This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...) the differences between the well-Known english writers on moral philosophy from sidgwick to the present day are of little importance." (staff). (shrink)

I take a pragmatic approach to what interpreters do when they interpret and argue that critical pluralists have focused almost exclusively on one aspect of interpretation: the fact that it is an event taking place in a historical and cultural milieu that influences the many ways interpreters approach a given text. However, there is also in interpretation a pragmatic aspect: the fact that it is an act performed by individuals who, through the utterance of their statements, implicitly make claims, for (...) example, regarding the truth of their interpretation. In the first part I explain what critical pluralists overlook and the consequences of such oversight. In the second part I indicate how the validity of interpretation can be assessed. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

Vaccination policy is an ethically challenging domain of public policy. It is a matter of collective importance that reaches into the most private sphere of citizens and unavoidably conflicts with individual-based ethics. Policy makers need to walk a tight rope in order to complement utilitarian public health values with individual autonomy rights, protection of privacy, non-discrimination and protection of the worst-off. Whether vaccination is voluntary or compulsory, universal or targeted, every option faces complex ethical hurdles because of the interdependence of (...) humans in infectious disease matters. In this article, we explore the following three policy questions. (i) Ethically, which policy measures should be addressed when vaccination coverage is insufficient in a population? Information campaigns, legal compulsion, or the use of financial incentives can all be effective, but also controversial policy options. (ii) Is it ethical to target vaccination programs at certain risk-groups? If such measures are necessary, we argue that policymakers will often have to decide which is more important to uphold: non-discrimination or the protection of privacy. And (iii), what is the ethical significance of adverse herd immunity effects? Some vaccination programs will improve average population health, but will at the same time increase the risk of severe morbidity and mortality for individuals in the worst-off groups of society. (shrink)

This book offers a thorough reflection on the relationship between autonomy and paternalism, and argues that, from both theoretical and practical angles, the ...

In the previous issue of Ethical Perspectives David Heyd defends the permissibility of sex selection for non-medical reasons. He tries to show that there is nothing inherently wrong with this practice and that allowing it does not lead to undesirable consequences. There are several difficulties with his analysis, but the main objection is that it ultimately relies on a crude form of utilitarianism. Along with some critical comments on his article, we provide ethical arguments in support of the intuitive condemnation (...) of sex selection for non-medical reasons. (shrink)

In this book, an international group of philosophers, economists and theologians focus on the relationship between justice, luck and responsibility in health care. Together, they offer a thorough reflection on questions such as: How should we understand justice in health care? Why are health care interests so important that they deserve special protection? How should we value health? What are its functions and do these make it different from other goods? Furthermore, how much equality should there be? Which inequalities in (...) health and health care are unfair and which are simply unfortunate? Which matters of health care belong to the domain of justice, and which to the domain of charity? And to what extent should we allow personal responsibility to play a role in allocating health care services and resources, or in distributing the costs? With this book, the editors meet a double objective. First, they provide a comprehensive philosophical framework for understanding the concepts of justice, luck and responsibility in contemporary health care; and secondly, they explore whether these concepts have practical force to guide normative discussions in specific contexts of health care such as prevention of infectious diseases or in matters of reproductive technology. Particular and extensive attention is paid to issues regarding end-of-life care. (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

The Task of the Interpreter offers a new approach to what it means to interpret a text, and reconciles the possibility of multiple interpretations with the need to consider the author’s intention. Vandevelde argues that interpretation is both an act and an event: It is an act in that interpreters, through the statements they make, implicitly commit themselves to justifying their positions, if prompted. It is an event in that interpreters are situated in a cultural and historical framework and (...) come to a text with questions, concerns, and methods of which they are not fully conscious. These two aspects make interpretation a negotiation of meaning. The Task of the Interpreter provides an interdisciplinary investigation of textual interpretation including biblical hermeneutics, translation, and literary fictions. Vandevelde’s philosophical discussion will appeal to theorists of both continental and analytical/pragmatic traditions. (shrink)

An examination of verbal hallucinations and thought insertion as examples of "alienated self-consciousness.".

This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

This book discusses the ethical dimension of the interpretation of texts and events. Its purpose is not to address the neutrality or ideological biases of interpreters, but rather to discuss the underlying issue of the intervention of interpreters into the process of interpretation. The author calls this intervention the "ethical" aspect of interpretation and argues that interpreters are neither neutral nor necessarily activists. He examines three models of interpretation, all of which recognize the role that interpreters play in the process (...) of interpretation. In these models, the question of the truth or validity of interpretation is dependent upon the attitude of interpreters. These three models are: (1) the principle of charity in interpretation in the two different versions defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson; (2) the production of truth, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault; and (3) the regulative principle in interpretation as formal validity claims-as presented by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas-and as benevolence or love as an epistemic virtue-as defended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The critical discussion of these three models, which brings to the fore the different manners in which interpreters intervene in the process of interpretation as persons, lays the foundations for an ethics of interpretation. The Ethics of Interpretation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory. (shrink)

