Gerald Odonis produced a lengthy commentary on the Ethics, recognized by both his contemporaries and modern scholars as a substantial analysis of Aristotelian thought on the virtues, the will, moral choice, justice, and the nature of ethical inquiry. As recent research on late-medieval ethics has expanded deeper into these discussions, interest in Odonis' contributions has grown, but it has been limited textually to the two early printed editions of the work. The present survey of the commentary's manuscript tradition investigates the (...) codices attributed to Odonis, identifies the incomplete witnesses and misattributions, and clarifies the nature of the manuscripts recently assigned to Odonis. (shrink)

Gerald Odonis produced a lengthy commentary on the Ethics, recognized by both his contemporaries and modern scholars as a substantial analysis of Aristotelian thought on the virtues, the will, moral choice, justice, and the nature of ethical inquiry. As recent research on late-medieval ethics has expanded deeper into these discussions, interest in Odonis' contributions has grown, but it has been limited textually to the two early printed editions of the work. The present survey of the commentary's manuscript tradition investigates the (...) codices attributed to Odonis, identifies the incomplete witnesses and misattributions, and clarifies the nature of the manuscripts recently assigned to Odonis. (shrink)

In this interview, Ruth Groff discusses how she came to be a realist, her role as a community organizer, her relationship to critical realism, and various issues arising from her published work over the years. Discussion ranges across the nature of positivism and its legacy, the concept of falsehood, realism about causal powers, mind-independent reality, the history of philosophy, and the underlying interest in ideology-critique that runs through her thinking.

I argue that a common philosophical approach to the interpretation of physical theories—particularly quantum field theories—has led philosophers astray. It has driven many to declare the quantum field theories employed by practicing physicists, so-called ‘effective field theories’, to be unfit for philosophical interpretation. In particular, such theories have been deemed unable to support a realist interpretation. I argue that these claims are mistaken: attending to the manner in which these theories are employed in physical practice, I show that interpreting effective (...) field theories yields a robust foundation for a more refined approach to scientific realism in the context of quantum field theory. The paper concludes by briefly sketching some general morals for interpretive practice in the philosophy of physics. (shrink)

The recent discovery of the Higgs at 125 GeV by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC has put significant pressure on a principle which has guided much theorizing in high energy physics over the last 40 years, the principle of naturalness. In this paper, I provide an explication of the conceptual foundations and physical significance of the naturalness principle. I argue that the naturalness principle is well-grounded both empirically and in the theoretical structure of effective field theories, and (...) that it was reasonable for physicists to endorse it. Its possible failure to be realized in nature, as suggested by recent LHC data, thus represents an empirical challenge to certain foundational aspects of our understanding of QFT. In particular, I argue that its failure would undermine one class of recent proposals which claim that QFT provides us with a picture of the world as being structured into quasi-autonomous physical domains. (shrink)

: On realist terms, politics is about power, security, and order, and the question of whether politics can practice compassion is irrelevant. The author argues that a politics of compassion is possible and necessary in order to address human security needs. She extend debates on care ethics to develop a politics of compassion, using the example of asylum seekers to demonstrate that politics can practice compassion with attentiveness to the needs of vulnerable people who are suffering, an active listening to (...) the voices of the vulnerable, and open, compassionate, and appropriate responses to particular needs. (shrink)

This paper examines Florence Nightingale's realist philosophy of science by comparing it to the contemporaneously dominant philosophy of positivism. It starts by adumbrating the tenets of positivism and continues by assessing the degree to which Nightingale accepted or rejected those tenets. It is argued that while she accepted much of positivism, on realist grounds she opposed its belief in phenomenalism, its rejection of speculative philosophy, its separation of fact and value, and its rejection of religion. Following an examination of how (...) Nightingale's philosophy impinged on her approach to nursing and health care, the paper concludes with a comparison of her ideas with those of modern realism and a discussion of the contemporary salience of her ideas. It is argued that while some aspects of her approach may no longer provide an appropriate basis for modern nursing, her environmental approach, her transcendental realism, and her adherence to caring values may still be of use to contemporary nurses. (shrink)

Contribution to a PPR book symposium on Mark Wilson's Physics Avoidance.

