This 1988 volume is a collection of thirteen seminal essays on ethics, free will, and the philosophy of mind. The essays deal with such central topics as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the concept of a person, the structure of the will, the nature of action, the constitution of the self, and the theory of personal ideals. By focusing on the distinctive nature of human freedom, Professor Frankfurt is able to explore fundamental problems of what it is to be (...) a person and of what one should care about in life. (shrink)

As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...) recommend that particular charity. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already being used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars of donations, it is not supported by any of the approaches to moral uncertainty that have been proposed thus-far in the philosophical literature. In this paper, we will develop a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty that honors the proportionality intuition in favor of splitting one’s donations. We also show how this bargaining-based approach has several further advantages over the best alternative proposals. (shrink)

Presents a theory of bullshit, how it differs from lying, how those who engage in it change the rules of conversation, and how indulgence in bullshit can alter a person's ability to tell the truth.

Shelly Kagan has recently defended the view that it is morally worse for a human being to suffer some harm than it is for a lower animal (such as a dog or a cow) to suffer a harm that is equally severe (ceteris paribus). In this paper, I argue that this view receives rather less support from our intuitions than one might at first suppose. According to Kagan, moreover, an individual’s moral status depends partly upon her ‘modal capacities.’ In this (...) paper, I argue that the most natural strategy for justifying Kagan’s theory faces some important challenges. More generally, I argue that philosophers who wish to defend the view that human beings have a higher moral status than that of the lower animals face a dilemma. Either their theory of moral status will imply (unacceptably) that some severely cognitively impaired human beings have a significantly lower moral status than that of typical human beings, or these philosophers will be forced to ground moral status in a set of properties so far removed from a subject’s actual capacities that it will become difficult to see why these kinds of properties should have such moral importance. (shrink)

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes (...) clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between consciousness and attention through theoretical considerations about evolution. Specifically, we will argue that the empirical findings on attention and the basic considerations concerning the evolution of the different forms of attention demonstrate that consciousness and attention must be dissociated regardless of which definition of these terms one uses. To the best of our knowledge, no extant view on the relationship between consciousness and attention has this advantage. Because of this characteristic, this paper (...) presents a principled and neutral way to settle debates concerning the relationship between consciousness and attention, without falling into disputes about the meaning of these terms. A decisive conclusion of this approach is that extreme views on the relationship between consciousness and attention must be rejected, including identity and full dissociation views. There is an overlap between the two within conscious attention, but developing a full understanding of this mechanism requires further empirical investigations. (shrink)

Wolfson's systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza has long been a classic. It is with pride that we make it available again in a one-volume edition.

This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship’s loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with an explanation of friendship’s (...) institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity’ juxtaposed with Honneth’s recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution personal relationships make to morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship’s institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity. (shrink)

Monogamy, I’ve argued, faces a pressing problem: the difficulty of finding a morally relevant difference between its restriction on having additional partners and a restriction on having additional friends. To the extent that we’d find a restriction on having additional friends morally troubling, that puts pressure on us to judge the same about monogamy. This argument, however, has recently come under attack by Kyle York, who defends monogamy on grounds of specialness, practicality, and jealousy. In this paper I’ll argue that, (...) pace York, these defenses of monogamy all fail. (shrink)

One of the logical problems with which Arthur Prior struggled is the problem of finding, in Prior’s own phrase, a “logic for contingent beings.” The difficulty is that from minimal modal principles and classical quantification theory, it appears to follow immediately that every possible object is a necessary existent. The historical development of quantified modal logic (QML) can be viewed as a series of attempts---due variously to Kripke, Prior, Montague, and the fee-logicians---to solve this problem. In this paper, I review (...) the extant solutions, finding them all wanting. Then I suggest a new solution inspired by Kripke’s theory of rigid designation and Kaplan’s logic of demonstratives, the latter in particular. It turns out that the basic mechanism of Kaplan’s logic can be exploited to yield a version of QML that will serve as a viable logic for contingent beings. This result, as I show, sheds new light on the problems of singular negative existential propositions, the question of actualism, the question of the existence of the contingent a priori, the relation between logical truth and necessity, and various modal problems and paradoxes going back to Chrysippus, Ramsey, and Moore. (shrink)

_Formal Ethics_ is the study of formal ethical principles. The most important of these, perhaps even the most important principle of life, is the golden rule: "Treat others as you want to be treated". Although the golden rule enjoys support amongst different cultures and religions in the world, philosophers tend to neglect it. _Formal Ethics_ gives the rule the attention it deserves. Modelled on formal logic, _Formal Ethics_ was inspired by the ethical theories of Kant and Hare. It shows that (...) the basic formal principles of ethics, like the golden rule, are very similar to principles of logic, and gives a firm basis for our ethical thinking. As an introduction to moral rationality, _Formal Ethics_ also considers non-formal elements, and is applied to areas of practical concern such as racism and moral education. (shrink)

