Expressions of the form 'S is aware of the fact that p' are commonplace. This book provides a systematic exploration of the relation between knowledge and factual awareness, arguing that knowledge is but one species of factual awareness and that we can understand the possession of objective reasons, the normativity of knowledge, and the nature of knowledge in terms of factual awareness. In this way, the state of factual awareness is, structurally and substantively, a more basic type of state (...) than knowledge. If correct, this undermines a number of ways in which knowledge has been regarded as ‘first’ in recent epistemology. (shrink)

I explain why, from the perspective of knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology, objective act consequentialist theories of ethics imply skepticism about the moral status of our prospective actions and also tend to be self-defeating, undermining the justification of consequentialist theories themselves. For according to knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology there are modal anti-luck demands on both knowledge and justification, and it turns out that our beliefs about the moral status of our prospective actions are almost never able to satisfy these demands if (...) class='Hi'>objective act consequentialism is true. This kind of applied moral skepticism introduces problematic limits on our ability to use objective act consequentialism’s explanatory power as evidence for its truth. This is, in part, a product of higher-order defeat as I explain in the final section. There is, however, a silver lining for objective act consequentialists. For there is at least one type of objective act consequentialism, prior existence consequentialism, that is poised to avoid at least some of the epistemic problems discussed in this paper. (shrink)

Traditional accounts stress certain features of theoretical objects such as their alleged imperceptibility, that are taken to raise epistemological difficulties. But these accounts do not show how theoretical objects, rightly understood, either differ in kind from more ordinary sorts of objects or make science possible. I sketch a new account that focuses on the underdetermination and similarity of theoretical objects, features closely connected to the explanatory roles they play, and construes them on an algebraic model.

: The development of the interdisciplinary areas of cognitive, affective and action neurosciences contributes to the identification of neurobiological bases of conscious experience. The structure of consciousness was philosophically conceived a century ago as consisting of a subjective pole, the bearer of experiences, and an objective pole composed of experienced contents. In more recent formulations, Nagel refers to a “point of view”, in which qualitative experiences are anchored, while Velmans understands that phenomenal content is composed of mental representations “projected” (...) to the space external to the brains that construct them. In Freudian psychology, the conscious mind contains a tension between the Id and the Ego. How to relate this bipolar structure with the results of neuroscience? I propose the notion of projection [also used by Williford et al. ] as a bridge principle connecting the neurobiological systems of knowing, feeling and acting with the bipolar structure. The projective process is considered responsible for the generation of the sense of self and the sense of the world, composing an informational phenomenal field generated by the nervous system and experienced in the first-person perspective. After presenting the projective hypothesis, I discuss its philosophical status, relating it to the phenomenal and high-order thought approaches, and a mathematical model of projection. Eight ways of testing the status of the projective hypothesis are briefly mentioned. Resumo: O desenvolvimento de áreas interdisciplinares das neurociências, contribui para a identificação das bases neurobiológicas da experiência consciente. A estrutura intrínseca da experiência consciente foi filosoficamente concebida há um século como consistindo de um pólo subjetivo, o portador de experiências, e um pólo objetivo, composto dos conteúdos experimentados. Em formulações mais recentes, Thomas Nagel refere-se a um “ponto de vista”, no qual experiências qualitativas são ancoradas, enquanto Max Velmans entende que o conteúdo fenomenal é composto de representações mentais “projetadas” para o espaço externo ao cérebro que as constrói. Na psicologia freudiana, a mente consciente contém uma tensão entre o Id e o Ego. Como relacionar esta estrutura bipolar com os resultados da neurociência? Proponho a noção de projeção como princípio-ponte, conectando os sistemas neurobiológicos do saber, sentir e agir com a estrutura bipolar. O processo projetivo é considerado responsável pela geração do sentido do eu e do sentido do mundo, compondo um campo fenomenal informacional gerado pelo sistema nervoso e vivenciado na perspectiva da primeira pessoa. Após apresentar a hipótese projetiva, discuto seu status filosófico, relacionando-o às abordagens fenomenológicas, à teoria do pensamento de ordem superior e ao modelo matemático da projeção. Oito maneiras de testar o status da hipótese projetiva são brevemente mencionadas. (shrink)