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard story (...) of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is twofold: to distinguish two notions of naturalness employed in beyond the standard model physics and to argue that recognizing this distinction has methodological consequences. One notion of naturalness is an “autonomy of scales” requirement: it prohibits sensitive dependence of an effective field theory’s low-energy observables on precise specification of the theory’s description of cutoff-scale physics. I will argue that considerations from the general structure of effective field theory provide justification for the role this notion (...) of naturalness has played in BSM model construction. A second, distinct notion construes naturalness as a statistical principle requiring that the values of the parameters in an effective field theory be “likely” given some appropriately chosen measure on some appropriately circumscribed space of models. I argue that these two notions are historically and conceptually related but are motivated by distinct theoretical considerations and admit of distinct kinds of solution. (shrink)

This is an introduction to renormalization group methods in quantum field theory aimed at philosophers of science. review path integral methods, the relationship between early renormalization theory and renormalization group methods, and conceptual shifts in thinking about quantum field theory spurred by the development of renormalization group methods.

I discuss Ingmar Persson’s recent argument that the Levelling Down Objection could be worse for prioritarians than for egalitarians. Persson’s argument depends upon the claim that indifference to changes in the average prioritarian value of benefits implies indifference to changes in the overall prioritarian value of a state of affairs. As I show, however, sensible conceptions of prioritarianism have no such implication. Therefore prioritarians have nothing to fear from the Levelling Down Objection.

Justice makes demands upon us. But these demands, important though they may be, are not the only moral demands that we face. Our lives ought to be responsive to other values too. However, some philosophers have identified an apparent tension between those values and norms, such as justice, that seem to transcend the arena of small-scale interpersonal relations and those that are most at home in precisely that arena. How, then, are we to engage with all of the values and (...) norms that we take to apply to us? In this article, I discuss one way that we might hope to resolve the tension and its relation to John Rawls's `basic structure restriction'. The prospect of resolution is offered by the idea of a `division of moral labour', according to which the pursuit of certain values is assigned to institutions and not to individuals. According to Rawls's basic structure restriction, principles of justice are applicable only to the institutions of the basic structure of society. The possibility of a connection between the division of moral labour and the basic structure restriction readily suggests itself. Taking G.A. Cohen's well-known `incentives' critique of the basic structure restriction as a starting point, I consider five ways in which that restriction might be defended by appeal to the division of moral labour. I conclude that none of these defences succeeds, for none convinces that the conditions in which it makes sense to apply the division of moral labour idea obtain for Rawls's conception of distributive justice. Although the division of moral labour is an attractive proposal, it can do no work in a Rawlsian context. Key Words: Cohen • distributive justice • egalitarian ethos • equality • Rawls. (shrink)