Although fear and anxiety have gradually become a shared experience in the time of COVID-19, few studies have examined its content from historical, cultural, and phenomenological perspectives concerning the self-awareness and alterity. We discuss the development of the ubiquitous nature of Taijin-kyōfushō (TKS), a subtype of social anxiety disorder (SAD) originated and considered culturally-bound in the 1930s Japan involving fear of offending or displeasing other people. Considering the historical processes of disease classification, advances in cognitive neurosciences, and the need to (...) better understand the content of suffering, psychiatric nosology for SAD still appears controversial and requires further investigations. (shrink)

This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle’s account, but also clarifies the process of “actualizing time” as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time. It speaks to the resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and will become an important resource for anyone interested in Aristotle’s theory of time, of (...) its relationship to Aristotle’s larger project in the Physics, and to time’s place in the broader scope of Aristotelian natural science. Graduate students and scholars researching in this area especially will find the authors arguments provocative, a welcome addition to other recent publications on Aristotle’s Treatise on Time. ​. (shrink)

In this long-awaited volume, on which he worked for twenty years, Mr. Wolfson describes the body of doctrine known as the Kalam.

Abstract:Boundaryless careers may be beneficial to people with rare and valuable skills, but might prove harmful to many others. The idea ofemployabilityas an ethical responsibility of employers to employees is introduced; it is argued that attention to employability in private practice and public policy partially resolves the ethical problems inherent to in boundaryless careers. Because employability programs are considered to be voluntary, some means of holding employers accountable for such responsibilities needs to be considered when discussing boundaryless careers. Implications for (...) practice and public policy are also discussed. (shrink)

Chronos in Aristotle’s Physics: On the Nature of Time argues that Aristotle’s Treatise on Time (Physics iv 10-14) is a highly contextualized account of time in so far as it is not a treatment of time qua time but a parallel account to Aristotle’s foregoing studies of nature, principles (192b13-22), motion (201a10-11), infinite (iii 4-8), place (iv 1-5), and void (iv 6-9) in the Physics i-iv 9. It offers a reading of Physics iv 10-11 with the aim of showing that (...) time, chronos, here has to do with time as an attribute of motion, as an interval, i.e., the type of time that, as Aristotle describes at 218a1, “is taken.” With support from a reading of Physics iv 14 and evidence from Aristotle’s greater philosophy of nature, it argues that time for Aristotle is derivative of the modal change of natural being. Time is then only ever potentially actual unless this change is apprehended, in most cases, by the working together of perception and intellection and, in some cases, by perception alone. (shrink)

This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains. -/- Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a (...) genuine cognitive extension Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in "digital native" philosophy and engineering Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web. (shrink)

Abstract:Although the concept of corporate social performance (CSP) has become more clearly specified in recent years, an analysis of CSP from the perspective of one particular stakeholder group has been largely ignored in this research: employees. It is proposed that employees merit specific attention with regard to assessments of corporate social performance. In this paper, a model for evaluating and measuring CSP at the employee level is proposed, and implications for evaluating contemporary employment policies and practices are offered. An iterative (...) process for systematically including normative content in the CSP model across stakeholder groups is also offered. (shrink)

This book explains how the many diverse topics that concerned him belong together as essential elements in his effort to play physician to "the sickness of the modern mind.

This is a translation of the second chapter of F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. It is preceded by a brief introduction in which I situate the chapter within Schelling's oeuvre and suggest that it is not only an early articulation of Schellingian Naturphilosophie, but also prescient, anticipating Schelling's later positive philosophy.

This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept. I also defend Robust Temporalism against several common objections, and I highlight its relevance to a (...) number of practical policy debates, including longtermism. My conclusion is that Robust Temporalism is a moral live option, that deserves to be taken much more seriously in the future. (shrink)

Many people question whether God is the source of morality. Under divine command theory, God's will creates the moral order, and therefore ethical truths are true because of God's will. Under natural law, on the other hand, some ethical truths do not depend on God's will, and yet perhaps they depend on his reason or creation. Ethics and Religion develops strong, defensible, and original versions of both divine command theory and natural law. The book also discusses ethics and atheism: how (...) atheists object on ethical grounds to belief in God and how they view ethics. The book defends belief in God from criticisms and analyzes related concepts, such as practical reason, the golden rule, ethics and evolution, the problem of evil, and the fine-tuning argument. (shrink)