Both Ricoeur and Foucault, apparently independently of each other, dedicated much effort to provide an account of truth that goes far beyond the truth of sentences, propositions, or judgments. While well aware of the speech act theory and pragmatics, they want to go beyond a formalism of rules of speech or arguments and integrate the attitude of the one who speaks in the very notion of truth. They see truth not merely as a property of statements, but as an existential (...) process in such a way that the truth of statements is linked to the historically situated speaker. Truth as a property of statements is related to truth as an event. However, both reject any form of historicism or relativism. I examine Ricoeur's notion of attestation and Foucault's notion of parrhesia, showing how both notions represent a kind of “poetics of truth”, which combines the existential position of the speaker and the historical circumstances of utterance. I show the extent to which both poetics of truth are political and ethical and how successful each poetics is: Ricoeur believes that he can maintain a claim to universality whereas Foucault abandons such a claim and instead subscribes to a radical singularity of the event of speech in a mode of truth that is, as he says, “polemic”. (shrink)

I address a simple question: How are the notions or “discourse” and “text” to be understood, and what does it mean that they “create” their own object? A historical reconstruction seems to be required, if we are to make some sense of the provocative postmodern statements. In order to understand how a discourse can create its own object, three features need to be examined: (1) the inheritance of F. de Saussures’s structuralism, (2) the influence of the Freneh NouvelIe Critique, and (...) (3) Heidegger’s radicalization of hermeneutics. A brief overview is provided of the first two topics, and l will then focus upon the third: an attempt to reconstruct Heidegger’s understanding of ‘discourse’, ‘Ianguage’, and ‘category’ in a course he gave on Aristotle in Freiburg University in 1931. (shrink)

I argue that the romantic notion of “understanding better,” as the ideal of interpretation according to Schleiermacher and Schlegel, is not a “meliorative” understanding, retrospectively situating the work in a broader conceptual or historical context and thus surpassing what the original author meant. The qualification “better” is ethical insofar as it indicates a future-oriented task of responding for the authors and contributing to the continued life of their work. What guides interpreters in such an ethical task is benevolence or love, (...) both toward the object of interpretation—the work—and the author of the work. Love is a hermeneutic imperative that has two sides: first, interpretation “augments” the work or brings it to its “second power;” and, second, interpreters need to put themselves in a certain attitude of non-understanding so that the work will not be constricted in pre-established categories and, instead, susceptible to challenge interpreters. (shrink)

I argue that the romantic notion of “understanding better,” as the ideal of interpretation according to Schleiermacher and Schlegel, is not a “meliorative” understanding, retrospectively situating the work in a broader conceptual or historical context and thus surpassing what the original author meant. The qualification “better” is ethical insofar as it indicates a future-oriented task of responding for the authors and contributing to the continued life of their work. What guides interpreters in such an ethical task is benevolence or love, (...) both toward the object of interpretation—the work—and the author of the work. Love is a hermeneutic imperative that has two sides: first, interpretation “augments” the work or brings it to its “second power;” and, second, interpreters need to put themselves in a certain attitude of non-understanding so that the work will not be constricted in pre-established categories and, instead, susceptible to challenge interpreters. (shrink)

The project consists of editing and translating fifty-four essays by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) in three volumes. The editors and translators have selected and organized these essays of the Gesammelte Werke (‘Complete Works’) published by J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) in Tübingen (from 1986 to 1995) in three volumes. These three volumes will complete the translation of Gadamer into English.

The essay is an examination of two models that have been used to think what “meaning” or “sense” is. Husserl offers the first model in which there is an exchange between the sense that is made in experience and the meaning that is articulated at the linguistic or logical level. The second model is offered by Paul Ricoeur in his theory of narratives. A narrative has a link to what took place that Ricoeur calls “représentance” or “lieutenance”: the narrative configures (...) but at the same time does justice to what took place. The fiction involved in the “as” of “such as it was” is necessary for the “such” that guarantees an adequacy between the narrative and the action or event. I expand on these two models and offer a model of meaning that I call “translatability”. (shrink)

Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into the perennial philosophical problem of ‘truth'.Starting with an historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserl's methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that contemporary phenomenological research opens up (...) in the face of the most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative approaches.Across the 12 essays collected in this volume, Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality and understanding. (shrink)

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.

Editor James Fetzer presents an analytical and historical introduction and a comprehensive bibliography together with selections of many of Carl G. Hempel's most important studies to give students and scholars an ideal opportunity to appreciate the enduring contributions of one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century.

In this article, I define solidarity as the willingness to share with people we do not know personally but whom we consider to be equal to ourselves on the basis of some common feature allowing for identification. In the spirit of David Hume, I explain how identification can be developed through a learning process that leads us to ever more encompassing forms of sympathy. Then I show how solidarity, thus defined, is implemented in the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, (...) I present arguments for not making solidarity too much dependent on responsible behaviour. (shrink)