Of the various loci of systematic theology that call for sustained philosophical investigation, the doctrine of sanctification stands out as a prime candidate. In response to that call, William Alston developed three models of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model. In response to Alston’s argument for the sharing model, this paper offers grounds for a reconsideration of the interpersonal model. We close with a discussion of some of the implications (...) of one’s understanding of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit for practical Christian spirituality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Note of Interpretation: Theistic Finitism as an Aesthetics of Religious NaturalismAndrew Stone Porter (bio)In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate (...) directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation.—Alfred North Whitehead1Theistic finitism, the position that God is not omnipotent, is the most tenable solution to the problem of evil—but it also necessitates a slide toward immanence. Among the ranks of the finitists we find philosophers such as William James,2 process thinkers such as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne,3 theological personalists such as Edgar Brightman (and, Rufus Burrow argues, his pupil Martin Luther King, Jr.),4 feminist disability theologians like Julia Watts Belser,5 and popular religion writers such as Harold Kushner.6 Like many others, Kushner found in finitism not an answer to an abstract theological puzzle, but an existentially necessary salve for the despair that nearly overtook him when his three year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. No loving, all-knowing, all-powerful creator would ever allow such [End Page 70] a thing to happen, Kushner reasoned. If God is not all-powerful, then God need not be the author of our pain, but a friend who hurts with us as we bear it. Rather than sadistic puppeteer, a finite God becomes “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”7 As Jürgen Moltmann put it, “the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So [God] is also a loveless being.”8 Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected as he awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp, “Only the suffering God can help.”9However, when one strips away divine omnipotence, one must also bid adieu either to God’s omniscience or creator-hood: for an omniscient creator, crafting the world with full knowledge of how everything would unfold, would be ipso facto omnipotent. We are left, then, with the following alternatives: we could posit a God who pressed the “create world” button not knowing what would happen (which seems irresponsible, calling into question God’s goodness)—as Tim Bayne puts it, “If future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a massive gamble.”10 We may share Albert Einstein’s famous distaste for a God who plays dice with the universe. The other alternative is that God’s knowledge and power are partial, that the Divine is merely one being/force among many. But if God is “just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,”11 then in what sense can we say that God is God at all?This paper offers a construal of theistic finitism as a form of religious naturalism with an aesthetics of empathetic solidarity. That is, when we relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence, instead imagining that God is struggling and suffering along with us, we relinquish as well belief in an overbearing “supernatural realm” or “order” governing/underlying all things. To see God in this way, as Whitehead says, is to “introduce the note of interpretation.” And that note, I suggest, is a musical note, specifically a blues note.12 To call the loving [End Page 71] friendship we experience “God” is an aesthetic choice, an informed way of interpreting life in order to move through it with companionship, tenderness and care. A naturalistic religiosity, in Carol Wayne White’s phrasing, “can be a mode of reflecting on, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.”13 In this way theology becomes, as Belser puts it, “a grammar of the imagination.”14 As a blues aesthetics of empathetic solidarity, theistic finitism may be considered a form of religious naturalism particularly well-suited to our present moment, mired as it is in cascading crises and careening into catastrophe. I suggest that, as young spiritual seekers exit churches in search of more meaningful community... (shrink)

