-mindedness; this can be successfully taught through character education. - Harnessing new technology, such as the Internet, offers exciting opportunities for character education. - It is beneficial to investigate the impact of new character education resources in order to bring greater clarity about ‘what works’. The most useful approach is a mixed methods one that allows for triangulation of evidence. - It is possible to run RCTs and other experimental research in schools to assess developmental projects of this kind, but applying the method in schools and creating suitable outcome measures present challenges for researchers. - A positive indicator of the success is that five out of the six pilot schools have embedded My Character into their curriculum. In addition, many new schools, both in Britain and internationally, have started to use the website and / or journal. This report describes the research, analyses the impact of My Character and concludes with recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and researchers embarking on similar projects. These recommendations include: i) advocating that schools create space in the curriculum to teach future-mindedness through character education; ii) enhancing traditional character education teaching methods with opportunities brought by Internet technologies; iii) evaluating character education interventions using triangulated evidence drawn from a mixture of research methods. (shrink)

Perhaps the question “What is philosophy?” can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There are (...) cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question “between friends” as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the two-volume Cinema , The Logic of Sense , and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza . Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

The text "A Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning, and Action" is translated here from Donald Davidson's book: Problems of Rationality.Oxford University Press, 2004. pp.151-166.

There is a growing consensus in Britain on the importance of character, and on the belief that the virtues that contribute to good character are part of the solution to many of the challenges facing modern society. Parents, teachers and schools understand the need to teach basic moral virtues to pupils, such as honesty, self-control, fairness, and respect, while fostering behaviour associated with such virtues today. However, until recently, the materials required to help deliver this ambition have been missing in (...) Britain. The Knightly Virtues Programme, devised by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, aims to help solve this challenge. The programme, designed for 9 to 11 year olds, draws on selected classic stories to help teach moral character in schools. This approach has proved to be popular with children and teachers, with more than 5,000 pupils from one hundred schools having participated in the programme so far. Fifty-five of these schools and 3,272 pupils were directly involved in different stages of the research. Based at the University of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre houses leading academics dedicated to researching the various ways in which good character, which underpins the building blocks of society, can be developed. Recent research from the Centre has shown that the qualities that make up character can be learnt and taught, and suggests that we need a new emphasis on their importance in schools and in professional education. This report from the Centre into the use of classic literature within schools sets out the ways in which the Knightly Virtues Programme is able to develop the virtue literacy of school pupils, and the extent to which an understanding and awareness of good moral character can make positive changes to behaviour. The impact of the programme has been tested using several rigorous research methods, detailed in this report alongside their findings, which provide substantial empirical evidence for the effectiveness of using stories to develop virtue literacy. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning . This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that (...) we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require. (shrink)

As educators, writers and public intellectuals, many of us share a sense of responsibility for reflecting on the worlds in which we live, with a view to transforming them for the common good, towar...

In this essay, I consider Sally Haslanger’s social constructivist account of race and propose a modification to the nature of hierarchy specified. According to Haslanger, race will cease to exist post-hierarchy, given that she builds in a requirement of synchronic hierarchy for the existence of race. While Haslanger maintains that racial identity would linger beyond hierarchical treatment in the form of ethnicity, I will suggest this fails to provide adequate conceptual justice for the cultures and aesthetics which emerged out of (...) past oppression. In response, I propose a modification which would allow us to recognize the possibility of post-hierarchical races. (shrink)

I argue that abstract objects cannot depend on God for their existence and nature.

In this paper, I explore various views on which mind-body dualism is true, but the soul is located in the body. I argue that this sort of dualism (which I call 'somatic dualism') once was a not-uncommon view in the philosophy of mind. I also argue that it has the resources to reply to some of the problems thought to affect Cartesian dualism.

