A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them.

How does a person become Hitler's enemy number one? Not through espionage or violence, it turns out, but by striking fearlessly at the intellectual and spiritual roots of National Socialism. Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Catholic thinker and teacher who devoted the full force of his intellect to breaking the deadly spell of Nazism that ensnared so many of his beloved countrymen. His story might well have been lost to us were it not for this memoir he penned (...) in the last decades of his life at the request of his wife, Alice von Hildebrand. In My Battle Against Hitler, covering the years from 1921 to 1938, von Hildebrand tells of the scorn and ridicule he endured for sounding the alarm when many still viewed Hitler as a positive and inevitable force. He expresses the sorrow of having to leave behind his home, friends, and family in Germany to conduct his fight against the Nazis from Austria. He recounts how he defiantly challenged Nazism in the public square, prompting the German ambassador in Vienna to describe him to Hitler as 'the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria.' And in the midst of all the danger he faced, he conveys his unwavering trust in God, even during his harrowing escape from Vienna and his desperate flight across Europe, with the Nazis always just one step behind. Dietrich von Hildebrand belongs to the very earliest anti-Nazi resistance. His public statements led the Nazis to blacklist him already in 1921, long before the horrors of the Third Reich and more than twenty-three years before the famous assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. His battle would culminate in the countless articles he published in Vienna, a selection of which are featured in this volume. 'It is an immense privilege,' writes editor John Henry Crosby, founder of the Hildebrand Project, 'to present to the world the shining witness of one man who risked everything to follow his conscience and stand in defiance of tyranny'. (shrink)

Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley helped popularize science by writing for general interest publications when science was becoming increasingly professionalized. A non-professional, Chambers used his family-owned Chambers' Edinburgh Journal to report on scientific discoveries, giving his audience access to ideas that were only available to scientists who regularly attended professional meetings or read published transactions of such forums. He had no formal training in the sciences and little interest in advancing the professional status of scientists; his course of (...) action was determined by his disability and interest in scientific phenomena. His skillful reporting enabled readers to learn how the ideas that flowed from scientific innovation affected their lives, and his series of article in the Journal presenting his rudimentary ideas on evolution, served as a prelude to his important popular work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Huxley, an example of the new professional class of scientists, defended science and evolution from attacks by religious spokesmen and other opponents of evolution, informing the British public about science through his lectures and articles in such publications as Nineteenth Century. He understood that by popularizing scientific information, he could effectively challenge the old Tory establishment -- with its orthodox religious and political views -- and promote the ideas of the new class of professional scientists. In attempting to transform British society, he frequently came in conflict with theologians and others on issues in which science and religion seemed to contradict each other but refused to discuss matters of science with non-professionals like Chambers, whose popular writing struck a more resonant chord with working class readers. (shrink)

The distinction between taxonomic plant geography and ecological plant geography was never absolute: it would be historically inaccurate to portray them as totally divergent. Taxonomists occasionally borrowed ecological concepts, and ecologists never completely repudiated taxonomy. Indeed, some botanists pursued the two types of geographic study. The American taxonomist Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975), for one, made noteworthy contributions to both. Most of Gleason's research appeared in short articles, however. He never published a major synthetic work comparable in scope or influence (...) to the ecological texts of Clements, Schimper, and Warming.Despite exceptions such as Gleason, most plant geographers throughout the twentieth century have emphasized the distinction between ecological and taxonomic plant geographies. Why have these distinct traditions developed? In his book Geographical Ecology, Robert MacArthur has suggested a psychological explanation for the dichotomy: “Unraveling the history of a phenemenon has always appealed to some people and describing the machinery of the phenomenon to others... The ecologist and physical scientist tend to be machinery oriented, whereas paleontologists and most biogeographers tend to be history oriented.”46Without necessarily rejecting MacArthur's explanation, my study suggests a more complex relationship between taxonomic and ecological plant geographies. At the turn of the century a group of botanists self-consciously defined a new area of botanical research. These ecologists defined their new discipline in opposition to what they believed was a moribund, nineteenth-century, natural-history tradition. They turned from historically oriented, descriptive, taxonomic plant geography to experimental physiology. The new ecological plant geography was to focus on communities rather than on species, on proximate environmental causes rather than on historical explanations, and on physiological experiments rather than on morphological descriptions.As we look back, much of the “revolt from morphology” was rhetorical. Ecologists never completely replaced species as units of distribution, nor did they set geography on an explicitly physiological basis. Indeed, much of early ecological research was, quite simply, descriptive. Plant communities were defined in terms of dominant species, representative life forms, or general physiognomy. The underlying physiological basis for community characteristics was more often assumed than demonstrated by experiments.Despite the fact that ecological plant geography was not a truly physiological specialty, it was significantly different from more traditional taxonomic plant geography. First, ecologists were less explicitly evolutionary in their approach than were taxonomists. Following Darwin, most taxonomic plant geographers viewed distribution in historical terms. In contrast, early ecologists tended to ignore the traditional geographic problems. Most ecologists were skeptical of historical explanations, emphasizing instead the proximate, environmental causes of distribution. While some nineteenth-century biogeographers had studied the correlation between climate and vegetation, twentieth-century ecologists focused much more sharply on the interactions between plant and environment. Plant ecologists did not place biogeography on a physiological basis, but by emphasizing physiology they laid the foundation for a more detailed understanding of adaption. This emphasis on physiology and environmental causation was a second distinguishing characteristic of ecological plant geography. Finally, the idea of the plant community, articulated by Eugenius Warming in 1895, provided ecologists with a unique perspective on the distribution of plants. For early ecologists, the community was more than an assemblage of species; it was an integrated unit. The distribution of these units became the major focus of ecological plant geography. Communities never completely replaced species as geographic units, and the distinction between flora and vegetation was often blurred. Nonetheless, ecologists were innovative in studying the distribution of structurally and functionally integrated groups of plants.In the twentieth century plant geography has occupied an anomalous position in biology. It has not developed into an autonomous discipline, nor has it been incorporated into the developing discipline of ecology. Ecologists and taxonomists have pursued fairly distinct styles of geographic research, with the result that two relatively independent approaches to the study of plant distribution have persisted. (shrink)