In The Foundations of Bioethics, former senior editor of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. radically reassessed the nature and scope of bioethics, as well as the possibilities for this still-young field that he helped found, in light of the prevailing sociohistorical context, which he argued had been inadequately considered by bioethicists. This issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy provides a snapshot of how bioethics is developing in the wake of Engelhardt’s critique. Topics covered (...) include the relation between rule of law and US healthcare policy, the relation between autonomy and consent, the role of rights in bioethical discourse, the debate between naturalism and normativism in the theory of disease, and the question of when human individuals begin to exist. Although no single theme explicitly unites them, the papers in this issue were produced within and are fruitfully read in terms of what Engelhardt influentially characterized as a morally pluralistic postmodernity subsisting amidst the ruins of tradition. In the conclusion, I introduce a further wrinkle into this Engelhardtian picture—namely, the looming danger of a more general epistemological pluralism effected by new technologies like Deepfakes. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barrio, Pailos and Szmuc (BPS) show that there are logics that have exactly the validities of classical logic up to arbitrarily high levels of inference. They suggest that a logic therefore must be identified by its valid inferences at every inferential level. However, Scambler shows that there are logics with all the validities of classical logic at every inferential level, but with no antivalidities at any inferential level. Scambler concludes that in order to identify a logic, (...) we at least need to look at the validities and the antivalidities of every inferential level. In this paper, I argue that this is still not enough to identify a logic. I apply BPS’s techniques in a super/sub-valuationist setting to construct a logic that has exactly the validities and antivalidities of classical logic at every inferential level. I argue that the resulting logic is nevertheless distinct from classical logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 151-171 [Access article in PDF] Eric Voegelin on Nazi Political Extremism Clifford F. Porter Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is not as well known among historians as he is among political theorists, yet he has had a continuing influence on both German Social Democrat and Christian Democrat political leaders. His early life is very much a reflection of both the intellectual developments (...) and the chaos of Germany and Austria between the wars. Voegelin's analysis of Nazism is worth revisiting by historians because it delineated the Nazi rationale for the Holocaust in the early 1930s, even if the Nazis themselves had yet to move towards mass murder early in the regime. Voegelin was not prescient enough to predict the extent of the Holocaust, but he understood that the ideological rationale of Nazi violence was unlimited. Furthermore, his description of political extremism as Gnosticism in 1952 is valid for explaining why an individual might support the Nazis and then voluntarily commit extraordinarily vicious acts to try to realize the dream-world of the Third Reich.The political, economic, and social chaos in Austria after World War I was the catalyst for the young Eric Voegelin's studies of the essence of ideologies and the ideologists who promoted them from both the left and right wing. As National Socialism grew, so did his experiences with and understanding of extremist political ideologies. Contemporary intellectual debates between neo-Kantian and existentialist methodology, however, did not help penetrate to the essential causes of political extremism. His experiences in America in the mid-1920s were essential for his development away from what he characterized as narrow methodological provincialism to an empiricism open to philosophic questions, including spiritual questions. By 1938 he had theorized that ideologies were political secular religions that substituted the state for divine reality.Because of this interpretation, Voegelin's approach to totalitarianism has been characterized as an outdated ersatz religion model, better suited for the Cold War. 1 The ersatz religion model worked reasonably well to describe similarities [End Page 151] the National Socialist movement had with religions, but Voegelin recognized that it did not penetrate to the essence of ideologies. His understanding of ideologies matured after World War II into his theory that ideologies were Gnostic quests for absolute certainty that caused alienation from reality.Voegelin thought that the search for certainty ultimately required excluding any evidence to the contrary of the ideology; therefore, ideologies limited the individual's view of human reality to the immediate world. Furthermore, although ideologies are founded on a kernel of truth—e.g., proletarians are sometimes oppressed—ideologists become quickly alienated from reality as a consequence of their own quest for certainty about meaning in existence. The consequences of alienation are that ideologists pursue the perceived immanent good and try to eliminate the perceived immanent evil, thereby rationalizing criminality and even murder. Violence is inherent to extremist political ideologies. Background and Influences: Weber, Kraus, University, and America Eric Voegelin was born in 1901 and grew up in Vienna. After the war Austria was convulsed by political and social crises ranging from attempted reactionary and Communist coups to constant food shortages. In the first post-war election Voegelin's political and social inclinations led him to vote for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), but he was aggravated by the uncompromising Marxist rhetoric of the SDP leadership. In this atmosphere Voegelin began his long journey toward understanding ideologies, but first he had to work through many different political and philosophic problems before he arrived at an adequate understanding. The intellectuals that influenced him during this long process were diverse, but they shared a hostility to ideologies.The first important academic influence on Voegelin was Max Weber. 2 Weber encouraged intellektuelle Rechtschaffenheit (intellectual honesty) with others and especially with oneself. Weber insisted on following an ethic of responsibility for one's actions (Verantwortungsethik), rather than making apologies for following an ethic of good intentions (Gesinnungsethik). The latter, Weber feared, was often used to justify bad consequences of well-intended actions. 3 These simple... (shrink)

It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...) systems. I show that by exploiting a connection between the amount of entanglement in a quantum state and the algorithmic complexity of that state, one can use recently developed tools for causal inference to identify a causal asymmetry—and a notion of causation—in the dynamical evolution of quantum systems. (shrink)

What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, (...) and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. In a new preface, the author sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy. (shrink)