Copyright © 2015 by the Society of Criti. Objective: Global lung stress varies considerably with low tidal volume ventilation for acute respiratory distress syndrome. High stress despite low tidal volumes may worsen lung injury and increase risk of death. No widely available parameter exists to assess global lung stress. We aimed to determine whether the volume delivered during a recruitment maneuver is inversely associated with lung stress and mortality in acute respiratory distress syndrome. Design: Substudy of an acute respiratory (...) distress syndrome clinical trial on esophageal pressure-guided positive end-expiratory pressure titration. Setting: U.S. academic medical center. Patients: Forty-two patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome in whom airflow, airway pressure, and esophageal pressure were recorded during the recruitment maneuver. Interventions: A single recruitment maneuver was performed before initiating protocol-directed ventilator management. Recruitment maneuvers consisted of a 30-second breath hold at 40 cm H2O airway pressure under heavy sedation or paralysis. VRM was calculated by integrating the flow-time waveform during the maneuver. End-inspiratory stress was defined as the transpulmonary pressure during end-inspiratory pause of a tidal breath and tidal stress as the transpulmonary pressure difference between end-inspiratory and end-expiratory pauses. Measurements and Main Results: VRM ranged between 7.4 and 34.7 mL/kg predicted body weight. Lower VRM predicted high end-inspiratory and tidal lung stress. After adjusting for Pao2/Fio2 and either driving pressure, tidal volume, or plateau pressure and positive end-expiratory pressure, VRM remained independently associated with both end-inspiratory and tidal stress. In unadjusted analysis, low VRM predicted increased risk of death. VRM remained significantly associated with mortality after adjusting for study arm. Conclusions: Low VRM independently predicts high lung stress and may predict risk of death in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. (shrink)

What were seen widely in Hume's time as "the obvious dictates of reason" are rarely if ever seen as such today. One reads now that the table does not seem to diminish as one removes oneself from it; instead it appears roughly the same in size all the while. And, what if it did seem to diminish? This would not prove that the existent of which one is visually aware is diminishing, and is therefore but the image of the table (...) rather than the table itself. The appearance of an object is not another object; it is just the original object appearing. Quite simply, things may seem otherwise than they are. (shrink)

Often those attempting to resolve the answering machine paradox appeal to Kaplan's claim that the objects of semantic evaluation are expression-types evaluated with respect to indices, instead of utterances, as part of their solution. This article argues that Dylan Dodd and Paula Sweeney exemplify the kind of mistakes theorists make in applying such expression-based semantic theories in that they conflate what is asserted with semantic content, and they take their approach to utterance interpretation as having semantic significance. In light of (...) these mistakes, we learn two things. First, we learn how expression-based semantic theorists can avoid making these kinds of mistakes. Second, we learn how the limits of expression-based semantics can contribute to what we should expect a semantic theory to explain regarding how semantics fits into a more general theory of linguistic communication and linguistic understanding. (shrink)

Some people have found my distinction between meaning and significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction, I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that “there is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness.” 1 That assertion would be true (...) if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and knowledge. Hence there is a land of meanings beyond past and present human consciousness—the land of the future. What I should have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and future. This correction of my original statements leads to a deepening of the concept of meaning.In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader’s opinion is as valid as another’s would then be right, despite any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. 3 I also assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that meaning. 1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation, p. 4.2. See my “Objective Interpretation,” PMLA 75 : 463-79.3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, which ends:We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: the way of biographical or genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem “Prufrock”; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P. 18] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Against Interpretation?”, “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation, and “Stylistics and Synonymity”. (shrink)

The phenomenal concept strategy (PCS) is widely regarded as the most promising physicalist defence against the so-called epistemic arguments—the anti-physicalist arguments that establish an ontological gap between physical and phenomenal facts on the basis of the occurrence of epistemic gaps in our descriptions of these facts. The PCS tries to undercut the force of the epistemic arguments by attributing the occurrence of the epistemic gaps to the special character of phenomenal concepts—the concepts by means of which we think about our (...) phenomenal experiences. In this essay, the author examines David Chalmers' master argument against the PCS and the objections raised against this argument by Peter Carruthers, Bénédicte Veillet and Katalin Balog in defending the PCS. While the author finds these objections to be successful defences of the PCS, the author shares Balog's belief that in this regard, the debate between the physicalists and anti-physicalists is a stalemate. (shrink)