I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is (...) attested by the fact that we distrust the exceptions until they can be reconciled with the unmediated. My knowledge of the world outside of myself, on the other hand, depends on the functioning of my sense organs, and this causal dependence on the senses makes my beliefs about the world of nature open to a sort of uncertainty that arises only rarely in the case of beliefs about my own states of mind. Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. But my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense; I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour. (shrink)

Since Descartes, epistemology has been based on first person knowledge. We must begin, according to the usual story, with what is most certain: knowledge of our own sensations and thoughts. In one way or another we then progress, if we can, to knowledge of an objective external world. There is then the final, tenuous, step to knowledge of other minds. I shall argue for a total revision of this picture. All propositional thought, whether positive or skeptical, whether of the inner (...) or of the outer, requires possession of the concept of objective truth, and this concept is accessible only to those creatures that are in communication with others. Knowledge of other minds is thus basic to all thought. But such knowledge requires and assumes knowledge of a shared world of objects in a common time and space. Thus the acquisition of knowledge is not based on a progression from the subjective to the objective; it emerges holistically, and is interpersonalfrom the start. (shrink)

Spinoza rarely refers to art. However, there are extensive resources for a Spinozist aesthetics in his discussion of health in the Ethics and of social affects in his political works. There have been recently been a few essays linking Spinoza and art, but this essay additionally fuses Spinoza’s politics to an affective aesthetics. Spinoza’s statements that art makes us healthier (Ethics 4p54Sch; Emendation section 17) form the foundation of an aesthetics. In Spinoza’s definition, “health” is caused by external objects that (...) maintain our power to act in a variety of ways. Humans need such objects because our complex bodies constantly lose or consume many parts necessary to our overall functioning. Notably, Spinoza defines humans’ bodies through this complexity (2p13Sch), so health as maintenance of complexity is a distinctly human endeavor. Further, while art is not the only healthy activity, I argue that art is a particularly potent cure, which explains Spinoza’s otherwise opaque comment that music can cure melancholy (by which he meant a near-total inability to act, akin to death). Rather than only causing frivolous pleasures, art may be as essential to human flourishing as are other human beings in general; other people are “most useful” because of the variety of actions they make possible (4p35Cor & Sch1). Art’s production of a dizzying variety of affects is likewise most useful for health. -/- Having established how art in general affects the individual, I then explain the role of artists in shaping social groups. Artists use vivid and highly charged affective techniques, as do political sovereigns and religious prophets (TTP chapters 1-2 & 15-16). However, sovereigns and prophets are concerned exclusively with “morality,” defined by Spinoza as the use of affects (primarily based on fear and hope) to produce “obedience” in the generic multitude or people at large. An artist, however, rarely causes affects in the whole nation, affecting instead only a smaller niche or “sub-genre” of people. The affects produced in this group are also not identical to those used by sovereigns, since artists do not primarily deploy sad affects of hope and fear but instead use a wide variety of joyful affects. Further, in Spinoza’s analysis of ceremonies (TTP chapter 5), we see how small groups exposed to repeated ceremonies or social practices eventually develop new strengths which they lacked before. Repeated exposure to shared aesthetic “ceremonies” (e.g., live music performances) of the same sub-genre will over time create the capacity of new powers in the sub-genre of people, which distinguishes them from the masses. Spinoza says sovereigns forge a “second nature” for the generic people through affects; we can then affirm that smaller groups exposed to a distinct sub-genre of art can acquire a new “third nature” which will contain unique powers extending beyond healthy maintenance of their existing bodies. That is, art in general is necessary to flourish and remain whole (maintaining health), but it can also occasionally expand what one is to unforeseen heights (through specific artistic sub-genres). (shrink)