This article explores datafication as a speculative discourse that fundamentally and instrumentally misunderstands data, not as a representational system, but as an ontology. This analysis of datafication takes a semiotic and media-archaeological approach to datafication, understanding it as an imaginary media system, and the article looks to supplementary discourses in data visualization and big data to clarify and expand an understanding of datafication as a prescriptive and speculative idea. This critique is sharpened through the exploration of a detailed study of (...) the early visualizations and unpublished fictions of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose imagined technology of the “megascope” gives a remarkable blueprint for contemporary discourses in data visualization and data science. Du Bois’s liberatory perspective is contrasted to a more paranoid example coming from the self-documented delusional system of Daniel Paul Schreber, who provides a much different vision of a totalizing media system in the form of an Aufschreibesysteme, which seems to presage another side of datafication as a surveillance system. Taken together, datafication, the megascope, and the Aufschreibesysteme work as three speculative media that imagine themselves as different instances or visions of a totalizing media system, a notion that has become especially significant in the technological, cultural, and economic systems of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper is a philosophical defense of the doctrine of penal substitution. I begin with a delineation of Richard Swinburne’s satisfaction-type theory of the atonement, exposing a weakness of it which motivates a renewed look at the theory of penal substitution. In explicating a theory of penal substitution, I contend that: (i) the execution of retributive punishment is morally justified in certain cases of deliberate wrongdoing; (ii) deliberate human sin against God constitutes such a case; and (iii) the transfer of (...) the retributive punishment due sinners to Christ is morally coherent. Whatever else might be said for and against such a conception of the doctrine of the atonement, the plausibility of the theory presented here should give us pause in the often hasty rejection of the doctrine of penal substitution. (shrink)

What happens to the causal structure of a world when time is reversed? At first glance it seems there are two possible answers: the causal relations are reversed, or they are not. I argue that neither of these answers is correct: we should either deny that time-reversed worlds have causal relations at all, or deny that causal concepts developed in the actual world are reliable guides to the causal structure of time-reversed worlds. The first option is motivated by the instability (...) of time-reversed dynamical evolutions under interventions. The second option is motivated by a recognition of how contingent structural features of the actual world shape our causal concepts and reasoning strategies. (shrink)

The view that one’s moral status is dependent on the stance of the will alone is an attractive view, deeply entrenched in Christian ethics. Yet it cannot account for pervasive intuitions about some kinds of moral mistakes, in particular those which arise at the point of choice. An agent’s moral beliefs are connected to his or her moral personality in a way that beliefs about matters of fact are not. This does not mean that a moral mistake never excuses the (...) agent from subjective guilt, but it does mean that we cannot assume that this is always the case. This paper attempts to develop these suggestions through reflection on Othello, whose eponymous hero acts out of a combination of factual and moral errors which are intertwined with his character in revealing ways. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the debate between Derrida and Levinas on Hebraism and Hellenism, Christian thought that retains a place for philosophy is often regarded as “Graeco‐Christian”, a monolithic system with an unfortunate history. The work of the French philosopher Stansilas Breton suggests that the reality is more complex. In Le Verbe et la croix , he examines the function of the term logos staurou in Paul, arguing that this untranslatable term stands as a question mark in a world of (...) language that could only speak “Jew” or “Greek”. Far from being a sign of Christian superiority, the cross signals an imperative for dispossession intrinsic to Christian language. In its “nothingness” the cross functions as a principle of critique that makes innovation and engagement possible. Thus while the cross involves negation it moves beyond negative theology. Drawing upon neoplatonist philosophy, Breton delineates the way in which the cross makes possible “the writing of the self in the world”. This paper draws upon Breton's understanding of the function of the cross to argue that the heritage of Athens endures and must be re‐thought, always recognizing the limits of all human language. After examining Breton's understanding of the logos staurou, it relates this notion to his broader understanding of revelation as “writing”. Finally it shows how Breton appeals to neoplatonist meonotology to speak in more universal terms of the need for a principle of dispossession at the heart of all religious language. For Christians the cross is this principle, enabling human beings to be causes of themselves who engender new being. (shrink)

This study compares employee attitudes to their reports of whether they consider their socio-economic status to be higher, the same, or lower than that of their parents. The premise of the research was based on the apparent deterioration of the expectation that each generation will live in greater economic comfort than their parents, referred to as a vital component of the American dream. Where this pattern of socio-economic progress has been interrupted, it may relate to certain attitudes. These attitudes, in (...) turn, are likely to influence behavior. Here the focus is on whether employees' survey responses indicate they are honest, trustworthy, and tolerant. Differences in these characteristics that relate to self-reported socio- economic progress, may serve to explain the occurrence of certain behaviors among people who otherwise seem highly ethical. This information may also help create organizational awareness of the potential for unethical behavior, when employees have been blocked from their own expectations for betterment. (shrink)