In the analysis of Aquinas, instrumental causation is central to his doctrine of providence, yet their connection is not widely understood. On the one hand, early modern thinkers like Nicolas Malebranche claim that any notion of instrumental causation is unintelligible as a mode of divine operation. Alternatively, certain Thomists commit Aquinas to the doctrine of premotion, which partially resolves the problem of instrumental causation, but only at the cost of eliminating the causal freedom of creatures. In this paper I address (...) these two issues. After providing an outline of Aquinas’s position on instrumental causation, I first argue that Thomistic instrumentalism is not the target of Malebranche’s objections, for Malebranche endorses a view very much like that of Aquinas. Secondly, I discuss the doctrine of premotion and offer some reasons for thinking that Aquinas was not a premotionist. (shrink)

My argument has three parts. In the first, I shall explain some key Thomist distinctions concerning necessity and premotion. In the second, I shall argue that many philosophers who object to the Thomist position misconstrue the relevant understanding of necessity and contingency. In the third, I shall focus directly on their denial that the doctrine of premotion is helpful for discussions of how God moves the human will. The first two sections illustrate that the Thomists think plausibly that our understanding (...) of necessity is connected either with a logical necessity or secondary causality. Consequently, in order to show that the will is free, they argue that human actions are necessitated neither logically nor by secondary causes. In the third section, I argue that Thomists do not simply beg the question by asserting that God’s predetermining decrees are compatible with human freedom. They have an understanding of God’s causation which allows both for God’s infallible motion and the contingency of many created events, among which are free human actions. (shrink)

Thomas claims that a human act is specified both by the object and the end, and that the exterior act is the interior act’s object. These claims are best understood in light of the De Malo’s explicit mature teaching that the exterior act can be essentially good or bad, and that it is both the proximate end and the object of the interior act. Since the interior act wills the end, it wills the apprehended exterior act as the formality under (...) which the whole act is willed. The interior and exterior acts do not form the one human act merely as cause and effect, but also as matter and form. These clarifications explain some problematic texts in the Summa Theologiae. (shrink)

This paper primarily disputes Dreyfus’s account of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. Specifically, it raises objections to the three central claims of such an account; namely: that Searle’s theory of intentional action can be used as a stand-in for Husserl’s; that Heidegger rejects the primordiality of the intentionality of consciousness; and that Heidegger distinguishes between conscious and unconscious types of intentional actions and he privileges the latter over the former. I show the first to be unwarranted owing to (...) a lack of fundamental parallelisms between Searle’s and Husserl’s theories of intentionality. I show the second to be mistaken for failing to take into account Heidegger’s strategic handling of the concept of consciousness and for contradicting Heidegger’s concept of care as the essential meaning of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Lastly, I show the third to be highly problematic for lacking in textual evidence and explanatory power. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss and defend Augustine’s and Aquinas’s respective epistemologies of faith. This entails analyzing central claims both thinkers make in order to determine the ways in which the true beliefs about God the faithful form and hold are reasonable as well as properly grounded. In the first two sections of the essay, I highlight what I take to be some of Augustine’s enduring epistemological insights concerning the reasonableness and origins of faith. I read Aquinas’s own account of (...) faith in a distinctly Augustinian light, so in the third section of the essay, I turn to Aquinas to explain more fully how faith-beliefs are adequately or rationally grounded—that is, based on a specifically truth-conducive ground. Like Augustine, Aquinas sees love, or desire more broadly, as an essential component of faith (specifically what Aquinas calls “formed faith”): it is our love of God, infused in our will by God’s grace, that draws us to believe what our intellect also recognizes in the infused “light of faith” to be true revelations from God. In the final section of the essay, I consider and then counter three main objections to my reading of Augustine and Aquinas. Thus, by the end of the essay, I not only discuss some of the main features of the accounts of faith that Augustine and Aquinas respectively offer; I also defend those accounts, as well as the epistemology of faith that I derive from them. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans argues that the content of perceptual experience is nonconceptual, in a sense I shall explain momentarily. More recently, in his book Mind and World, John McDowell has argued that the reasons Evans gives for this claim are not compelling and, moreover, that Evans’s view is a version of “the Myth of the Given”: More precisely, Evans’s view is alleged to suffer from the same sorts of problems that plague sense-datum theories of perception. In (...) particular, McDowell argues that perceptual experience must be within “the space of reasons,” that perception must be able to give us reasons for, that is, to justify, our beliefs about the world: And, according to him, no state that does not have conceptual content can be a reason for a belief. Now, there are many ways in which Evans’s basic idea, that perceptual content is nonconceptual, might be developed; some of these, I shall argue, would be vulnerable to the objections McDowell brings against him. But I shall also argue that there is a way of developing it that is not vulnerable to these objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