In the selections that follow, Grace Neal Dolson offers a critical reading of experience, intuition, and duration in Bergson’s thought.

John Fisher, Cardinal-Bishop of Rochester, defended papal supremacy and the indissolubility of marriage in defiance of Henry VIII and Parliament and was the only Bishop who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy.1 He was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534 and was subsequently executed for treason in 1535. A full appreciation for Fisher's importance in English, continental, and Catholic history should include an examination of Fisher's theology not only because it informed his historic refutation of (...) class='Hi'>Henry's claims which won him the martyr's crown, but also because Fisher's works were widely read and often referenced at the Council of Trent.2 Ruard Tapper claimed that 'Fisher's works were in everyone's hands.'3... (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

In this article, Marjorie Silliman Harris offers a critical reading of Henri Bergson’s view of freedom as a creative act by the fundamental self.

Originally published in 1990, _Psychoanalysis and…_ brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan’s seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But _Psychoanalysis and… _demonstrates that (...) psychoanalysis – and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism – was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain. (shrink)

“Is something beautiful because we like it, or is it likable because it is beautiful?” This was how (in De vera religione 59: ideo pulchra sint, quia delectant; an ideo delectent, quia pulchra sunt...

Additional Contributors Include John V. Walsh, Bruno De Solages, Aurel Kolnai, Gabriel Marcel, Michele Federico Sciacca, Henri De Lubac, Robert W. Gleason, And Jacques Albert Cuttat. The Orestes Brownson Series On Contemporary Thoughts And Affairs, No. 3.

Additional Contributors Include John V. Walsh, Bruno De Solages, Aurel Kolnai, Gabriel Marcel, Michele Federico Sciacca, Henri De Lubac, Robert W. Gleason, And Jacques Albert Cuttat. The Orestes Brownson Series On Contemporary Thoughts And Affairs, No. 3.

Health care institutions, including Roman Catholic institutions, are in a time of crisis. This crisis may provide an important opportunity to reinvigorate Roman Catholic health care. The current health care crisis offers Roman Catholic health care institutions a special opportunity to rethink their fundamental commitments and to plan for the future. The author argues that what Catholic health care institutions must first do is articulate the nature of their identity and their commitments. By a renewed commitment to the praxis of (...) health care on their own distinctive terms, Roman Catholic health care institutions may reestablish a vision of human nature and human service in an increasingly secular society. Health care could then reclaim its place as a powerful setting for the expression of Roman Catholic faith, life and witness. (shrink)

Mitigation—preventative actions to reduce the human forcing of climate change with the goal of keeping climate change within a range to which humans can adapt—must be prompt, rigorous, and focused on eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide, beginning with rapid cessation of the use of coal. Carbon dioxide is by far the most threatening greenhouse gas because it remains in the atmosphere for millennia longer than any other major greenhouse gas, and the heat retained on the planet by atmospheric carbon dioxide (...) will continue to emerge from its transitional storage in the deep oceans for millennia after the atmospheric carbon finally dissipates. Sustainable development can be increased and ocean acidification can be stopped only if the dominant fossil fuel regime is promptly replaced by an affordable and accessible alternative energy regime. Poorer countries cannot be reasonably expected to cooperate with vigorous mitigation unless they are assisted with necessary adaptation. (shrink)