This book describes the "naturalistic fallacy", as attributed to Hume, that non-moral premises cannot logically entail a moral conclusion, and distinguishes it from the similarly named though subtly different fallacy identified by Moore in Principia Ethica by comparing and contrasting its presence in a range of ethical or moral systems. A review of Hume’s position elicits the implications to theological naturalism, and how this relates to Kierkegaard’s "paradox of faith" and the doctrine of ineffability. Methods of logical examination of religious (...) language are discussed, leading to the dissection of the analytic proposition that ‘God is Good’ and of the connotations of proper names. Porter concludes from this a solution to the naturalistic fallacy: that "good" is essential to "God" by definition, and therefore that premises relating to God must contain an inherent morality. Originally published in 1968, this book includes topics such as Mediaeval attitudes to deity and morality; Religious myth, images and language; Comparative conceptions of deity. (shrink)

'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and no superiors. Porter is a witty, humane writer with an extraordinary vocabulary and a sparkling sense of fun. Whether he is quoting from obscure medical texts or analysing scabrous diaries, dishing the dirt on long-dead bigwigs or evoking sympathy for human suffering, his grasp is masterly and his erudition appealing. I wish I could read it again (...) for the first time: you can.' Times Educational Supplement, Book of the Week In this startlingly brilliant sequel to the prize-winning ENLIGHTENMENT Roy Porter completes his lifetime's work, offering a magical, enthusiastic and charming account of the writings of some of the most attractive figures ever to write English. (shrink)

Lively, comprehensive, and contemporary, The Voice of Reason: Fundamentals of Critical Thinking covers three principal areas: thought and language, systematic reasoning, and modes of proof. It employs highly accessible explanations and a multitude of examples drawn from social issues and various academic fields, showing students and other readers how to construct and criticize arguments using the techniques of sound reasoning. The Voice of Reason examines the traditional elements of the field and also explores new ground. The first section of the (...) book elucidates the relationship between thought and language, explaining how words function. It discusses meaning, connotation, vagueness, ambiguity, and definition, identifying the linguistic elements that can produce mistakes in thinking. The next section describes the rules of systematic reasoning, examining such topics as truth, relevance, and adequacy; deductive logic ; and induction. Sixteen fallacies in thinking are also described through extensive illustrations and applications. The final section of the book offers a unique study of what constitutes proof in several different areas--including politics, advertising, law, and social issues--as well as in the academic disciplines of literature, science, history, and ethics. The author describes the various rules of evidence, using essays by major figures in each field as examples. An ideal text for courses in critical thinking, informal logic, and reasoning and writing, The Voice of Reason offers numerous pedagogical features including a host of examples; assignments, exercises, and puzzles at both the halfway point and at the end of each chapter; cartoons and quotations throughout; and practical applications of theoretical concepts. An extensive Instructor's Manual contains answers to the exercises that appear throughout the text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 349 Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics. By JOHN CASEY. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. ix + 226. By this philosophical study of the four cardinal virtues, John Casey joins the ever.expanding ranks of those moral theorists who have con· trihuted to the contemporary theory of the virtues. But Casey's hook is set apart from the others both by the exceptionally high quality of his analysis and (...) even more by his thesis that traditional thinking on the virtues is in tension, at least, with fundamental Christian assumptions about the nature of the moral life. For both these reasons, his hook deserves serious attention, especially by those scholars who argue for a special congruity between virtue theory and Christian ethics. Although the title might suggest otherwise, this hook is not primarily a historical study. Rather, Casey uses the traditional schema of the four cardinal virtues (courage, temperance, practical wisdom or prudence, and justice) as the basis for philosophical analysis, which is intended as "a modest rediscovery and (hence) criticism of a tradition which we inherit" (p. viii). Along the way, he draws on a diverse selection of writers, among whom Aquinas as well as Aristotle are prominent. His thesis is that the tradition of the virtues is "worldly," that is, in significant tension with our dominant Christian and Kantian assumptions about morality, in two ways: "[the virtues] include an element of self-regard, and... they rely upon material conditions for their fulfillment" (p. viii). And yet the tradition of the virtues is not simply at odds with our received assumptions about morality. As Casey argues in his brilliant first chapter, "Persons," the Kantian commitment to respect for persons implies that the adventitious qualities that distinguish individuals are far more significant morally than Kant could allow. In the first place, the human qualities that do in fact command our respect include such capacities as intelligence, wit, and even strength. While we may want to distinguish in theory between respect for these sorts of qualities and a purely moral respect for a good will, Casey argues that this sort of distinction is artificial and untrue to our actual judgments. Hence, he concludes, " If there is no adamantine distinction between what characterizes someone purely as a person, and all other advantages and attractive qualities a human being may have, then the way is clearly open for a 'worldly' scheme of values" (p. 9). Secondly, he argues that respect for persons necessarily presupposes some capacities for empathy and emotional response that on Kant's theory must he wholly irrelevant to the moral life (pp. 9-28). Correlatively, he claims that the individual's sense of oneself and 350 BOOK REVIEWS others is mediated through an awareness of one's body and its relation to others' bodies in a way that a Kantian theory cannot readily allow: "We can, then, move naturally from the idea of persons as self-conscious, rational beings, to them as beings with certain emotions and attitudes, and with a certain apprehension of themselves and others mediated through their sense of their own and others' bodies " {p. 43). Finally, he argues that these interlocking human qualities and capacities necessarily entail not only a willingness to acknowledge the claims of others but also a readiness to make certain claims upon others, to set a value on oneself, that is at least in tension with the Christian ideal of self-abnegation (pp. 44-50). I have dwelt at some length on the first chapter of Casey's book because it sets out the main lines of analysis for the subsequent chapters. In the course of developing his main thesis, he offers a number of fascinating analyses of particular questions, including a defense of the unity of the virtues (pp. 67-78), a discussion of the ways in which a virtue can he a bodily quality (pp. 105-113), and an argument that practical wisdom, and therefore moral goodness, may depend in part on the possession of a more than average level of intelligence (pp. 144147 ). At times, the very richness of his analyses can make it difficult to perceive the threads of a coherent argument. But he consistently returns to his... (shrink)