Faith in God can mean believing in God subjectively or believing in God objectively. Those who believe in God subjectively think that passion plays an important factor in having faith in God. Those who believe in God objectively think that reason plays an important factor in having faith in God. Both stances in having faith in God have problems. Can faith coming from passion be irrational? Can one be an honest religious thinker and still have genuine faith? This paper will (...) give light to those questions by analyzing the notion of faith of these two great thinkers, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both great thinkers brought great illumination to the relationship between faith and reason, the paper ends in challenging Kierkegaard’s thinking that faith can be irrational at times, like what happened in his discussion of the story of Abraham in his work entitled “Fear and Trembling.” The paper also challenges Wittgenstein’s thinking that one should approach the reality of faith by using reason only with his ideal of the honest religious thinker, written in his work posthumously published under the title “Culture and Value,” by using Kierkegaard’s discussion of the passion of the infinite. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how Thomas Aquinas's account of sensory cognition is undergirded by a strong commitment to direct realism. According to the specific form of direct realism I articulate and defend here, which I claim emerges from a proper study of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition, it is only by having sense experiences that possess definitive content--content that is isomorphic or formally identical with the sensible features of mind-independent reality--that we can be credited with occupying world-intending sensory states, (...) in which we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell objective aspects or features of the world itself. Thus, it is by virtue of possessing the requisite content that the veridical sensations or perceptions we enjoy and possess bear directly on the world, and thereby unite us to the world. In defending this claim, I exposit what I take to be the most important features of Aquinas's account of sensory cognition: most notably, the operation of the external senses, and secondarily, the role of the common sense and phantasms. Interpreting Aquinas in the right light allows us better to understand and appreciate his account of sensory cognition as well as the nature and benefits of direct realism itself. (shrink)

In this article, I advance what I think is a more theologically robust and informed free-will defense, which allows me to address the problem of evil in a more theologically robust and informed way. In doing so, however, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive response to the problem of evil, or full-blown "theodicy"; instead, I offer a partial response, which I place in the service of a full-blown theodicy. Moreover, my own approach is explicitly Thomistic, insofar as I (...) formulate much of it drawing on Thomas Aquinas's own formulations of the doctrines of original justice and original sin, or the human being as created and fallen. Structurally, the article consists of three main sections. In first section, I consider and critique a recent, expanded free-will defense offered by Peter van Inwagen, which also incorporates the doctrines of creation and the Fall. I then introduce key aspects of Aquinas's own thought in order to make the requisite improvements to this approach. In the second section of the article, I consider some main objections to my own Thomistic approach, as I will have formulated it so far: in particular, that the doctrines of original justice and original sin are unintelligible from the standpoints of moral psychology and evolutionary biology. I also begin to consider the objection that there is no intelligible way of explaining the transmission of original sin. In the third and final section of the article, I respond to these objections, offering a final defense of my central claim that the free-will defense is best served when it is wedded with a specifically Thomistic construal of the human being as originally created in a state of original justice, but now subject to defects (both bodily and spiritual) that are the inherited consequences of original sin. (shrink)