In the eighteenth century, the economic problem was reformulated according to a particular set of politico-economic components, in which the pursuit of individual freedom was elevated to an ethical and political ideal. Subsequent developments of this individualist philosophy together with the achievements of technological progress now appear as a threat to future existence. Extensive environmentaldegradation and persistent global inequalities of wealth demand a new reformulation of the economic problem. Sustainable development has emerged as the most recent economic strategy for addressing (...) concerns about ecological integrity and social justice. Although there is a recognized continuum of understanding about the concept—from conservative to radical—it has been argued that only the radical version of sustainable development embodies the ethical capacity to address these concerns. Simultaneously the perennial existential question “How should we live?” has been raised anew along with the novel ethico-moral question: “How should we arrange our systems of production and consumption to ensure the sustainability of the Earth under conditions of conspicuous and pressing environmentallylimiting conditions?” Moreover, the strong normative dimension embodied in the radical version of sustainability represents a challenge to liberal democracy and its understanding of individual and collective goods. I argue that the radical approach has the capacity to relieve what is an inherently acute tension of modern life and to reconcile individual autonomy with the wider social and ecological good. (shrink)

I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is (...) attested by the fact that we distrust the exceptions until they can be reconciled with the unmediated. My knowledge of the world outside of myself, on the other hand, depends on the functioning of my sense organs, and this causal dependence on the senses makes my beliefs about the world of nature open to a sort of uncertainty that arises only rarely in the case of beliefs about my own states of mind. Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. But my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense; I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour. (shrink)

Professor Davidson, you are one of the dominant figures in analytic philosophy, your articles and papers are read worldwide and long gone are the times when only a few American specialists knew about what you were doing. So today, there is no need to ask you to in introduce your philosophy in “ten sentences that everybody can understand”. Rather, I would like to give your readers the chance to get an impression of the person behind the philosophy as well (...) as a somewhat closer look at some of that person's current philosophical attitudes. What I am interested in, to put it in a nutshell, are all sorts of relations and transitions ‐relations between your philosophy and that of others, and transitions your thinking and interests, philosophical and otherwise, underwent over the years.Let me start with a couple of “historical” questions: What were the earliest philosophical problems that you were interested in? In the long run, you have become especially well known as the inventor of Anomalous Monism – have you always a physicalist of some sort? (shrink)

In a number of recent articles, the debate on the ethics of fractional reserve “free” banking has been extended to loan maturity mismatching, specifically the banking practice of borrowing short and lending long. Barnett and Block :711–716, 2009; 2010) claim the practice is illicit, because like fractional reserve banking it creates duplicate property titles. They argue there is a continuum in the time dimension between the two kinds of activities. Bagus and Howden :399–406, 2009; 106:295–300, 2012a; Eur J Law Econ, (...) 2012b; Bus Ethics 22:235–245, 2013) maintain that loan maturity mismatching does not create duplicate titles and is not illicit, and that from an economic and legal perspective there is no continuum with fractional reserve banking. Cachanosky and Evans enter the debate from the free-banking standpoint and view both practices as legitimate. In this paper, I agree with the conclusions of Bagus and Howden, but adopt a different approach to support this position. Using the title-transfer theory of contract, I demonstrate from first principles why loan maturity mismatching does not create duplicate property titles and is a legitimate practice. Employing this same theory, I then present a novel argument to show why the contractual arrangements found in fractional reserve banking are logically contradictory and illegitimate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ernst Bloch is a philosopher of hope, of this there can be no doubt. It is the fidelity to the proposition that a better world is possible that undergirds Bloch’s work. Yet, the hopeful tenor of Bloch’s philosophy, as I argue here, is accompanied by a second, more subterranean strand: a concern with the phenomenon of disappointment. Bloch has an interest in what happens after hope fails; those moments when the desire for utopia confronts the impossibility of its realisation. (...) By considering Bloch’s philosophical history of the defeat of the chiliastic movements of the medieval moment alongside his ontology of not-yet-being, the claim is made that disappointment has a constitutive role in the philosophy of hope, such that the dream of a new world is mediated through the history of its failures. Hope and disappointment are entangled, the power of the former indexed to the act of confronting the latter. (shrink)

This is a paper in which I argue that problems of transworld identity and the truth in-truth at distinction are motivated by unhelpful pictures we have in mind while doing metaphysics.