This paper introduces the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna in order to renew interest in it. I show that, in the 1910s and 1920s, she develops ideas and arguments that are also found playing key roles in the development of analytic philosophy decades later. Further, I describe her sympathetic, but acute, criticism of pragmatism and Heideggerian ontology, and situate her work in the tradition of American, speculative philosophy. Before 1920, we will see, de Laguna appeals to multiple realizability to (...) undermine reductionism in science, to support perspectival, scientific realism and, with help from a private language argument, to favour the view that mental states are classified by behavioural, teleological roles over what came to be called ‘type physicalism’. Her view of speech, mostly developed in the 1920s, tells us that its primary role is coordinating group behaviour rather than expressing thoughts. Belief is understood in terms of its causal role, including its causal relations to other kinds of mental states, when coordinating group behaviour. Thought is similarly understood. In developing her theory of mind, de Laguna rejects the pragmatist claims that belief can be reduced to dispositions to behaviour and that thought’s function is to address specific, rather than general, problems. She also favours meaning holism and rejects the analytic–synthetic distinction. In later work, de Laguna argues that individuals’ activity of self-maintenance brings universals, conceived of as irreducible potentialities, into being and makes them increasingly determinate. Further, she identifies the existence of all individuals with forms of self-maintenance and takes the existence of people to include maintenance of the cultural world. Such a unified treatment of existence, she holds, permits making its evolution intelligible. Heidegger’s view of being is rejected for not permitting this. All de Laguna’s work, we will see, fits a vision of philosophy as the systematic, imaginative and naturalistic examination of being as well as a source of criticism of science. (shrink)

Joel Katzav's survey of the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna's philosophy covers a broad range of ideas, and I have selected three for further development and commentary: (1) the relationship between naturalism and analytic philosophy, (2) the relationship between classical and radical empiricism, and (3) the historical question of where to situate a view such as de Laguna's in the history, the present, and the future of philosophy. I suggest that the view belongs with a group I call (...) the ‘New Naturalists’, including Theodore de Laguna, Susanne Langer, Marjorie Grene, Michael Polanyi, and others who keep philosophy closer to developments in natural and social science than is typical for pragmatists, process philosophers, and analytic philosophers. This is a position somewhere between classical and radical empiricism, but which insists that reductionism is too limiting and unwise, even when restricted to being only a method. (shrink)

The literature has shown that different types of moral dilemmas elicit discrepant decision patterns. The present research investigated the role of uncertainty in contributing to these decision patterns. Two studies were conducted to examine participants' choices in commonly used dilemmas. Study 1 showed that participants’ perceived outcome probabilities were significantly associated with their moral choices, and that these associations were independent from the dilemma type. Study 2 revealed that participants had significantly less preference for killing the individual when the outcome (...) probabilities were stated using the modal verb ‘will’ than when they were stated using the numerical phrasing of ‘100%’. Our findings illustrate a discord between experimenter and participant in the interpretation of task instructions. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick,, philosopher, classicist, lecturer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and supporter of women's university education, is well known for his Method of Ethics, a significant and influential book on moral theory. First published in 1883, this work considers the role the state plays in economic life, and whether economics should be considered an Art or a Science. Sidgwick applies his utilitarian views to economics, defending John Stuart Mill's 1848 treatise of the same name. The book calls for (...) a return to traditional political economy by eliminating 'needless polemics'. Sidgwick also outlines the need to bridge the gap between his analytical or deductive method and the inductive method employed by Mill's critics, the new generation of economic philosophers including John Elliot Cairnes and William Stanley Jevons. The second edition, reissued here, was published in 1887. (shrink)

Dutch Book Arguments (DBAs) have been invoked to support various requirements of rationality. Some are plausible: probabilism and conditionalization. Others are less so: credal transparency and reflection. Anna Mahtani has argued for a new understanding of DBAs which, she claims, allow us to keep the DBAs for probabilism (and perhaps conditionalization) and reject the DBAs for credal transparency and reflection. I argue that Mahtani’s new account fails as (a) it does not support highly plausible requirements of rational coherence and (b) (...) it does not, even setting aside the first objection, succeed in undermining the DBAs for credal transparency or reflection. (shrink)

The guiding premise from which this special report begins is the conviction and hope that justice is at the normative heart of medicine and that it is the perpetual task of bioethics to bring concerns of justice to bear on medical practice. On such an account, justice is medicine's lifeblood, that by which it contributes to life as opposed to diminishing it. It is in this larger, historical, intersectional, critical, and ethically minded context that we must approach pressing questions facing (...) medicine, including the question of the import and role of genomic knowledge for human life. The second premise is that, at least in principle, the knowledge generated by genomics can be a gift or a weight, or both at the same time. That is to say that, on the one hand, genomic knowledge is a gift, creating novel insights into the genetic drivers of disease and into the geographical paths of our ancestors. And on the other hand, it is a weight, creating new obligations, new forms of social classification, and new forms of surveillance. Because it is in many ways the “common sense” of the day that genomic knowledge is a gift, this special report, which contains nine essays, concentrates on the ways in which such knowledge can be a weight, a weight that has the potential to thwart—and historically has thwarted—medicine from genuinely advancing justice . (shrink)