There are two competing approaches to sustainability in agriculture. One stresses a strict economic approach in which market forces should guide the activities of agricultural producers. The other advocates the need to balance economic with environmental and social objectives, even to the point of reducing profitability. The writings of the eighteenth century moral philosopher Adam Smith could bridge the debate. Smith certainly promoted profit-seeking, private property, and free market exchange consistent with the strict economic perspective. However, his writings are also (...) consistent with many aspects of sustainable agriculture. For example, Smith argued that people ought to exercise restraint in their pursuit of self-interest, and he believed in balancing economic with environmental and social considerations. If both sides of the debate more fully regard the work of Adam Smith, then proponents of the strict economic perspective might be more appreciative of the concerns raised within the sustainable agriculture community, while advocates of sustainability might be more effective in achieving the objective of a sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

A MAJOR THESIS OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY is that its theory of justice, which incorporates strong rights to negative liberty, must be prior to and independent of a theory of the good. This priority is necessary, according to liberal theorists, in view of the requirement that any adequate theory accommodate a plurality of contending views of the good, no one of which is capable of eliciting public assent to it. Recent critics of liberalism have disputed this thesis, maintaining instead that (...) there is indeed an objective good, rather than a plurality of contending goods, which at least seriously compromises and possibly undermines the negative liberty with which liberals traditionally associated their theories. Variously called communitarians, virtue theorists, or republicans, these critics have presented an important challenge to contemporary liberalism whether of the individualist or welfare state variety. (shrink)

Following discussions by Callicott and Zimmerman, I argue that much of deep ecology’s critique of science is based on an outdated image of natural science. The significance of the quantum revolution for environmental issues does not lie in its alleged intrusion of the subjective consciousness into the physicists’ description of nature. Arguing from the viewpoint of Niels Bohr’s framework of complementarity,I conclude that Bohr’s epistemological lesson teaches that the object of description in physical science must be interaction and that it (...) is now mistaken to imagine that physical science aims to represent nature in terms of properties it possesses apart from interaction. (shrink)

The American Institute of certified public accountants (AICPA) has promulgated a Code of Professional Conduct, which has served as the primary ethical standard for public accountants in the United States for more than 20 years. It is now out of date and needs to be replaced with a code of ethics. Just as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are being migrated toward "principles-based accounting" as part of a convergence with international financial reporting standards, a similar process needs to occur with (...) ethics. This article organizes the primary rules of the AICPA Code around five essential virtues: objectivity, integrity, inquisitiveness, loyalty, and trustworthiness. These virtues correspond to the general principles set forth in the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). From this virtue ethics perspective, various rules of the AICPA Code are critiqued as being inadequate at best, and poorly crafted at worst. The article concludes with the proposition that principles-based ethics serves the profession and the financial reporting process better than the current rules-based approach. (shrink)

Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge. They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an earlier, truer Hirsch.Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of “bicycle” that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They propose that a literary work is “more appropriately conceived as … a Schwinn or even (...) a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat and two flat tires”. They object to my adoption of Sir Philip Sidney’s claim that literature provides both the general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver, an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified”.This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be dissevered from its particular embodiment. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Against Interpretation?” and “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation”. His most recent contributions is “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted”. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

Although Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines disagree with each other profoundly over the relationship between the intellect and the will, they all think that someone who sees God must also love him in the ordinary course of events. However, Godfrey rejects a central thesis argued for by both Henry and Giles, namely that by God’s absolute power there could be such vision without love. The debate is not about the ability to freely reject or at (...) least refrain from willing complete happiness, but about the connection between the known object and the will’s act. Godfrey’s discussion is an occasion for him to criticize Giles’ idiosyncratic view that an elicited act of love for the known object is necessary for every act of knowing, and Henry’s development of the view that the known object is merely a sine qua non cause of an act of love. In his response, Godfrey defends a thesis that later becomes widespread, namely that the known object is an efficient cause of love. (shrink)

Following discussions by Callicott and Zimmerman, I argue that much of deep ecology’s critique of science is based on an outdated image of natural science. The significance of the quantum revolution for environmental issues does not lie in its alleged intrusion of the subjective consciousness into the physicists’ description of nature. Arguing from the viewpoint of Niels Bohr’s framework of complementarity,I conclude that Bohr’s epistemological lesson teaches that the object of description in physical science must be interaction and that it (...) is now mistaken to imagine that physical science aims to represent nature in terms of properties it possesses apart from interaction. (shrink)