Drawing on Nietzsche's prolific early notebooks and correspondence, this book challenges the polarized picture of Nietzsche as a philosopher who abandoned classical philology.

Abstract:Bipolar or related disorders (BoRD) present unique practical and existential problems for people who live with them. All agents experience changes in the things they care about over time. However people living with BoRD face drastic shifts in what seems valuable to them, which upset their longitudinal values (if, indeed, any stable longitudinal values are available in the first place). Navigating these evaluative high seas presents agents living with BoRD with a distinctive existential question, not shared by those on calmer (...) waters. I draw out two contrasting ways in which someone living with BoRD might seek to support their self-determination in these circumstances, by crafting appropriate self care and support regimes. The first strategy involves managing one’s affective episodes so that they do not interrupt one’s plans and long-term agency over time. The second involves a regimen that allows one the greatest degree of freedom in adapting to changes in one’s experiences of value. What distinguishes these sorts of self-determination is the scope at which they are predicated. Although both sorts of self-determination allow an individual to rule themselves, they alter the overall shape of one’s autonomy in quite different ways. (shrink)

This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James I. Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and idealism that were enshrined (...) by Plato and Aristotle, and through whose lens most subsequent views of ancient art and aesthetics have typically been filtered. Treating aesthetics in this way can help us perceive the commonly shared basis of the diverse arts of antiquity. Reorienting our view of the ancient vocabularies of art and experience around matter and sensation, this book dramatically changes how we look upon the ancient achievements in these same areas. (shrink)

Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal-historical but the term ‘rice’ is (...) hybrid. For, whereas the former term is of scientific but little practical interest, the latter is not: rice is a significant part of the human diet. So, we predicted there would be two factors to the reference determination of ‘rice’: a superficial-descriptive one and a deep-causal one. Our experiments confirmed these hypotheses using the methods of elicited production and truth value judgments. We take our results to support the hybrid Theory of ‘rice’ rather than the ambiguity or different-idiolects theory. We were not testing ‘myrtle’ but, surprisingly, our results implied that ‘myrtle’ was partly descriptive and so like ‘rice’ but not ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’. A follow-up experiment confirmed these puzzling results. More investigation is needed. (shrink)

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design decisions that we believe warrant consideration as others study cross-disciplinary research processes.

