Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary (...) dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology. (shrink)

Focusing on the concept of freedom, Leslie Paul Thiele makes Heidegger's philosophical works speak directly to politics in a postmodern world. Neither excusing Heidegger for his political sins nor ignoring their lesson, Thiele nonetheless refrains from polemic in order creatively to engage one of the greatest philosophers of our time. The product of this engagement is a vindication of a democratic and ecological politics firmly grounded in philosophic inquiry. Using Heidegger's understanding of freedom as a point of departure, Timely (...) Meditations lays out the philosophic and political nature and potential of freedom in thought, speech, and deed. This disclosive freedom is contrasted to both modern (positive and negative) and postmodern (Nietzschean and Foucaultian) variations. The result is an original and provocative study that challenges our present understanding of liberty while underlining dangerous collusion with the contemporary forces of technology. Timely Meditations marks an increasingly rare achievement today. For unlike many theorists who attempt to steer a course into the world of postmodern politics, Thiele does so without forsaking philosophic foundations and without abandoning practical hopes and tasks for rhetorical diversions. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of U.S. farmland owners, operators, and workers by race, ethnicity, and gender. We first review the intersection between racialized and gendered capitalism and farmland ownership and farming in the United States. Then we analyze data from the 2014 Tenure and Ownership Agricultural Land survey, the 2012 Census of Agriculture, and the 2013–2014 National Agricultural Worker Survey to demonstrate that significant nation-wide disparities in farming by race, ethnicity and gender persist in the U.S. In 2012–2014, White (...) people owned 98% and operated 94% of all farmland. They generated 98% of all farm-related income from land ownership and 97% of income from farm owner-operatorship. Meanwhile, People of Color farmers were more likely to be tenants rather than owners, owned less land, and generated less farm-related wealth per person than their White counterparts. Hispanic farmers were also disproportionately farm laborers. In addition to racial and ethnic disparities, there were disparities by gender. About 63% of non-operating landowners, 86% of farm operators, and 87% of tenant farmers were male, and female farmers tended to generate less income per farmer than men. This data provides evidence of ongoing racial, ethnic and gender disparities in agriculture in the United States. We conclude with a call to address the structural drivers of the disparities and with recommendations for better data collection. (shrink)

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns to Kant’s (...) Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his (...) eleven-year tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. Both volumes examine the ethical issues surrounding a range of topics including politics, morality, duty, and crime and punishment. (shrink)

The federal regulations that govern biomedical research, most notably those enshrined in the Common Rule, express a protectionist ethos aimed at safeguarding subjects of human experimentation from the potential harms of research participation. In at least one critical way, however, the regulations have always fallen short of this promise: if a subject suffers a research-related injury, then neither the investigator nor the sponsor has any legal obligation under the regulations to care for or compensate the subject. Because very few subjects (...) with research-related injuries can meet the financial or evidentiary requirements associated with a successful legal claim to recover the costs associated with their injuries, most injured subjects must shoulder the burden of those expenses alone. For 40 years, national advisory panels have concluded that this result is out of step with the Common Rule's otherwise protectionist promise. When the Department of Health and Human Services released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) in 2011, suggesting potential changes to the Common Rule, the time seemed ripe to address research-related injuries. The ANPRM, however, makes no mention of compensation for research-related injuries, and the federal government once again seems poised to stop short of addressing what has arguably become the most longstanding, frequent, and consistent plea for regulatory reform of research: protections for injured subjects. This article asks why, despite decades of federal-level panels recommending no-fault compensation for research-related injuries, the United States has so strongly resisted change. I suggest that a central reason for our current impasse is that, despite consensus among federal advisory committees that there is an obligation to compensate injured subjects, the committees have not coalesced around a moral justification for that duty. Although multiple justifications can support and even strengthen a single ethical obligation, the reverse has occurred in this context. I demonstrate that the committees' articulation of multiple ethical principles – including humanitarianism, professional beneficence, and compensatory justice – results in incongruent obligations that favor different kinds of compensation systems. This outcome, which I call “moral gridlock,” makes it extremely difficult to determine what kind of compensation scheme to implement. Recognizing that each moral argument for compensation creates a slightly different trajectory is, however, an important first step in moving toward a more systematic approach to compensating injured research subjects. (shrink)

Contemporary legal philosophers have focussed their attention on two aspects of the general theory of authority: the issue of legitimacy and the issue of obligation . In John Finnis's work we have a powerful statement of the importance of a third issue: the problem of governance . This paper explores the nature of this duty, its foundations, and its relation to the other aspects of a theory of authority.