Material acquisition—buying, inheriting, being given—and nonmaterial—learning a word, assimilating a form—have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements—both material and nonmaterial—we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-established fine distinctions. We need not (...) deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1 we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige". And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object". Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities. · 1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, p. 43.· 2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers, p. 19; all further citations in text. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbook and coeditor of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:358 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY und k6nnen es nur sein. Das Gleiche ist der Fall mit den Erfahrungstatsachen des wissenschaftlichen Versuches und im Grunde aller Wissenschaft gibt es nichts anderes und kann es nichts anderes geben. Mag ein gewandter Dialektiker die Voraussetzungen, yon denen er ausgeht, noch so sehr durcheinanderwirbeln, sie verbinden und zu Schliissen aufeinandertiirmen: Was er erhiilt, wird stets wieder eine Aussage sein. Niemals wird er zu einem (...) Gesetze gelangen, das lauten wiirde: Tue dies! oder Tue dies nicht! also zu einem Satze, der dem sittlichen Gesetze entsprechen oder ibm entgegenstehen kSnnte,r Kann Morscher dann noch immer behaupten, dass Poincar6 nur kategorische Syllogismen oder nur Schhssfolgerungen mit gerade Priimissen im Sinne hatte? Wir sind dem t3bersetzer eine Ehrenrettung schuldig: wenn er hier "syllogisme" mit "logischer Schluss" iibersetzt hat, hat er keinen Fehler begangen, es trifft ihn nicht der Tadel, durch eine scblechte Ubersetzung eine Legende hervorgerufen zu haben. Morscher soUte jedoch nicht, wenn er "syllogisme" liest, "kategorischer Syllogismus" verstehen, lind bei geistesgeschichtlichen Diskussionen immer den hermeneutisch relevanten Kontext beachten, d.h. wnigstens den Absatz, den er gerade analysiert, zu Ende lesen. Es liisst sich rticht daran zweifeln, dass Hare mit Recht [PR] Poincar6 zuschreibt. Nicht ganz sicher bin ich, ob Poincar6, wenn er sah und es ausdriicklich sagte, dass die iiblichen logischen Regeln fiir Imperativfolgerung nicht anwendbar sind, damit auch gleichzeitig die Entwicklung einer Imperativlogik (Normenlogik) forderte, oder ob er sich dieser programmatischen Konsequenz nicht ganz bewusst war. OTAWEINBERGER Universitiit Graz RUSSELL'S REALIST THEORY OF REMOTE MEMORY In a paper on Bertrand Russell's theory of memory1 David Pears undertakes to amend certain aspects of his version of Russell's theory of memory which he had presented in his Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy. ~ In that work Pears had attributed to Russell an extreme realist theory of memory from 1905 through 1918, i.e., a general theory of memory according to which the mind maintains direct contact by the dual relation of acquaintance with past sense-data. 3 This, he now believes, is historically incorrect in view of two of Russell's lesser known papers which have since come to his attention and which make it clear that in 1915 Russell held the extreme realist account only in connection with immediate memory--i.e., with memory within what is often called the specious present--and that as regards remote memory--i.e., memory of things not very recent and, so, outside the specious present--past sense-data 7 Poincare, Letzte Gedanken, aus dem FranzSsischen iibersetzt yon Karl Lichteneeker (Leipzig : Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1913),pp. 226 f. 1 D. F. Pears, "Russell's Theories of Memory 1912-1921," in Bertrand Russell's Philosophy, ed. George Nakhnikian (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 117-137. The papers are from the Indiana University Russell centenary conference, 1972. 2 (London: Collins~I967), pp. 7I, 181-182. 3 Ibid. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 359 were knowable only by description and not by acquaintance.4 But Pears still argues, as against J. O. Urmson,5 that Russell did hold the realist theory of remote memory before 1915, although he was "changing his mind" in that year and, by 1917 ("The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"), had definitely abandoned the theory,e I believe that Pears is partly right about this matter: Russell almost certainly did hold a realist theory of remote memory before 1915. However, it can be shown, I think, that the theory was abandoned, not in 1915 or later, but in 1914. Pears shows beyond any reasonable doubt that Russell held a realist theory of remote memory in 1912. The strongest evidence may be found in a passage in Problems of Philosophy: There is some danger of confusion as to the nature of memory, owing to the fact that memory of an object is apt to be accompanied by an image of the object, and yet the image cannot be what constitutes memory. This is easily seen by merely noticing that the image is in the present, whereas what is remembered is known to be in the past. Moreover, we are certainly able to some extent to compare our image with the object remembered, so that we often know, within... (shrink)