SummaryStarting with Descartes, epistemology has been almost entirely based on first person knowledge. We must begin, according to the usual story, with what is most certain: knowledge of our own sensations and thoughts. In one way or another we then progress, if we can, to knowledge of an objective external world. There is then the final, tenuous, step to knowledge of other minds.In this paper I argue for a total revision of this picture. All propositional thought, whether positive or skeptical, (...) whether of the inner or of the outer, requires possession of the concept of objective truth, and this concept is accessible only to those creatures in communication with others. Third person knowledge – knowledge of other minds – is thus conceptually basic. But such knowledge is impossible without knowledge of a shared world of objects in a shared time and space. Thus the acquisition of knowledge is not based on a progression from the subjective to the objective; it emerges holistically, and is interpersonal from the start. (shrink)

Among the late fifth-century regulations governing the wine-trade in Thasos is a ban on κοτυλιζεν . It is normally characterized as a law of rather narrow relevance, something to do with maintaining the quality of Thasian wines and guarding against false measures. Here I want to examine the possibility that it is in fact a highly political measure on the part of a government hostile to the demos, an attempt to ban an institution identified with democracy–the public bar.

Among the late fifth-century regulations governing the wine-trade in Thasos is a ban on κοτυλιζεῖν (‘selling wine in half-pint measures’, or more generally ‘breaking bulk’). It is normally characterized as a law of rather narrow relevance, something to do with maintaining the quality of Thasian wines and guarding against false measures. Here I want to examine the possibility that it is in fact a highly political measure on the part of a government hostile to thedemos, an attempt to ban an (...) institution identified with democracy–the public bar. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that presentism has a problem accounting forthe truth of statements whose truth conditions seem to require therebe relations that hold between present and non-present objects. Imotivate the problem and then examine several strategies for dealingwith the problem. I argue that no solution is forthcoming, and thispresents a prima facie problem for presentism.

The dispute between Schlick and Neurath over het foundations of empirical knowledge illustrates the difficulties m trymg to draw epistemological conclusions from a verificationist theory of meaning. It also shows how assummg the general correctness of science does not automatically avoid, or provide an easy answer to, skepticism. But while neither Schlick nor Neurath arrived at a satisfactory account of empüical knowledge, there are promising hmts of a better theory m their writmgs. Following up these hints, and drawing on further (...) ideas m Hempel, Carnap and particularly Quine, I suggest the direction I think a naturalistic epistemology should take. (shrink)

In this paper I will consider a number of responses to the grounding problem for presentism. I don’t think that the grounding problem is a damning problem for the presentist (it seems to me that presentism has much more serious problems with cross-time relations and relativity). But each of the solutions comes at a cost, and some are much pricier than others. I will set out what I take these costs to be when I examine each response to the grounding (...) problem. (shrink)

The dispute between Schlick and Neurath over het foundations of empirical knowledge illustrates the difficulties m trymg to draw epistemological conclusions from a verificationist theory of meaning. It also shows how assummg the general correctness of science does not automatically avoid, or provide an easy answer to, skepticism. But while neither Schlick nor Neurath arrived at a satisfactory account of empüical knowledge, there are promising hmts of a better theory m their writmgs. Following up these hints, and drawing on further (...) ideas m Hempel, Carnap and particularly Quine, I suggest the direction I think a naturalistic epistemology should take. (shrink)

In this article I argue that governments are justified in addressing the potential for human induced climate damages on the basis of future generations' rights to bodily integrity and personal property. First, although future generations' entitlements to property originate in our present entitlements, the principle of self-ownership requires us to take 'reasonable care' of the products of future labour. Second, while Parfit's non-identity problem has as yet no satisfactory solution, the present absence of an equilibrium between theory and intuitions justifies (...) a precautionary approach, i.e. treating climate damage as a wrongful harm. In addition, a supplementary consideration is described as arising from transcendental needs. (shrink)