The article combines a criticism of public understanding of science with the sociology of expectations to examine how particular expectations toward scientific progress have performative effects for the construction of publics as citizens of science. By analyzing a particular controversy about gene therapy in Denmark, the article demonstrates how different sets of expectations can be used to discriminate among three different assemblages: the assemblage of consumption, the assemblage of comportment, and the assemblage of heroic action. Each of these assemblages makes (...) medical science, scientific citizenship, politics, patients, doctors, and expectations toward the future emerge in particular ways. By their radically different expectations toward science and their different constructions of what it means to be a scientific citizen, the assemblages construct the objectives of the governance of science in three very different ways. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

This book opposes the position that meanings can be explained by way of intralinguistic relations, as in structural linguistics and its successors, and rejects definitional descriptions of meaning as well as naturalistic accounts. The idea that we are able to live by strings of mere signifiers is shown to rest on a misconception. Ruthrof also attempts an explanation of why arguments grounded in a post-Saussurean view of language, as for instance certain feminist theories, find it so difficult to show how (...) precisely the body can be reclaimed as an integral part of linguistic signs. In reinstating the body in language, Ruthrof draws on Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, as well as on the writings of Helen Keller. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen was an English biographer, and a writer on philosophy, ethics and literature. He was educated at Eton, King's College, London, and then Trinity College in Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for his entire career. He was also a keen mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. He served as the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and in 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. (...) During his eleven-year tenure he wrote two successful books on ethics, of which this work, published in 1882, was one. It was widely adopted as a standard textbook on moral philosophy, and became one of the most influential publications on the ideas of evolutionary ethics that had been inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

Social groups claim authority to impose restrictions on their members that the state cannot. Churches, ethnic groups, minority nations, universities, social clubs, and families all regulate belief and behavior in ways that would be obviously unjust in the context of a state and its citizens. All religions impose doctrinal requirements; many also enforce sexist practices and customs. Some universities impose stringent speech and conduct codes on their students and faculty. Parochial schools discriminate in their hiring practices. Those who complain about (...) such internal restrictions on the liberties of members might well be told to “love it or leave it.”. (shrink)

In this book, I offer an account of intentional action. The book has two main parts: in the first part, I discuss and criticize the currently prevailing account of intentional action—the Causal Theory of Action (CTA)—and, in the second part, I offer my alternative account. The CTA proposes essentially two conditions for something that you do to be an intentional action: (1) what you do is represented by your intention (or other mental attitudes), and (2) it is caused by your (...) intention. Against the CTA, I argue that, since it conceives of representation and causality as essentially separate conditions, it cannot explain why, when someone acts intentionally, it is not a mere accident that both conditions are jointly satisfied: i.e., that the intention causes the movement it represents. The CTA’s inability to rule out such accidentality is, as I argue further, the deeper source of the notorious problem of deviant causation. Given this diagnosis, I claim that the key for a satisfactory account of intentional action is to conceive of the essential unity of representation and causality in intentional action. Doing so, I suggest, requires understanding a distinctive sort of causality at work in intentional action. Following the work of G.E.M. Anscombe, I argue that what is distinctive of the sort of causal-explanatory connection captured in action explanations like “S is doing A because she intends to do B” is that it is essentially known by the acting subject. In the final sections of the book, I then develop and defend a conception of the sort of self-knowledge involved in intentional action. (shrink)

Horst Bredekamp’s subject is the astute deployment and perennial resonance of the startling image of the body politic that dominates the frontispiece to Leviathan: a treatise on the psychology of the individual and the dynamic of the multitude, published in 1651 by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Affirming the centrality of such a figural device for this pioneering theorist of the state, Bredekamp goes on to address the art-historical dimension of the mesmerising etched title-page. In his central chapters he (...) explores the extraordinary range of sources – from socio-cultural tradition to scientific advances – on which the author and his artist-collaborator may have drawn. In conclusion, he reveals Hobbes to be no less passionate than shrewd in his belief that the constraints and amenities of a tolerable life in common attest to the potency of the visual. As appendices, two essays and catalogues explore the portraits made of Hobbes as well as illustrations that appeared in his other works, thus systematically completing the exploration of the images connected with this exceptional philosopher. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen was a writer, philosopher and literary critic whose work was published widely in the nineteenth century. As a young man Stephen was ordained deacon, but he later became agnostic and much of his work reflects his interest in challenging popular religion. This two-volume work, first published in 1876, is no exception: it focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects, as well as the reactions to what Stephen saw as a revolution in thought. Comprehensive and full (...) of detailed analysis, this is an important work in the history of ideas. Volume 1 contains a thorough discussion of the arguments for and against deism, and of the state of theology at the end of the century. Volume 2 focuses on eighteenth-century moral philosophy, political philosophy, literature, and on the literary and religious reactions to the revolution in thought. It also discusses utilitarianism in depth. (shrink)

Einleitende Bemerkungen zu Kunst und Kunstwerk -- Kunstphilosophische Auffassungen in kurzem -- Zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion über Kunst.