Sally Gadow influenced our work when we first began exploring the meaning of nursing philosophically. In this article, we discuss two major themes of Gadow's work that have influenced us: existential advocacy and treating the body objectively without reducing the patient to the moral status of an object. Our treatment of these issues is appreciative but not uncritical. We argue that existential advocacy makes an important contribution to the meaning of nursing but that it cannot be its essential meaning. We (...) contend that Gadow, by making self‐direction the essence of care, tends to diminish the intersubjective nature of care. Then we show how Gadow recovers the intersubjective nature of care by disclosing how nurses and patients both become subjects in personal relationships, even when tending to the body objectively. We show how hermeneutic phenomenology, which we favour, can contribute to Gadow's existential phenomenology by using examples from nursing practice to disclose the meaning of nursing. Gadow's major contribution to our work has been in the ways her work has evoked creative thought from us concerning the meaning of nursing. (shrink)

This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat”, I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong. The present paper explores whether this consistency-based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral judgments on beliefs we (...) already hold, with no appeal to moral theory, is a legitimate way of doing practical ethics. I argue that grounding particular moral judgments on our core moral convictions and other core nonmoral beliefs is a legitimate way to justify moral judgments, that these moral judgments possess as much epistemic justification and have as much claim to objectivity as moral judgments grounded on particular ethical theories, and that this internalistic coherentist method of grounding moral judgments is more likely to result in behavioral guidance than traditional theory-based approaches to practical ethics. By way of illustrating the approach, I briefly recapitulate my consistency-based argument for ethical vegetarianism. I then defend the coherentist approach implicit in the argument against a number of potentially fatal metatheoretical attacks. (shrink)

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation that (...) have been applied to the doctrine of the resurrection: substance dualism, constitutionalism, and animalism. We argue that animalism offers a superior explanation for the necessity of the resurrection: since human persons just are their bodies, life after death requires resurrection of one’s body. We conclude that those endorsing the doctrine of the resurrection should be animalists. (shrink)

The fact that causal laws in the social sciences are most realistically expressed as both multivariate and stochastic has a number of very important implications for indirect measurement and generalizability. It becomes difficult to link theoretical definitions of general constructs in a one-to-one relationship to research operations, with the result that there is conceptual slippage in both experimental and nonexperimental research. It is argued that problems of this nature can be approached by developing specific multivariate causal models that incorporate sources (...) of measurement bias, along with the theoretical variables of interest. Many general concepts are defined in such a way that causal assumptions are built into the definitions themselves. Additionally, in any given piece of research it is necessary to omit many variables from consideration, and this is often done without careful consideration of the assumptions required to justify such omissions. Finally, generalization to more inclusive populations or a diversity of settings ordinarily requires one to replace "constants" by variables. It is concluded that the criteria of parsimony, generalizability, and precision are incompatible, given the multivariate nature of social causation, and the author expresses his own preference for sacrificing parsimony in favor of the objectives of achieving increased precision and generalizability of social science laws. (shrink)

My quarrel is with Ehman's third and concluding section. There he undertakes a confrontation of the two conceptions of the self developed in his preceding argument. "We must decide," he says, "whether the self is reducible to a determinate object in the world or is a transcending subject for which both the world and the self's own determinate nature are mere objects". But the self can never be reduced to a mere object, for the self "can detach itself in thought (...) and will from every objective determination" --a power one would hardly wish to ascribe to a mere object. Thus. (shrink)