Rawls’s account of international toleration in The Law of Peoples has been the subject of vigorous critiques by critics who believe that he unacceptably dilutes the principles of his Law of Peoples in order to accommodate non-liberal societies. One important component in these critiques takes issue specifically with Rawls’s inclusion of certain non-liberal societies (‘decent peoples’) in the constituency of justification for the Law of Peoples. In Rawls’s defence, I argue that the explanation for the inclusion of decent peoples in (...) the constituency of justification is not, as is standardly assumed, that they are the kind of societies that ought to be tolerated in that way on some prior conception of which kinds of societies ought to be tolerated in that way. The real explanation appeals to a methodological principle underlying Rawls’s approach to political justification, according to which liberals owe justification, as a matter of liberal principle, to those who comply with liberal principles for political institutions that apply to them. If such liberal principles can be complied with by agents who nevertheless cannot accept fully liberal justifications for those principles, then liberalism itself requires liberals to seek justifications which they can accept. This approach gives us a new way to view decent peoples: as just such agents, who are therefore owed a justification for the Law of Peoples that they can accept. Decency is thus a concept that is internal to liberal political justification at the international level. Reading Rawls in this way permits a coherent and attractive defence of his strategy of toleration and of his international theory as a whole. (shrink)

Whether it is morally permissible to compel women to undergo a caesarean section is a topic of longstanding debate. Despite plenty of arguments against the moral permissibility of a forced caesarean section, the question keeps cropping up. This paper seeks to scrutinise a particular moral argument in favour of compulsion: the appeal to parental obligation. We present what we take to be a distillation of the basic form of this argument. We then argue that, in the absence of an exhaustive (...) theory of parental obligation, the question of whether a labouring woman is morally obliged to undergo emergency surgery—and especially the further question of it is morally permissible for third parties to compel this—cannot be answered via ready-made theory. We propose that the most viable option for settling both questions is by analogy. We follow earlier writers in presenting an analogous case—that of fathers being compelled to undergo non-consensual invasive surgery to save their children—but expand the analogy by considering objections that appeal to the ownership of the fetus. We offer two lines of response: the parthood view of pregnancy and chimaera dad. We argue that it is clear in the analogous case that compulsion cannot be justified. We also offer this analogy as a useful tool for assessing whether mothers have a moral duty to undergo caesarean sections, both in general and in particular cases, even if such a duty is insufficient to warrant compulsion. (shrink)

This article discusses clinical ethics consultation (CEC), and thereby ethics support services in the Canadian context. Commonalities and differences between the three models of ethics support and CEC shared in this article are identified, set within the broader context of the Canadian healthcare system, accreditation, and professionalization of practicing healthcare ethicists.

T'Challa, seemingly risen from the dead after having suffered grievous wounds and a fall from a high cliff, openly challenges Erik Killmonger's right to be called King of Wakanda. With T'Challa's return, Killmonger orders W'Kabi to "kill this clown," but Okoye decides to follow tradition, not Killmonger, saying to her husband W'Kabi that "the challenge is not complete." The same principle is at work when, earlier in the film, T'Challa engages in ritual combat against M'Baku, leader of the Jabari Tribe. (...) T'Challa, occupying the most privileged position, can smile bemusedly and shake his head at Shuri's outburst, and a child in the crowd can innocently slap his hand to his forehead in disbelief; but the adults present are not amused at Shuri's transgressions. Shuri may be the most visible gadfly, but the harshest – and, ultimately, most effective – critics of Wakanda's kings are Killmonger, Nakia, and T'Challa himself. (shrink)