We offer a particularist defense of conspiratorial thinking. We explore the possibility that the presence of a certain kind of evidence—what we call "fortuitous data"—lends rational credence to conspiratorial thinking. In developing our argument, we introduce conspiracy theories and motivate our particularist approach (§1). We then introduce and define fortuitous data (§2). Lastly, we locate an instance of fortuitous data in one real world conspiracy, the Watergate scandal (§3).

Henry Sidgwick, (1838–1900), philosopher, classicist, lecturer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and supporter of women's university education, is well known for his Method of Ethics (1874), a significant and influential book on moral theory. First published in 1883, this work considers the role the state plays (and ought to play) in economic life, and whether economics should be considered an Art or a Science. Sidgwick applies his utilitarian views to economics, defending John Stuart Mill's 1848 treatise of the (...) same name. The book calls for a return to traditional political economy by eliminating 'needless polemics'. Sidgwick also outlines the need to bridge the gap between his analytical or deductive method and the inductive method employed by Mill's critics, the new generation of economic philosophers including John Elliot Cairnes and William Stanley Jevons. The second edition, reissued here, was published in 1887. (shrink)

The dream solution of the continuum hypothesis would be a solution by which we settle the continuum hypothesis on the basis of a newly discovered fundamental principle of set theory, a missing axiom, widely regarded as true. Such a dream solution would indeed be a solution, since we would all accept the new axiom along with its consequences. In this article, however, I argue that such a dream solution to $\mathrm {CH}$ is unattainable.

This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore in a new way how unacknowledged moral concerns are integral to debates in the philosophy of mind.The radical suggestion of the book is that we can make sense of the internal dynamics and cultural significance of these debates only when we understand the moral forces that shape them. Drawing inspiration from a variety of traditions including Wittgenstein, Lacan, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the authors address a wide range of topics including (...) the mind/body-problem, the problem of other minds, subjectivity and objectivity, the debates on mindreading, naturalism, reductive physicalism, representationalism and the ‘E-turn’; Dennett’s heterophenomenology, McDowell’s neo-Kantianism, Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ considerations and his notion of an ‘attitude towards a soul’; repression, love, conscience, the difficulties of self-understanding, and the methods and aims of philosophy. Through a combination of detailed, immanent criticism and bold constructive work, the authors move the discussion to a new level, beyond humanistic or conservative critiques of naturalism and scientism. (shrink)

I am grateful to Philip Reed for his article ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’. His piece compellingly demonstrates the import of expanding analyses concerning the expressivist thesis beyond the reproductive sphere to the end-of-life sphere. I hope that his intervention spurns further work on this connection. In what follows, I want to focus on what I take to be moments of slippage in his use of the concept of disability, a slippage to which many disability theorists succumb. (...) In short, I argue that there are crucial moments in his argument where Reed runs together cases of disability that should be kept distinct—at minimum for the context in which he discusses them. Namely, forms of disability the suffering of which justice can eliminate versus those that ‘no amount of accessibility and social justice could eliminate’.1 Disability studies scholars and philosophers of disability have long noted that certain types of disability are often ‘left …. (shrink)

The raison d’être of the humanities is widely held to reside in its unique ability to generate critical thinking and critical thinkers. But what is “critical thinking?” Is it a generalized mode of...

Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, (...) and describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters.Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy. (shrink)

Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography—something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but by laymen. Furthermore, (...) for most of this century the majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important way and require different methods in interpretation precisely because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each other—by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings and people who believe they are superior; by people who think that photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe that they should at least try. Joel Snyder teaches criticism and history of photography at the University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own photographs. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Picturing Vision" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. Neil Walsh Allen produces educational audio-visual materials and has designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and applications of photography for the Smithsonian Institution. (shrink)

The consequences of taxation matter for the optimal design of the tax system. Those consequences depend on behavioral responses to taxation, as summarized by the elasticity of taxable income. Although this elasticity depends on characteristics of preferences, such as the elasticity of substitution between goods and leisure, it also depends on the avoidance technology, and on the response of government to avoidance behavior. It depends on the size of states, and the amount of tax coordination and harmonization. To some degree (...) the elasticity of response can be affected by government policies, and the government need not accept it passively, but rather should put in place policies that optimally determine it. (shrink)