In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison argues that Kant’s theoretical treatment of the self presents both an incoherent “official view” and a coherent “alternative view.” In this paper, I argue that Kant’s genuine position on the self can be reconstructed as a coherent unity by examining the flaws in Allison’s analysis. It is shown that Allison’s objections to Kant’s official view are based on unwarranted metaphysical assumptions and unjustified conceptual identifications. Allison’s own dual-aspect view of the transcendental distinction between phenomena (...) and noumena is used to correct these misconceptions. Thus, the official view as described by Allison is not Kant’s genuine position. Rather, it is shown that Kant treats the noumenal self as the ground or support of the activity of thinking and the subject of apperception, and that this grounding function is essential to Kant’s view but overlooked by Allison’s analysis. (shrink)

The major competing statistical paradigms share a common remarkable but unremarked thread: in many of their inferential applications, different probability interpretations are combined. How this plays out in different theories of inference depends on the type of question asked. We distinguish four question types: confirmation, evidence, decision, and prediction. We show that Bayesian confirmation theory mixes what are intuitively “subjective” and “objective” interpretations of probability, whereas the likelihood-based account of evidence melds three conceptions of what constitutes an “objective” (...) probability. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Ethics and Valuesis a comprehensive exploration and assessment of current and future issues facing social work practice and education. It is the first book to codify ethical practices for social workers from across the globe and in myriad workplace settings. Each section meaningfully captures this complex subject area: ethics writ large visions of diverse values abortion relationship and gender issues micro and mezzo practice settings social work education technological issues spirituality globalism economic issues special (...) topics Leaving no stone unturned, this handbook comprehensively addresses the most controversial topics in an evenhanded manner. Among professional social workers, values and ethics traverse political boundaries, cultural identifications, and languages. This handbook will help to make sense of this unity within diversity. With contributions from the world's leading scholars, this book will be a valuable resource for all social work students, academics, researchers, and practitioners who seek a coherent and objective analysis in the abstract arena of ethics and values. lity globalism economic issues special topics Leaving no stone unturned, this handbook comprehensively addresses the most controversial topics in an evenhanded manner. Among professional social workers, values and ethics traverse political boundaries, cultural identifications, and languages. This handbook will help to make sense of this unity within diversity. With contributions from the world's leading scholars, this book will be a valuable resource for all social work students, academics, researchers, and practitioners who seek a coherent and objective analysis in the abstract arena of ethics and values. (shrink)

In working his way through his complex conception of the relation of fiction and reality, [Henry] James thus found the unconscious moral dimension inextricably embedded within "realism" itself. In following the threads of realism back to consciousness itself, James invariably found there intertwined with its roots those aspects and elements that other theorists kept carefully separate. By exploring experience to its source, he found imagination. By following objective life from "out there" to conception, he found individual vision. By following (...) the seeming oneness of the passing show back to perception, he found infinite variation and multiplicity. By following the uncolored flux and flow of events to their embodiment in the fictional medium, he found coloration of personality. And by following the "felt life" back to the artist's "prime sensibility", James found there the "moral sense" and the "enveloping air of the artist's humanity"—that which gives "the last touch to the worth of a work." James E. Miller, Jr., professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman; F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique; J.D. Salinger; Theory of Fiction: Henry James; and numerous articles on American literature and education. He contributed "Catcher In and Out of History" to Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977. (shrink)

The institution of private property lies at the heart of contemporary Western societies. However, what are the limits of property ownership? Do principles of justice require some measure of governmental redistribution of property in order to relieve poverty or to promote greater equality among citizens? And what do principles of justice have to say about individuals' ownership of their own talents and the products of their labor, and about the initial acquisition of land and natural resources? The essays in this (...) volume, written by eleven prominent political and moral philosophers, address these questions and explore related issues. A number of them consider the theoretical foundations of property ownership, asking how the rights of individuals to acquire property can be justified, and how extensive these rights are. Some focus on the concept of self-ownership, discussing how the individual's right to control their own mind, body and actions relates to their right to gain control over extrapersonal objects and resources. Others look at connections between property ownership and various values, including democratic political participation and equality of wealth and opportunity. (shrink)