The controversies in our time between teleological and deontological ethics which come down to the problem "from being to ought," referring to human being or nature, can be resolved only by an adequate conception of human nature. Taking up the ancient tradition again, we can re-examine the teleological conception of human nature as primarily instinctive and selfish, and say that human nature is constituted also by reason and that the instinctive nature is predisposed to be guided by reason or intellect. (...) The constitutive order of the human soul, with the subordination of the instinct under the intellect, involves already some natural goodness, of which the intellect is aware and for which the will strives. This is the basis for the "moral law" and for normative ethics. Thus, human nature is not selfish in itself. Although moral goodness as humankind’s perfection is an ideal, it has in us already imperfect natural beginnings, a "natural morality." In a certain sense, the moral ought of actions comes from one’s being, from the natural moral goodness of which the intellect is aware in itself, and from its good intentions. (shrink)

An enkratic agent is someone who intends to do A because she believes she should do A. Being enkratic is usually understood as something rationality requires of you. However, we must distinguish between different conceptions of enkratic rationality. According to a fairly common view, enkratic rationality is solely a normative requirement on agency: it tells us how agents should think and act. However, I shall argue that this normativist conception of enkratic rationality faces serious difficulties: it makes it a mystery (...) how an agent's thinking and acting can be guided by the enkratic requirement, which, as I shall further argue, is something that an adequate conception of enkratic rationality must be able to explain. This, I suggest, motivates exploring a different account of enkratic rationality. On this view, enkratic rationality is primarily a constitutive requirement on agency: it is a standard internal to agency, i.e., a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agential powers well. (shrink)

At the age of eighty-four, Thomas Hobbes wrote an autobiography in Latin elegaics. Unsurprisingly, it was not as widely read as his two great philosophical works, Leviathan and Behemoth, in which he laid out a set of sociopolitical theories that enraged many of the philosophers and moralists of Europe. In this comprehensive biography, first published in 1904, Sir Leslie Stephen charts the character and changes of Hobbes' thinking, from the scholasticism of his early Oxford education, to his later devotion (...) to geometry and deductive science. With an emphasis on personal influences, Stephen sets Hobbes and his work in the historical context of Hobbes' often difficult patrons, the Civil War, and the Restoration, providing an insight into the life of the eminent philosopher and into the tenets of early twentieth-century biographical writing. An interesting text for students of both philosophy and English literature. (shrink)

Sir Leslie Stephen, the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and a writer on philosophy, ethics, and literature, was educated at Eton, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained as a fellow and a tutor for a number of years. Though a sickly child, he later became a keen and successful mountaineer, taking part in first ascents of nine peaks in the Alps. In 1871 he became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. During his eleven-year (...) tenure, he wrote two successful books on ethics, including The Science of Ethics in 1892, which was widely adopted as a standard textbook. This two-volume work, which was first published in 1896, brings together the lectures he gave to various ethical societies, mostly in London. In Volume 1, he considers the role of ethical societies and discusses a range of questions in politics, social equality and morality. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. Volume 1 gives the social and political context of the rise of utilitarianism and examines its leading theorist, Jeremy Bentham. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. It examines the background to utilitarian theories and their development in Britain, focusing on the work of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. Volume 1 gives the social and political context of the rise of utilitarianism and examines its leading theorist, Jeremy Bentham. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. Volume 2 examines the life and political background of James Mill whose writings were influential in the dissemination of utilitarianism. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. Volume 3 examines John Stuart Mill, the son of James Mill, philosopher, economist and a proponent of utilitarianism who was influential in the development of political liberalism. (shrink)

Why is it that toleration can be uncomfortable for the tolerated? And how should tolerators respond to that discomfort? This paper argues that properly directed toleration can be deficient in its scope, grounds or spirit. That explains some of the discomfort in being tolerated. Beyond this, the occasions for toleration - the existence of a power to prevent and of an adverse judgment - can also make toleration sting. The paper then explores and rejects two familiar suggestions about how one (...) should respond to this discomfort: with acceptance or recognition of the tolerated. It is proposed instead that toleration should be supplemented by understanding. The nature and importance of this attitude are assessed. (shrink)