Recent discussion of Scanlon's account of value, which analyses the value of X in terms of agents' reasons for having certain pro-attitudes or contra-attitudes towards X, has generated the problem (WKR problem): this is the problem, for the buck-passing view, of being able to acknowledge that there may be good reasons for attributing final value to X that have nothing to do with the final value that X actually possesses. I briefly review some of the existing solutions offered to the (...) WKR problem, including those by Philip Stratton-Lake and Jonas Olson, and offer a new, better one, which accommodates all the relevant cases presented in the literature. (shrink)

Strokes of Luck provides a detailed and wide-ranging examination of the role of luck in moral and political philosophy. The first part tackles debates in moral luck, which are concerned with the assignment of blameworthiness to individuals who are separated only by lucky differences. ‘Anti-luckists’ think that an agent who, for example, attempts and succeeds in an assassination and an agent who attempts and fails are equally blameworthy. This book defends an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ argument, according to which the successful assassin is (...) more blameworthy than the unsuccessful one. Moreover, the successful assassin is, all things equal, a worse person than the unsuccessful one. The worldly outcomes of our acts can make an all-important difference, not only to how bad our acts can be deemed, but to how bad we are. The second part enters into debates about distributive justice. It is argued that the attempt to neutralize luck in the distribution of advantages among individuals does not deserve its prominence in political philosophy: the ‘luck egalitarian’ programme is flawed. A better way forward is to re-invest in John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness, which demonstrates a superior way of taming the bad effects of luck and unchosen disadvantage. (shrink)

This 1999 book demonstrates a method for reading the texts of Aristotle by revealing a continuous line of argument running from the Physics to De Caelo. The author analyses a group of arguments that are almost always treated in isolation from one another, and reveals their elegance and coherence. She concludes by asking why these arguments remain interesting even though we now believe they are absolutely wrong and have been replaced by better ones. The book establishes the case that we (...) must rethink our approach to Aristotle's physical science and Aristotelian texts, and as such will provoke debate and stimulate new thinking amongst philosophers, classicists, and historians of science. (shrink)

In a series of influential papers, John McDowell has argued that the rule‐following considerations explored in Wittgenstein’s later work provide support for a particularist form of moral objectivity. The article distinguishes three such arguments in McDowell’s writings, labelled the Anthropocentricism Argument, the Shapelessness Argument, and the Anti‐Humean Argument, respectively, and the author disputes the effectiveness of each of them. As far as these metaethical debates are concerned, the article concludes that the rule‐following considerations leave everything in their place.

At the very end of Plato's Philebus Socrates and Protarchus place the goods of a human life in a hierarchy (66a-67b). Previous interpretations of this passage have concentrated upon its relevance to the good human life, including the allowance of (true and pure) pleasures. This view picks up Plato's metaphor of a mixture of reason and pleasure, but the ranking of the goods is emphatically a vertical stratification and not a mixture in which all elements are equally fundamental. In this (...) article I argue that each and all of the higher ranked goods are necessary conditions for the goods of the level immediately below. The ranking represents an attempt to identify as far as possible what is responsible for the characteristics of the good in human life, and therefore to narrow down the definition of the good itself. (shrink)

I investigate the case for being comparatively relaxed about academic no-platforming, based on the 'gatekeeping argument' and 'selectivity argument'. I find more to be concerned about than these arguments suggest.

Grady and colleagues (2008) have provided a major contribution to the field of bioethics, and their research should lend a significant hand to the oft-neglected ethics needs of professional nurses....

Drawing on the work of Robert Nozick and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the author argues that human self-consciousness cannot be explained in naturalistic terms. Instead, it is a spontaneous phenomenon.

Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical (...) rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do. (shrink)

ILLUSTRATIONS Chapter 2 1. Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting 83 2. Luis Buriuel, Viridiana (Last Supper scene) 86 3. ...

This paper begins with the problem of natural substance and its identification by Aristotle as the combination of form and matter, as distinct from the substrate of the body. This is an investigation of the relation between the combination of form and matter on the one hand and body on the other. Looking at both natural science and metaphysics will give us a clear account of the partners involved in the relationship that defines living things. That is the first step (...) toward understanding how and why they enter into a relation and exactly what, for Aristotle, is entailed by that relation. Being clear on the relation of natural substance in the sense of the combination of form and matter, soul and body, will in turn allow us to ask if soul is in every regard attached to body or if there is “something proper” to soul alone. (shrink)

Langer's first book, The Practice of Philosophy, is relevant to a discussion of the theory of the art work as symbol for the apparently perverse reason that it refers to the art work only tangentially. Where symbolism is mentioned, it is described in general terms that are largely indifferent to its consequences for the theory of art. It seems from this that Langer's consideration of the connection between the art work and the symbol is propagated by an early interest in (...) the symbol alone, and that only at a later stage in the evolution of her system does the idea of the symbol's congruity to the art work occur to her. This is not of itself a criticism of the system; but her eventual qualification of the description of art as symbol is pre-figured and underscored by the description's synthetic origins. What seems to occur by the time Problems of Art appears is that an over-literal adherence to a metaphor--the art work as a symbol of the life of feeling--is discerned, and gradually but severely reduced; the symbol, in short, collapses. (shrink)